We Christians, if we even believe we have to be born again, tend to think it's a one time deal. But being born again is really just moment by moment life in God--a binary thing--on or off. Each moment finds us either on are off. Open or closed. Awake or asleep. Or perhaps somewhere in between--not exactly hot or cold but kind of lukewarm.
I sometimes say to my Christian friends (who think I've gone from left field to foul territory because I value Buddhist mindfulness training), "Mindfulness helps me follow Jesus." There's nothing like mindfulness to reveal our small selves. Consistent awareness tunes us into the small self broadcast network: "small talk all the time."
As I listen to my own small talk radio, sometimes I catch myself thinking, Who is this guy? OMG, this guy is ME. Or at least base-level-me. Sometimes "I" cut myself down. Sometimes "I" build myself up--but almost always in small defensive kinds of ways. And usually this 'broadcast stream' is far from accurate. Lots of old and unconvincing opinions that add up to my own not-very-well-tested theory of How-Everything-Works.
It's not like Jesus was unclear about how this life works. "If you're determined to save your self you'll end up losing your Self. If you don't figure out how to love your Self--and your neighbor like you love your Self--you'll never experience what God's Reality is all about."
Learning how small our small selves are can be unnerving and therefore hard.
Researchers in both neuroscience and human behavior are adding to the 'data' of how the small self operates. Here's a snippet from Andrew Haidt's very helpful book, The Happiness Hypothesis:
"The self is one of the great paradoxes of human evolution.... In The Curse of the Self, social psychologist Mark Leary points out that many other animals can think, but none, so far as we know, spend much time thinking about themselves. Only a few other primates (and perhaps dolphins) can even learn that the image in a mirror belongs to them. Only a creature with language ability has the mental apparatus to focus attention on the self, to think about the self's invisible attributes and long term goals, to create a narrative about that self, and then to react emotionally to thoughts about that narrative.
"Leary suggests that this ability to create a self gave our ancestors many useful skills, such as long-term planning, conscious decision making and self-control, and the ability to see other people's perspectives. Because these skills are all important to enabling human beings to work closely together on large projects the development of the self may have been crucial to the development of human untrasociability. But by giving each on of us an inner world, a world full of simulations, social comparisons, and reputational concerns, the self also gave each of us a personal tormentor. We all now live amid a whirlpool of inner chatter, much of which is negative (threats loom larger than opportunities), and most of which is useless."
"...Leary's analysis shows why the self is a problem for all major religions: The self is the main obstacle to spiritual advancement in three ways:
- First, the constant stream of trivial conerns and egocentric thoughts keeps people locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity. This is why Eastern relgions rely heavily on meditation, an effective means of quieting the chatter of the self.
- Second, spiritual transformation is essentially the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back...and often the self objects. Give up my possessions and the prestige they bring? No Way! Love my enemies, after what they did to me? Forget about it.
- And third, following a spiritual path is invariably hard work, requiring years of meditation, prayer, self-control, and sometimes self-denial. The self does not like to be denied, and it is adept at finding reasons to bend the rules or cheat."
Sound familiar? That's good. Because it's when we begin to get intimate with how wrong and how counterproductive our small selves are that we begin to find motivation for transformation. Small-self disappoint can be Big-Door opportunity.
After the initial shock and disappointment of seeing the small self in action and in detail, the bits and pieces of our theories (on How-Everything-Works and How-Important-I-Am) are not that hard to let go of. And as we let go, bit by bit, we start finding room for love and joy and peace and patience and a host of lots of other wonderful fruit. Also, God's less frustrated ;-)
