Richard Rohr's Meditation: Losing Myself To Find Myself
One of the reasons that i particularly like this meditation is that it tries to deal with our faulty and feeble abilities to get beyond the manifestations to the essence. http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Richard-Rohr-s-Meditation--Losing-Myself-to-Find-Myself.html?soid=1103098668616&aid=DIzJdUTgn2k,
It admits that language is a poor tool for getting beyond our perception of multiplicity, which the mystics say is false, to the True Reality which lies beyond concepts and perceptions.
But he calls the dualistic self (the "manufactured" self) a "private self" and it is far from private. It is far more a social self than a private one. It is "manufactured" under the tutelege of parents, teachers, preachers, politicians, and all sorts of wealthy, powerful, and privileged people, to say nothing of the subculture of underprivilege which seeps up to intrique our young minds as we half suspect the brainwashing we are getting at home, church, and school.
To start getting rid of the false self we must, as Rohr suggests, get even more dualistic and recognize that there, perhaps, a True Self waiting to be uncovered and discovered. He ends his Christian coded message by suggesting that the Buddhists can explain it better!
Well, certainly the Buddhists would explain it differently, as would the Hindus, the Sufis, the shamanists, etc., etc. And since we know that our explainations are inadequate, we need theirs even more than we need our own.
If our language is a poor vehicle from which to survey reality, our cultures, religions, clans, classes, occupations, philosophies. and sciences are even worse. As a monolingual person, i have not idea what the world would be like from the point of view of a person speaking a different language. I can maintain the comforable illusion that there is "something out there" which can be percieved correctly if i just try to be more observant and/or objective and/or scientific and/or detached. Discovering that people who speak different languages live and different words would disabuse me of that illusion.
The same is true of gender, class, culture, religion, etc. Each artificial difference reinforces our own arificiality as purveyors of wisdom and truth, And a single language, culture, religion, etc. would not help. We would simply be reinforing the illusion that what is "out there" is real.
Edward Stevens* has argued that i must strip away everthing that socialization, society, culture and history has given me and stand empty and silent before the Real. This won't be easy, in fact it might be impossible. The phenomonologists tried to objectfy the numina and ended up talking about .... phenomena. But i must try.
* (An Introduction to) Oriental Mysticism by Edward Stevens, Paulist Press, 1973, p60ff.