SPARK AND SELF

In its Gnostic origins, the Way of Sophia sees each of us as a divine spark, exiled in a broken world and yearning for home. I, with my view of one life and one home, appreciate the reframe offered by Piero Ferrucci*. Here, ‘spark’ becomes ‘self’.

“Every morning when we wake and rise up from the darkness of sleep to awareness of our surroundings, of time and of our individual presence, we recapitulate in a few moments an adventure which took many millions of years: the awakening from the depths of unconsciousness. This saga started when the first forms of life came into being on the planet, and it eventually culminated in the emergence of self-consciousness and individuality.

“It is precisely this awareness of self that makes it possible for us to experience solitude and love, to be responsible to other human beings, to be aware of the past and the future, of life and death, to have values, to be able to plan ahead, to be conscious of our evolution and perhaps to be able to influence its course.

“Self … has been seen as the executive function of the personality, as the coordinator of behaviour, as the meeting place of conscious and unconscious, or as a constellation of attitudes and feelings individuals have about themselves. Still others describe the self as the result of our interaction with others, as the whole psychophysical organism, or as an illusory aggregate of transient elements.

“Psychosynthesis brings the matter to a point of extreme simplicity, seeing the self as the most elementary and distinctive part of our being – in other words, its core. This core is of an entirely different nature from the other elements (physical sensations, feelings, thoughts and so on) that make up our personality. As a consequence, it can act as a unifying centre, directing these elements and bringing them into the unity of an organic wholeness.

“The self can also be defined as the only part of us which remains forever the same. It is this sameness which, once found and fully experienced, acts as an ever-present pivot for the rest of the personality, an inner stronghold to which we can always refer in order to regain a sense of poise and self-consistency. Then we can see that the self remains the same in ecstasy and despair, in peace and turmoil, in pain and pleasure, in victory and defeat. … It is a state of psychological nudity in which we have taken off all our psychological clothes – thoughts, feelings, images, physical sensations – and only pure being remains”

I will be looking at this understanding more deeply in future posts, including implications for working with it, contemplatively, within the Western Way.

  • Piero Ferrucci What we may be: the vision and techniques of psychosynthesis Wellingborough: Crucible, 1989