Newsletter: What is the ‘Self?’

Greetings, dear Subscribers!

This week we are republishing the essay by Dr. Rama P. Coomaraswamy, titled, ‘Psychological Integration and the Religious Outlook’. The paper was a presentation at the 73rd Annual Meeting of The American Orthopsychiatric Association, held in Boston, Massachusetts, from May 1 through 4, 1996. The text was edited for Sacred Web and was first published in Volume 3 of the journal (Summer 1999, pp. 37–48).

The Delphic maxim on Apollo’s Sun Door counsels: ‘Know Thyself’’. After all, if Reality is Absolute, then it is present within us too. What better way to seek the Real than by seeking within! And yet, what we take to be the ‘self’ (in a psychological sense) is not the ‘Self’ (in a spiritual sense).

Dr. Coomaraswamy, M.D., was Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York City. He was also an ordained Catholic priest and a Traditionalist. His paper compares the psychological and religious dimensions of selfhood and the importance of understanding the hierarchical metaphysical dimensions which need to be harmonized in order to live an integrated life.

Here is an excerpt:

Now as opposed to this lesser and inconstant “self,” which is the self we as psychiatrists and psychologists deal with and attempt to help our clients modify, the religious psychologies hold that man also has a higher or inner Self. This inner Self, often distinguished by the use of a capital S, goes by many names. It is seen as “divine,” is often described as the “indwelling of the Holy Spirit,” the scholastic “Synteresis,” the Hindu “Source of the Breaths” or Atman, the Arabic Ruh, Philo’s “Soul of the soul,” and Plato’s “Inner Man,” and so forth. Such a metaphysical outlook further presumes that the average person is “at war with himself” precisely because these two selves are in conflict and that true sanity or wholeness is ultimately to be found only in the saint whose two selves are at one—the essential nature of “at-onement” or “atonement,” a state in which the “lamb and the lion” can be said to lie down together. It is in this sense that we speak of someone being in control of himself and admonish the distraught to “get hold of your self” or “pull yourself together.”

The full essay can be read here: