Fighting for the Higher Self
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"What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man,<br>that thou visitest him? For thou has made him a little lower than the angels,<br>and has crowned him with glory and honor." -- Psalms 8:4-5
"Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant,<br>easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance;<br>and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations<br>to which their position has devoted them, and the society into which it<br>has thrown them, are not favorable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise.<br>Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes,<br>because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they<br>addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately<br>prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have<br>access or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.<br>It may be questioned whether anyone who has remained equally susceptible<br>to both classes of pleasures ever knowing and calmly preferred the lower,<br>though many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to<br>combine both." --John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism<br>"Make your lives extraordinary." --John Keating, protagonist<br>in the movie The Dead Poets Society
"Be all that you can be." --U.S. Army recruiting slogan<br>and jingle -- accompanied on tv commercials by video reference to career/organization<br>skills, physical fitness, and extreme or exotic adventure
Fighting For the Higher Self
Rick Garlikov
Books, magazines, news articles and programs, talk<br>shows, infotainment, and infomercials, tell us all how to make more money,<br>live longer and healthier, be more physically fit, be more active, and<br>have more fun and excitement. Such self-improvement advice for "success",<br>and the market for it, is pervasive. But with the exception of religious<br>preaching, which is usually quite narrow in its exhortations(1),<br>there is not much in popular culture nor in schools today that beckons<br>or challenges us to "be all that we can be" in regard to nobility of spirit<br>and understanding, and in regard to striving for a higher plane of non-material<br>self-actualization and fulfillment -- along with whatever else we<br>do in life.<br>It is not that one has to give up worthwhile physical<br>pleasures or material comforts, joys, and goods in order to achieve higher<br>aspirations. Even instant or merely temporary gratifications are not necessarily<br>incompatible with higher pleasures, unless they are all one is seeking.<br>It is that the pursuit of the physical and material need not, and should<br>not(2), preclude thinking and reasoning<br>of the highest order; nor should they prevent the pursuit of what is best<br>for the spirit. Yet, in our<br>culture today, the pursuit of the higher self -- the development of our<br>individual worthwhile talents and abilities, the development of our senses<br>of curiosity, wonder, and awe (which should increase, not decrease, as<br>we gain more knowledge), as well as our senses of humor, the playful, and<br>the ridiculous; the pursuit of understanding and wisdom (as opposed to<br>just specific, factual or technical and practical knowledge), the pursuit<br>of understanding of and appreciation for the good and the beautiful, rather<br>than the possession of the merely currently fashionable and popular or<br>immediately pleasurable(3) -- is neither<br>fostered in schools nor modeled very much in the media, if at all. It is<br>a pursuit that does not occur to many people, and when it does, there are<br>forces at work that discourage it as being impractical, arrogant, too human-centered(4),<br>anti-social, austere, disrespectful of tradition, or subversive of the<br>allegedly more important economic need for specialization whereby people<br>serve primarily to fill instrumental roles within viable organizations.<br>I have titled this essay "Fighting For the Higher Self" because it takes<br>a real struggle to overcome these forces, whether one is trying to do it<br>for one's own inner being or whether one is trying to help others do it,<br>particularly (one's) children. It takes as much of a struggle even to get<br>children, and sometimes adults, to see there can be a higher self, and<br>that it is worth pursuing, because too often, in our daily life, it just<br>does not seem important or necessary to make the effort.
However, it may be in people's best overall personal<br>interests(5),...