Tim Boyd – USA
The Universal Spiritual Problem
he world’s spiritual traditions differ in many ways — rituals, methods of practice, descriptions of divinity — but in some essential areas, no matter in what time period, location, or culture the tradition has its roots, there is unanimous agreement. One of those areas of agreement is about the essential human problem holding us back from spiritual awareness. The names for this problem are many and vary across traditions: ego, man of clay/ flesh, the Natural Man, personality, lower self, Nafs (Arabic), Nefesh (Hepew), Ahamkâra (Sanskrit), Animal Soul, Egoic Mind, the self-cherishing, deluded mind. In theosophical parlance the term most often used is the “self”, with a lower case “s” to distinguish it from “Self”, the universal shared essence of all life.
Every valid tradition that points toward spirit has intensively analyzed this personal center, and has named and described its qualities and habits. The universal recognition of the problematic nature of the self is based on the observation that each of us functions from a personal center, and that our way of seeing the world and relating to its processes and its inhabitants is conditioned by it. Sages and close observers over time have understood that our clinging to and being directed by this personal self severely limits our experience of a more expansive, richer, greater life within which we are embedded, but fail to realize. This, they say, is because our attention is fixed on servicing the wants, needs, and demands of what Rumi describes as the “corrupt, self-absorbed king”. The First Object of the Theosophical Society (TS) is to “form a nucleus of the Universal potherhood”, but it is an object which is unattainable while the self dominates our thought and behavior. What to do?
The Ascetic Response
The sense that the self is the problem preventing a deeper connection with spirit has led to a number of strange attitudes. In many approaches to spirituality, the body has come to be regarded as an enemy. In an attempt to control or subdue it, often continence and fasting are emphasized, but within all traditions there are forms of extreme asceticism empaced by some. Starvation, self-flagellation, sleeping on a bed of nails, wearing shirts made of hair, and many other imaginative forms of mortification of the body are practiced in the belief that somehow disdain and abuse of the body can diminish its authority and lead to union with spirit. Before becoming the Buddha, Siddartha tried it. He starved his body, becoming so emaciated that every bone pressed against his skin. In his determination, he reached the point of death and was only pought back to life by a young woman who had come to give an offering of milk to a tree spirit. Mistaking him for that spirit she fed him the milk. When he eventually regained his strength, he realized that self-deprivation was as harmful as self-indulgence and abandoned his austerities to practice the Middle Way.
It is our inability to free ourselves from our attachment to the self that blinds us to our spiritual depths, but that same self is also the pathway that leads us to the heights — the boat that carries us across the water. It is through our personal relationships with family, friends, teachers, even pets, that we experience the liberating power and depths of love and compassion. Our body and its senses open us to experiences of beauty in Nature, music, fragrance, taste, that can move us to transcendent states. And our thoughts, though normally self-focused, can rise to levels touching on spirit.
Why are you unhappy?
A contemporary Daoist teacher once asked a rhetorical question, and then answered it himself. The question was simple: “Why are you unhappy?” And his answer was: “Because 99% of your thoughts are about your self, and there isn’t one.” It is a clever statement, but also profound and worthy of serious reflection. So much of our thought revolves around ourselves, yet deep down is it possible that such a thing may not truly exist? That question and answer cut across ll spiritual traditions. In every tradition there is an awareness of a self with which we identify. In scriptural imagery it is often portrayed as a person, far from home, estranged from their true source. In the Bible there is the story of the prodigal son who leaves his father’s house and suffers in a far land. In Buddhism there is the Bhavachakra, the Wheel of Life, where beings cycle through repeating incarnations, driven by ignorance. In all of these traditions there is the sense of a self that is somehow unaware of its deeper nature and unable to reconcile itself with a greater reality. We often think in terms of a self with a little “s”, but there is also the Self with a capital “S” — universal consciousness, divinity, God. There is the personal self, and then there is That. Spiritual traditions, in one way or another, attempt to pidge the gap between the two. The Mission Statement of the TS points us toward “spiritual self-transformation”.
Does the Self Exist?
On what basis can someone say that the self, the most immediate, most obvious aspect of our lives, is non-existent? Many people, when talking about themselves, take their finger and tap their chest to indicate “me” or “I”. The body is undeniable and ever present as the most prominent aspect of self. In many ways it is like the sun whose gravity holds all of the planets in orbit around itself. We all are conscious of the flow of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that largely define who we are. So, how can it be said of this familiar, constant companion, that “there isn’t one”? Clearly the self does exist, but like a cloud its reality is temporary and conditional. In order for a cloud to take form many conditions come together — the right amount of water vapor in the air, temperature, and altitude precipitate a form which exists for a time. While the conditions last it has a shape, it can be seen, it moves across the sky pinging rain or shadow to the earth below. Then it dissipates, and all of its components dissolve into the surrounding environment. So, yes, it is real, but only so long as the binding conditions remain. It is real, but only relatively real.
Theosophical Perspectives on the Self
In Theosophy the conditions that give reality to the self are described using a number of terms from the spiritual traditions of West and East. In The Key to Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky comments on the Buddha’s concept of the Five Skandhas — Form, Sensation, Perception, Mental Formations, and Consciousness — equating all but Consciousness with the Lower Quaternary (the self, composed of its body, energies, desires, and desire-driven mind). She goes further in outlining the composition of the human being. At the outset of The Secret Doctrine, HPB describes humanity as the meeting point of three evolutionary streams: spiritual, intellectual, and physical:
Each of these three systems has its own laws, and is ruled and guided by different sets of the highest Dhyanis or “Logoi”. Each is represented in the constitution of man, the Microcosm of the great Macrocosm; and it is the union of these three streams in him which makes him the complex being he now is.
But the self we construct within this human dimension is something slightly different. It is a psychological construct through which we function.
The House of Self
In some ways, it is like a home. Some people live in a single room, others in an apartment, others in a mansion or palace. Regardless of size, it is a space we inhabit. We decorate it, embellish it, protect it. We insure it against loss. We install alarms to guard it. It is the place where we accumulate possessions, where we experience enjoyment and suffering, where we live and eventually die. But what truly defines such a space? Ultimately, it is defined by its walls — by the barriers that enclose it. If we ask, what would happen if the walls were removed, we begin to approach the heart of spiritual inquiry.
Neti, neti: The Deconstruction of Identity
In traditional practice there is the phrase neti, neti — “Not this, not this.” It relates to a process of deconstruction in which one inquires into the components of the self. “Is my body the self?” “Are my sensations or emotions my self?” “Is it my thoughts or mind?” We ask, we test our answers, and one by one, layer after layer of identity falls away. Not this, not this.
The process is much like peeling an onion. If we persevere, eventually only one final layer is left. And when that too is removed, what remains? Some would say nothing remains. Others would say that what remains is what was always there: infinite, indivisible, omnipresent space. We are the ones who erect these little houses, imagining that our space, our self, is somehow separate from all others.
The question then becomes: How do we dissolve these confining walls? How do we diminish the control of this self, or even make it disappear? This is where the spiritual path begins, with all of its teachings, disciplines, and practices. There is the personal self, and there is the Universal Self, but between them lies a space often described as “no-self”. This no-self is the pidge toward the Self, Universal and impersonal.
The Mind as the Barrier
In The Voice of the Silence, HPB identifies the mind itself as the problem: “The mind is the slayer of the Real.” The mind separates us from the greater Self, therefore, “we must slay the slayer.”
Buddhism offers similar teachings. Among the six pâramitâs, or perfections, the final one is prajñâ — wisdom. But wisdom here does not simply mean knowledge about things. In many ways, it means the opposite. Wisdom begins with the realization of emptiness — that nothing possesses inherent, independent existence. A chair, for example, is not inherently a chair. What makes it a chair? Is the chair its legs? Its wood? Its shape?
As we examine more deeply, we discover that everything is composed of countless interdependent elements. The wood grew from a tree nourished by soil formed through the decay of innumerable living beings. Rain watered it. Sunlight sustained it. The carpenter shaped it. Someone else made the carpenter’s tools. Every object is part of an immeasurable web of causes and conditions. The same is true of ourselves. It has been more than one hundred years since modern science moved away from the idea of an “ultimate atom”, a final indivisible unit, discovering instead ever finer subatomic particles. There is no isolated, ultimate, independent material unit. Everything exists interdependently. If we could truly grasp this, the hold of the self might loosen. We would see that everything we call “me” is the product of countless beings, forces, and levels of consciousness participating in a shared process.
Dying to the Self
The final line of the Prayer of St Francis beautifully expresses this idea:
It is in dying [to the self] that one awakens to eternal life.
Not the death of the body but dying to the self. The self that has set up camp as “me”. Through its dissolution comes birth into eternal life, into the divine, into universal consciousness, into the Self. This raises the practical question: How do we participate in the dying of the self? Spiritual teachings offer many approaches.
HPB, in her essay “What is Truth?”, wrote that the personal self must be paralyzed in order for the inner life to be experienced. She spoke of “paralyzing the appetites of the lower personality” — not physical starvation, but starving the tendencies and desires that strengthen the egoic self.
In Light on the Path, the language is even more forceful. One of the repeated instructions is “Kill out . . .” Kill out desire. Kill out ambition. Kill out the sense of separateness.
Yet the problem immediately arises: Who is doing the killing? Who is starving the self? The self itself is being asked to participate in its own dissolution. The ego is being enlisted to silence the ego. Is this even possible? This paradox appears throughout spiritual traditions. In Buddhist imagery, Samsâra is a wheel perpetuated by ignorance, and it is that ignorance that gives us the confidence in the reality and permanence to the separate self.
The Impossible Question
The American mystic Joel S. Goldsmith authored many books. The dedication in all of his books was a quote from the Psalms in the Bible and addressed this paradox:
Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it.
Unless the structure of our life is built by a consciousness united with the divine, all human effort remains merely another construction of the ego.
Jiddu Krishnamurti approached the issue differently. In a series of talks collected as The Impossible Question, he suggested that transformation requires asking questions that cannot be answered within the limits of the self, of the known. One such question is: Can the mind free itself? Can the mind empty itself of the known, not through personal effort or control, but spontaneously, naturally, without the intervention of the ego? Just asking the question reveals its impossibility. How can “my mind” become free of conditioning without “me” doing something about it?
An answer to this impossible question may be another question. Does a plant peak through its encasing seed and grow because of self? Does the chick keep pecking until its shell cracks because of thought, or personal motivation? After long, gradual preparation and growth the plant and the chick appear and the enclosed world of the seed and shell is left behind, not because of self-will, but because it is what life demands and the time has come. It isn’t a decision or a plan. There is no choice involved. Just like the plant that sleeps in the seed and the empyo within the egg, there is a gestation period of seeming inactivity during which a swelling reservoir of energy and intelligence emerges as a new birth into a greater life, beyond the shell, beyond the self.
Ramana Maharshi repeatedly posed the question: “Who am I?”
At first, we answer in ordinary ways: this body, this personality, this history. But deeper inquiry reveals that whatever can be observed cannot be the true Self.
If one continues deeply enough into the question, eventually the independent observer itself begins to dissolve. The “I” ceases to exist as something separate. It is precisely at this point that the experience of no-self becomes possible. It is also at this point that people speak of enlightenment.
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This article was also published in The Theosophist, VOL. 147 NO. 10 JULY 2026
The Theosophist is the official organ of the International President, founded by H. P. Blavatsky on 1 Oct. 1879.
To read the JULY 2026 issue click HERE
