Letting Go of the Local Self

By Steve Beckow On February 23, 2013

Wisdom hath built her temple with the seven pillars. The temple is the body; the seven pillars are probably the seven chakras; and housed within the temple is the Self.

The Ark of the Covenant contains the laws. The Ark is the body; the laws are the Self.

The fire is always burning on the altar. The altar is the body and the fire is the Self.

The body is the illusion and the Self is the Reality within the illusion. The purpose of life is to see through the illusion to the Reality.

The Self is the flame in the heart, the treasure buried in a field, and the Pearl of great price. It’s the big fish among fish, the mustard seed that grew into a great tree, and the firebrand plucked from the burning. The Self is the Mystery of mysteries.

Life itself is like a hall of mirrors, each reflection in a mirror being a false self, a separate self, a local self. Only the one Self is real; all the other selves are reflections of it, illusory, non-existent.


It seems to me that life is a process of letting go of one false, separate and illusory self after another, one local self after another, until all that’s left is a generalized Self with no particular claim to any “me” but a claim to being all of us – and more; in fact everything, though unto itself it is no thing.

We leapfrog from Self to No-Self to Self to No-Self at higher and higher dimensions of life, always heading towards the one and only Self/No-Self whose discovery is the end and the beginning of Life.

But always at the center of our journey is a letting go of any local self, anything that appears as a center in favor of a deeper center, which then must be let go of in turn. That which we are cannot be let go of. Therefore anything that can be let go of would be wisely jettisoned.

Life itself is an endless series of invitations to let go of the local self. There’s no need to embrace the universal Self, for That we always already are.  That Self is the residuum, the default, both the end and origin of life. It can never be let go of. It never leaves us. It is us, all of us.

Let go, let go, let go. That could be said to be all there is to do in life if what we want from life is to be and know who we are.