I went to see Inside Out 2 twice last week. If I have a free evening this week, I might go again. I found it funny, and moving, and deeply soothing. How wonderful to have such an easy to grasp, positive picture of how our core self is formed, up there in bright colors on the silver screen.
In between the first viewing and the second, an essay from The Babbling Brook dropped into my inbox, which was largely about the self.
This is timely, I thought. This is synchronicity.
The themes of Identity and Individuation and What Does It Mean to be Your True Self are everywhere these days. Or maybe it just seems that way to me.
I had another bit of synchronicity this week. In a dream, I was revisiting a small bit of desert I’d been trying to restore to vibrancy. It was like a garden, surrounded by a rock wall, only the soil was pale, dry, cracked. I was finished with my work, and I wanted to see the garden one more time before I left for good. It was still dry as I approached in my dream body, but while I stood there, feeling intense love for and connection with this piece of land, the waters started to rise. Plants grew. Flowers bloomed. The desert was turning into a wetland.
As if to prove it was a wetland, a loud ribbit came from a hole in the rocks. A shadow moved in the hole. That’s a big frog, I thought. I should take a picture. But rather than a frog coming out of the hole, it was a cat.
The dissonance of a cat ribbiting like a big frog woke me up.
Later, I was on Facebook. One of the first things I saw was this picture:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75b5301a-c34c-4634-bc2a-dd2f0d7e97ae_1206x1434.jpeg)
I realized, looking at that, that I’ve gotten a little jaded about synchronicity. So many things that would have seemed like magical coincidences a couple of decades ago, can now be explained by algorithms. Three posts in a row all about whales? That’s Meta clustering, right?
Or, worse, our devices are listening to us. Have a conversation with your friend about traveling to Greece, and the ads you see online become an endless stream of Agean beaches. It’s not synchronicity. It’s our ever-present online world.
But what about the frogs? Surely Meta isn’t listening in on my dreams….
I sent Phrin a link to the picture of the frogs in the holes, and told her about my dream. She said that was the third time in 24 hours that someone had told her a story like that, of internal visions appearing in the world. “We’re opening up to a much bigger picture of who we are, and what we’re connected with,” she said. “The world is finding many ways of speaking to us, and we’re finding new ways of listening.”
In the Babbling Brook essay, the author, Kate, quotes a teacher’s response to an essay she wrote in college: “You’re a little too wedded to the idea that there just might be a whole, true self after all.” In the essay she explores the common concept of ‘self,’ and the Buddhist concept of ‘non-self.’ “‘Being oneself’” she wrote, “or ‘staying true to oneself’ suggests there’s a real self somewhere in amongst all the facets and faces we present to other people, and that to lead a happy life, we need to find and honour it.”
She continues, “Our selves are something akin to a fire or a river: unfixed, fluid, constantly evolving. There’s no one spark or flame that constitutes the essence of a fire; nor is there any one wave or ripple or water molecule you can point to and say: ‘That is the true river.’”
Which makes me think of the stream of consciousness in Inside Out 2, and of the way in which, not only do we have so many different sparks and water molecules within ourselves, we are all sparks in the same fire. All molecules in the same river. We’re whole, individuated beings, but we’re also part of, and connected to, everything else.
It’s a dance, this balance between oneness and individuation. It’s a relationship. We’re constantly communicating to each other, “This is who I am.” Which can mean, “We are the same,” or “We are nothing alike.” We declare who we are with stakes in the ground. They help us hold on amidst the chaos of life. But in order to grow and change we have to, at least for a moment, let go. Find a new stake. Carry on.
The quickest way I know to feel one with everything, is to feel into the space between me and anything else. A tree. A bench. A dog.
The quickest way I know to recognize myself as an individual is to feel into the space within my own skin.
My teacher, Judy Christensen, made a distinction between the Self (Divine Self) and the self (what is referred to in Inside Out as the ‘core self.’). She defined Self as “Our personal Divinity, within the totality of Divine Consciousness.” Or “Individuated Divinity.” Divinity being “the innate demand, within all Consciousness, to express its existence.” “Self (“I am”) represents the innate capacity to evolve…”
The ‘self,’ in Judy’s words, is “the ego’s self-reference “I am,” as it perceives itself apart from all other persons.” The core self. Identities (I am this, I am not this,) accumulated through the experiences of life.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Individuate. Remember we are one.
What do you think of as the self or Self? What do you reach for, when you reach for the authentic you?
It’s fun and all to write these posts every week. And I do like a good monologue. But my goal is for these posts to open up a dialog. To facilitate that, I’ve started a Chat. Please join me! I would love to hear from you.