A Capital Letter

A capital letter is an interesting thing - YES, it is! One of the ways we use it is to distinguish between two different types of self: Small s = myself, my sense of me - a meaning quite close to ego which simply means ‘I’. And capital S = the Self, some kind of divine or immortal part of ourselves that is seen as more real and may well exist beyond death and is identical in its nature with the divine force that permeates the universe. A little bit of God within. This kind of idea is found in Hinduism and was taken up by C.G. Jung and then, one way or another has crept into our culture quite widely. You may believe it yourself.

Buddhism has its own versions of this. In the Tibetan tradition of the Great Perfection, Dzogchen, we find mind and Mind. Small m = my ordinary mind that experiences itself as seperate from everything it experiences. Capital M = an intrinsic non-dual awareness. The nature of reality itself. Of course, here mind/Mind is a translation of two Tibetan words but our choice of lower and upper case letters easily lends itself to expressing their meanings. And here is another one: emptiness and Emptiness. The first describing the transitory nature of everything - no more than an adjective. The second sounding more like a thing in itself, an underlying reality that is a bit god-like. So a noun.

However, there is (of course!) a problem with all of this. Our option to use our language to distinguish ‘spiritual entities’ with a capital letter - Self, God, Mind, Emptiness - does not exist in the languages that give us these ideas. In Pali, (the original language of Buddhism), Sanskrit and Tibetan, there are no lower and upper cases. It is all self, god, mind and emptiness and the meaning of these words is only known through the context - which given this is also often vague - makes the whole thing very confusing!

Buddhism has really struggled with this. The Buddha taught that the mind is entirely impermanent, there is no unchanging self within it. However, because this is written in Pali it is not clear what he exactly meant by self - small or capital s/S? This has opened the door to interpretations. Later Buddhists, thinking this sounded a bit nihilistic, like there was nothing really there, said, while it is true that everything is always changing, observation reveals that this changing universe is shot through with an awareness that is always present - they called this buddha-nature. But this really irritated those that stayed with the original idea because it sounded like the buddha-nature crowd had snucked a truly existing self (Self) back in.

For us, who do not need to get pulled into the intricacies of Buddhist thought there is something practical here and it is accessed through the felt-sense. Try this experiment: imagine you live in a universe where there are no capital letters to signal the presence of something transpersonal. No Self, no God, no Mind, no Transcendental. The basic reality of everything is just that it is transitory - nothing more. Got the feel of it? Now do the opposite. Imagine living in a Universe where Divine Truths really Exist. There is an Underlying Reality that through meditation and prayer we may know. That at our core exists a Self that is One with the Universe. (Notice all these capital letters). So what does this feel like?

I imagine you will have a preference - I do. Now comes the punch line: practice in a way that embodies the one you don’t like. Feel the one that is not attractive in your body. This may take our practice to its growing edge!

Oh yes, one last twist. Lower and upper case rely on the existence of each other for their definition. If one did not exist the other could not be described as different from it. Yes? So in that case, given that Pali/Sanskrit have no upper case that means we cannot say that what they do have is just lower case. What they have is just something different that is neither.

NW. 10 April 2024  With thanks to R.M. for the germ of this idea.