Who am I?

I finally got around to watching this video (below). I find internal family systems (IFS) therapy particularly interesting, as I've come to a similar practice via my own integral transformative practice (ITP). For example, my practice of vipassana allowed me to become aware of the many different voices continually running through my head. That practice requires one to just observe and let the voices go, which leads to a deep relaxation.

However another practice I picked up, which name escapes me at the moment, is similar to IFS in that one engages in dialogue with these different internal voices. In IFS terms, the Self gives the exiled parts of psyche a voice and engages with them. This theoretically allows our exiled parts to 'heal' in that they are no longer repressed and insidiously acting out in our sometimes inexplicable and destructive behavior.

Such repression actually keeps these parts stuck on the developmental level at which they were formed. Hence our psyches are literally all over the developmental map. Once brought to consciousness and engaged the destructive aspects are released and we can syntegrate these aspects within the Self, the latter being sort of like the esoteric traditions have described as our true nature, higher self, or holy guardian angel.

Now for me a question still remains. Do these parts that were formed at earlier stages, once integrated, move up to the overall and higher level of the Self? Or perhaps do they still remain at the level they were formed? And in the latter case, their syntegration into the Self doesn't so much require that they come up to its level but rather that we continue to be a multi-level construction of the various healthy parts interacting and conversing with each other?

It's a difference between what I've referred to in the past as a model where our lower or earlier parts are subsumed into the Self via hierarchical complexity, and a model where the parts remain what they are and from whence they came and its more of a enactive view of structural coupling, where the parts retain their autonomy yet nonetheless continue to interact with each other. And the Self in this model is perhaps not a distinct Self at a higher level coordinating everything but is instead rather in the distributive tensegrity of the entire system via e.g. Mark Edwards work. It is a difference that makes a huge difference.

Another view of Self, consistent with Edwards, is from Thompson based on his interpretation of the Buddhist Nagarjuna. Here is an excerpt of my review of his book Waking, Being, Dreaming (chapter 10):

The self is neither identical with nor separate from the five aggregates. The latter are body, feeling, perception, will and consciousness. Hence consciousness per se is not the foundation for the self or the universe at large. Thompson's enactive view of the self, which he bases on his interpretation of Nagarjuna, does not see it as an eternal essence but as dependently arisen and contingent, yet not reducible to the ephemerally fluctuating aggregates. It is “a self-specifying system,” a “collection of processes that mutually specify each other so that they constitute the system as a self-perpetuating whole in relation to the environment” (325). Here we see the sort of dynamic systems autonomy Levi Bryant or Francisco Varela discusses.

Or as Thompson said in that chapter concerning enlightenment:

"It consists in wisdom that includes not being taken in by the appearance of the self as having independent existence while that appearance nonetheless is still there and performing its important I-making function. [...] Nor does 'enlightenment' or 'liberation' consist in somehow abandoning all I-making or I-ing—all self-individuating and self-appropriating activity—though it does include knowing how to inhabit that activity without being taken in by the appearance of there being an independent self that's performing the activity and controlling what happens."

I suggest that the notion of the Self from said metaphysical traditions is still interpreting it as something 'essential' above and beyond all that base personality stuff. Whereas Thompson, well versed in the various Buddhist traditions, also finds such an interpretation metaphysical and therefore prefers the more Tsongkhapa interpretation of Nagarjuna. It's an ongoing debate in Tibetan Buddhism the history and analysis of which can be found here.

PS: The above dependently originated and conditional interpretations of self are consistent with Paul's overall emphasis on relative and concrete utopias versus the more abstract versions. He is consistent with this approach except for the language and conception of the Self as "the core spiritual essence, the fundamental essential nature of human beings" (26:20).