The Fabric of Self

How we relate to experienee=—to suffering, love, death, loneliness, and the host of other challenges life presentsdefines who we are. Our responses to these challenges are the threads of our lives; they are the warp and weft from which we weave our identities—our selves, our ecgos. We are a patchwork of personal idiosynerasies: our own variations on the themes of ambition, sorrow, anxiety, belief, aspiration. opinion, and all the host of petty vanities with which we clothe ourselves. They are the characteristics of our temperament, the shadings of our character and personalitv. From life's challenges, and our responses to them, we create our system of beliefs—our attitudes, values, and principles. These are the supporting threads in the fabric of our personal identity. They form our ideology: our image of what life, and our selves, should be like. From these values we structure our rituals and traditions, create our habits and routines. They are the basis of our personal drive. Our ambitions and the measurement of our achievements stem from these values, as do our rationalizations and justifications of failures and limitations. Our virtues are rooted in these values, and because every virtue creates its own opposite, our vices likewise find a home there. This duality is the source of internal conflict. The struggle to maintain our principles and beliefs—our ideals—is the source of fear and anxiety. We are filled with neuroticisms, concerns, suppressions, and insecurities, and these fears fuel our individual idiosyncrasies. They mold our temperament. They fuel our personal sorrows, griefs, and tears. They are the source of our regrets, our bitterness, and our loneliness. These fears color the fabric of our selves. It is our response to living—to suffering, loneliness, joy, love, desire, healing—that forms the threads of our being. But our relationships are incomplete, fearful, and self. centered. They are based on division, on the separation between ourselves and the rest of the world: on the concepts of “me” and “not me,” of “mine” and “not mine.” But in reality we are one. There is no identifiable line between “me” and “not me.” The fabric of our selves, which we create from the interweaving of these threads, is a curtain that hides the brilliant light of truth shining within each of us. The meditations in this book address the common threads of our relationship to the world. Through meditation, our relationships to people, to things, and to ideas can be transformed to coincide harmoniously with truth. Through meditation we can pierce the veil of our self-image. We can come to the source of beauty, to the infinite, timeless state that is immortality.