Slowly, like something being carefully unwrapped, the self I have long identified with is being revealed to me as an artifact of artifice. It is a set of indentifications, habits, ideas, and models we develop and inhabit in a way not entirely dissimilar to what the actors we call ‘stars’ are doing. But we are doing it on an internal stage, to an internal audience, as well as externally. And, like a flower, this artifact serves to both attract and reject certain kinds of relational ‘suitors’ or visitors. Relation, is, after all, the name of the game, and the self is the primary prosthesis of this game, deeply informing our cognition, psycho-emotional development, and every aspect of every form of relation from the imaginal to the physical.

Now, I had heard many times that this self was … not precisely real. And I even had some intuitive sense of this, but now, it has become so obvious that it is often more difficult to take it seriously than it is to recognize and release it — in the sense of not taking on the suggested roles or baggage that often emerge from its enaction. It is not an illusion, or a delusion. It is a way of seeing which has functional purchase in realms that are not precisely amenable to the emergence or character of the being I am. Similarly, underneath the self ‘the self’ that is more like me is really not very interested in the strange masquerades and lies that are the common fodder of the ‘little self’.

Underneath the self I identify with but am now aware of as an overlay, there is an ocean of oceans. A world of worlds. An eye of eyes, and a voice… of voices. A teacher comprised of students. Students, comprised of teachers. It is relationally ecstatic. The self I had long identified with is the ‘public masquerade’ of this deeper way of being; it is at once shield and projection, mirror and projector, sigil and emblem. But it is, in fact, jewelry, and must never be confused with that which displays it in a way which is analogous to one’s written signature. Personal, and unique. Public and effective.

But the mark is not the author. If you can see, in the world or your mind, one of your own footprints in the sand, ask yourself: what is this the print of?