"Americans cling to the myth of individualism as though it were the only normal way to live, unaware that it was unknown in the Middle Ages and would have been considered psychotic in classical Greece."        Rollo May, The Cry For Myth

          I wanted to escape myself. That's one reason why I went looking for some kind of cosmic consciousness. I yearned to feel part of a bigger reality so that I could leave the small reality I was living in--the separate, subjective, "me" monad. It was painful just being little old me. And I was not alone in my aloneness: there were a lot of other monads who desperately wanted to feel connected to something.

         Many post-war middle-class children were pumped up with self, pampered and prompted to become a special someone, to have it all, to be anyone they wanted to be. The most common advice given to me by my parents was to "be somebody" and "make something of yourself," as if I was nothing just being who I am. Meanwhile, the media promoted the idea of being unique, someone who stands out, while the rule of the economic game was that "you make it on your own." My peers in the sixties youth culture told me to "do your own thing"; the messages of the seventies were "find yourself" and "express yourself." Individuality was emphasized even within the counter-cultures, where a new communal ethos was also being promoted. I believe that for many of us, the focus on the individual self was so extreme, that we tried desperately to escape that single identity. "I need some self-help! Get me to group therapy, meditation, tribal events, rock and roll concerts--anything!" 

         Recent generations in the West have been shaped by the pressures of individualism. Perhaps never before in history have people felt so much on their own, without what anthropologists call "participation mystique," a sense of being part of a tribe or community, nature, the cosmos, or the divine.  In his book Constructing America, Constructing the Self, psycho-historian Phillip Cushman writes, "The masterful, bounded self of today, with few allegiances and many subjective `inner' feelings, is a relatively new player on the historical stage." 

         Crucial to a sense of self is the feeling of individual freedom, which barely existed in most pre-modern cultures. An individual was born into a certain religion, occupation, social status, and geographic area--and that was that. There was no such thing as "upward mobility," and hardly any sideways or outward mobility. No one could conceive of switching to a religion that better suited their personal convictions, and very few thought they could choose an occupation, spouse or a hometown. If you had approached a medieval peasant or a member of a tribe wandering around in the desert just a hundred years ago and asked, "What do you want to do with your life?" that person wouldn't know what you were talking about. Not until the second half of the 20th century had anyone held the notion that "you can be anyone you want to be in this lifetime."

         At one time, people did not even believe that they were in charge of their own mind. In his now famous study, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind, Julian Jaynes claims that in early Greek culture "the gods take the place of consciousness." Jaynes cites passages from the Iliad that indicate that the Greeks who lived circa 1,000 B.C., "have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will." According to Jaynes, the early Greeks heard their thought process as voices of the gods, an interpretation that today we would call schizophrenic. Even Agamemnon, the king of men, did not believe in his own power, saying, "Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus....Gods always have their way." 

         Five hundred years later, we witness a radically new "self" emerging in the Hellenic world, as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle heralded the apparent power of each individual to manipulate the contents of his or her own mind. It is no longer the gods' voices that we heard inside our heads, but our own.  A similar shift of identity took place when the early Christians began to emphasize each person’s soul and its private salvation or damnation. It was no longer the tribe’s history that was important, as in the Old Testament with the Jews; the focus shifted to the individual.

         The thoroughly modern Western self truly came alive during the 16^th and 17^th centuries in Europe, in the era known as the Enlightenment, poorly named according to most Buddhists. The Enlightenment thinkers became so enamored of their powers of intellection and invention that they declared themselves virtually independent from the external world. They took power away from God and truth away from the church and gave everything over to human reason and science. With Enlightenment consciousness, individuals grew more identified with their own minds, which were seen as the source and center of the personal self. 

         Although this modern Western self went through its adolescence in Europe, it reached full maturity in America. In fact, the first time that the word "individualism" appears in print, is in Alex De Tocqueville's book, Democracy in America, published in 1835. How much larger does the individual loom today in America, the land of individualized license plates?

         According to Robert Bellah and his associates in their classic sociological study, The Habits of the Heart, the contemporary American identity can be traced to two streams of individualism: utilitarian and expressive. Another name for utilitarian individualism is "the Protestant ethic," which emphasizes the qualities of endurance, stocism, and self-reliance. ("Self-Reliance" is the title of Ralph Waldo Emerson's most famous essay, which spoke clearly to the Americans of the 19th Century.) Expressive individualism, a legacy of the Romantic movement placed great value on the unique and passionate "soul," which feels deeply and lets its feelings be known. The early American poet Walt Whitman was the champion of expressive individualism beginning his famous book Leaves of Grass with the line "I celebrate myself." That sentiment still echoes through the "me" decades of the late 20th century, and on into the new age ideas of self-realization.

         The post-war generations have been dealing with symptoms of an extreme form of self-focus, which is perhaps why ours has been called “the culture of narcissism.” As Phillip Cushman writes, "...psychotherapy theories from the 1960's through the 1980's described a self similar in most ways to the self displayed in television commercials, magazine ads, and the blockbusters sixties musical Hair...a self that was exhibitionistic, self-involved, thoroughly acquisitive; it valued emotional expressiveness, a lifting of political and personal constraints, and immediate gratification...." 

         The modern self that lives in us at the beginning of the 21st Century has an extreme sense of its own autonomy and separateness. In the mirror of our culture, and in the mirror of our private bathrooms we see only the individual, which is, of course, a completely distorted image of reality. We think and act as though we are independent of the external world, outside of any context or gestalt, whether that of a god or evolution. Upon examination, we find that this sense of selfhood is a kind of delusional state, a bizarre form of schizophrenia in which we label all of the different voices in our heads as "I" or "mine." Believing them all to be ours is as far fetched as believing they all belong to God.

         Ironically, while many of us seem completely lost in our individual dramas, our culture has become acutely aware of how interwoven we are into the fabric of all things, from the atoms we share with the stars and the stones, to the DNA molecule we share with all other living beings, to the growing awareness of how much our behavior is inherited from the life that came before us. We know that we are inseparable from the great streams of biological and cosmic evolution, a part of the whole, and yet we wander around in what Alan Watts called our "skin encapsulated egos," sensing ourselves, from moment to moment as isolate and autonomous. Our intellectual understanding of who we are is therefore completely out of sync with our felt sense of ourselves. I believe that this dissonance is what led many of us to seek help in the Asian wisdom traditions, where a major emphasis is on seeing through the individual self, into the interrelatedness of all things.

         The modern self that we carry inside of us is a phenonmena of nature and history. We can't blame it on Descartes, Adam Smith, Whitman, Dr. Spock or anybody else. Besides, with all of its faults, this modern self has brought with it the development of extraordinary social and political freedoms as well as great material comforts. Very few of us would trade places with a medieval peasant, even if it meant having a deep feeling of interconnection with the world, since the world we would be deeply interconnected with would be that of a medieval peasant.

         Nonetheless, it is increasingly clear that our modern self is somehow out of balance. Our perceived separation from the world has grown much too extreme, and as a result both we and the world are suffering.  One major problem with our "bounded, masterful, self" is the outrageous belief that we are completely in charge of our lives, and that we can have it all, or become whomever we want to become. These notions are accompanied by almost inevitable frustration and cynicism when things don't work out the way we imagine they could. God used to be a kind of sacred scapegoat for our failures, but for many of us there is no longer anyone to blame but ourselves. That is why this modern self is not very easy to live with.

         The individualism of our culture fed what Norman Mailer called "the rebellious imperatives of the self," and shaped the struggle of many lives. We were called on to define ourselves, or create ourselves, as if out of whole cloth, a harrowing task.  Out of the feelings of separateness and isolation came our political and spiritual searching: at the heart of our various movements were the twin acts of expressing ourselves and fleeing from ourselves.

         Perhaps recent generations’ experiments with drugs, communal living, and new psycho-spiritual practices are attempts to escape from our solitary confinement; to relieve the burden of being someone special. That would explain the fact that during the seventies baby boomers were flocking to EST seminars, where they were told that they were all nobodies. The boomers seemed to welcome this message: what a relief to be nothing; nobody.

         Meanwhile, the right drug could evoke a feeling of connection to the world, and sometimes even an experience of "oneness." The group rituals of rock and roll concerts or political gatherings offered a sense of belonging; group therapy sessions could create an instant, intimate community; Asian spiritual practices promised to dissolve the illusion of separateness.

         I know that one of the primary reasons why I began Buddhist meditation practice was to find relief from the constant burden of self-focus. It is ironic, but somehow natural that I would reject individualism mostly for selfish reasons. I fled from the emphasis on self, not so much for lofty social or spiritual ideals, but primarily because it didn't feel good.

         The Buddha's teachings have perhaps spoken to so many in the West today, because he shows us that our suffering is directly related to our self-involvement. Buddhist meditation practices are a way to loosen our intense identification with our own drama, and offer both relief and a corrective to our civilization's extremes of selfhood. The growing popularity of meditation may be a sign that the evolving self is now seeking a new equilibrium, a middle way. It just might be that self-consciousness has become masterful enough to see through its own hubris, and we are coming to a more sane and satisfying understanding of who we are in the world.

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