The everyday self, according to Joseph Campbell, is ‘a fraction that thinks it is whole’. The everyday self thinks or assumes that it is whole but it is all the same persistently acquisitive, persistently restless, persistently fearful of unwanted outcomes and this shows that it isn’t whole. If it was whole then it wouldn’t be the way that it clearly is. If it were whole then it could ‘rest in itself’ and it can’t ever do that. The defining characteristic of the everyday self is that it can never ‘rest in itself’.

So what does it mean to be ‘whole’? For a start, we can say that being whole is a non-polar situation. Wholeness is not a polarity. It isn’t made up of two opposing things – it doesn’t have a plus at one end and a minus at the other. It doesn’t exist in a continuum with right at one end and wrong at the other so it can’t flip over between the two. The fact that wholeness is not a polarity means that there is no ‘self’ to be found in it, everyday or otherwise. There is no self to be found in wholeness because the self can only really exist in relation to polarity.

The ‘self’ equals striving for the positive and fleeing from the negative. This is what the self is always doing – it can’t ever not reach for the one nor flee from the other. It can’t ever ‘not strive’. It’s always ‘purposeful’ in this way and it is through being purposeful that the purposeful self gets to exist. The self exists through its purposes and whether it succeeds or fails makes no difference. One way the ‘winner self’ gets to be created, the other way the ‘loser self’…

The everyday self constructs itself in relation to the struggle to achieve its purpose. And another way of putting this is to say that the self creates itself (odd though this may sound) via its grasping. Because of its grasping, the everyday self exists. There are two (apparent) things that come about because grasping – [1] equals the ‘grasper’ and [2] equals ‘the thing that is being grasped for’. The self is by its very nature perpetual grasping, in other words. Or we could say that it is perpetual fleeing, if we were to look at it that way around instead. The everyday self is ‘attachment’ in other words; there is no such thing as a self that is not a slave to attachment! That isn’t a situation that can ever come true for the self, seductive though that possibility might seem.

There is a ‘comforting illusion’ that goes with this grasping – the comforting illusion of how great it is going to be when we finally secure what we are grasping for (or the comforting illusion of how great it is going to be when we finally escape from whatever it is we are fleeing from). So could be said that we are ‘fractional beings in search of wholeness’ and in a way this is true, but in another way it is not true. It is not true because we have no concept or perception of wholeness, and so we can’t seek it. All we can ‘seek’ are our own projections.

What we are really doing is ‘chasing our own projections’, which is – as Alan Watt says – like a puppy chasing its own tail. We can never ‘arrive’ – when a puppy is chasing its own tail there is no ‘arriving’! We can never arrive at our projected destination because projections aren’t real; my projections are just my own fantasies and so I’m not really getting anywhere. There is no distance between ‘me’ and ‘my projected destination’ and so there is no journey, no movement, no prospect of change. There is only ever ‘fantasy gain’ and ‘fantasy loss’ – our hopes of gaining the prize are as vain as our fears of losing it.

Instead of saying that the self is ‘perpetual grasping’ we could also say that it is ‘a recycling of the old’. When we grasp we are always grasping for ‘the old’ after all – there’s no such thing as a ‘grasping for the new’. How can we ‘grasp for the new’ when we don’t know what ‘the new’ is? If we did know what ‘the new’ was then it wouldn’t be new, but only something that we are already familiar with. Grasping means ‘chasing our projections’ and our projections – by definition – are never new.

‘The new’ is essentially ‘that which we have no way of anticipating’ and it is also therefore ‘that which we have no way of gaining the advantage over’. ‘Gaining the advantage’ means knowing something about the situation that is going to arise before it arises so that it doesn’t take us totally by surprise. For a game-player to be taken by surprise is not a good thing; as James Carse says, the last thing a game player wants is to be taken by surprise and the self is nothing if not a game player. Being a game player means that we are always ‘looking for the advantage’, obviously enough! Gaining the advantage is called ‘winning’ and not gaining the advantage is called  ‘losing’ and that’s all we need to know about games.

The thing about this is that there is neither winning nor losing in ‘the new’; both winning and losing (or advantage and disadvantage) equals ‘the game’ and the game is always old. That’s the whole point of games. The point is that neither winning or losing is ‘new’ – both equal ‘the game’ and the game is always old. That is the hidden agenda behind all games – to avoid newness. As we have said, the self can only exist in relation to the polarity of yes and no, winning and losing, advantage and disadvantage, and so this is just another way of saying that the self is just a game, odd though this may sound. It is by pretending to ourselves – as we do in games – that ‘the old’ actually exists (and that there is no such thing as ‘the radical new’) that we create the illusion of ourselves.

Just as Krishnamurti says that ‘thought is always old’ so too is the thought-created sense of identity ‘always old’ and the thing about this is that outside of the creations of thought, there is no ‘old’….