Richard Rohr appreciates the purpose the false or egoic self serves, while encouraging us not over-identify with it.
Our false self is not our bad self, our inherently deceitful self, the self that God does not like or we should not like. Actually, our false self is quite good and necessary as far as it goes. It just does not go far enough, and it often poses and substitutes for the real thing. That is its only problem, and that is why we call it “false.” Various false selves (temporary costumes) are necessary to get us all started, but they show their limitations when they stay around too long. If a person keeps growing, their various false selves usually die in exposure to greater light.
Our false self, which we might also call our small or separate self, is our launching pad: our body image, our job, our education, our clothes, our money, our success, and so on. These are the functional trappings of ego that we all use to get us through an ordinary day. However, they are largely projections of our self-image and our attachment to it.
When we are able to move beyond our false self—as we are invited to do over the course of our lives—it will feel precisely as if we have lost nothing. While this “moving beyond” almost always entails some suffering, it ultimately feels like freedom and liberation. When we are connected to the Whole, it lessens our need to protect or defend the mere parts. We no longer need to compare and compete. We are now connected to something inexhaustible.
To not let go of our false self at the right time and in the right way is precisely what it means to be stuck, trapped, and addicted to our self. (The traditional word for that was sin, the result of being separate from the Whole.) Discovering the true self is not just a matter of chronological age. Some spiritually precocious young people see through the false self rather early, while some old men and old women are still dressing it up. If all we have at the end of our life is our separate or false self, there will not be much to eternalize. These costumes are transitory and impermanent, useful to us in our development, but also largely created by the mental ego. The false self is what changes, passes, and dies when we die. Only our true self lives forever.
Before we have encountered our true self, our false self is who we think we are. But our thinking does not make it true. The false self is primarily a social construct to get us started on life’s journey. It is a set of agreements made during childhood with our parents, family, neighbors, school friends, partner or spouse, and religion. Jesus might call it an “old wineskin,” which he points out cannot hold any new wine (Mark 2:22).
Hidden in Plain Sight 