' A Dream Figure '...

Thus the witness‑self walks through this world incognito.

Only the few to whom philosophy grants her earned favours, find it out and know it by its true name.

The rest regard it under the limited aspect of a particular personality.

When they employ the word ‘self’ they do not usually refer it to anything beyond this physical being who stands before them in flesh and blood plus his little psychological collection of bitter‑sweet memories and transient moods, hot desires and cold fears.

It is within such small limits that they confine the meaning of this term. But the man who has come to genuine self‑knowledge knows what he really is over and above this named embodied individual; hence he may aptly adopt the expressive term ‘Overself when referring to it.

Theologians probably mean this when they speak of the ‘soul’.

But as our concept is as radically different from theirs in some ways as it is roughly similar to it in others, and particularly as it is not a theological theme for us, we prefer to call it the Overself.

The person is only a projection from the Overself as a dream‑figure is a projection from the mind of a dreamer. It is only a dependent creature which has forgotten its origin and now imagines itself to be the real ‘I’.


-Paul Brunton from WOTO