Agapic Self —having agapé for oneself

Each of us is created in such a way that we have a special spiritual power deep in the center of our being. This blog is based on the 2,000-year old Greek tradition of designating that power with the term “agapé.” I call it a spiritual power because it is capable of opening us up spiritually.

When we fully, honestly accept the transforming process that agape [for convenience I decided to drop the accented é], can do for us, we usually experience that process as having agape for oneself. Sometimes a person’s early childhood experiences and training and indoctrination causes a life-long search to be able to have agape for oneself.

The first awareness of that search is expressed as “loving oneself.” Such a search is advanced tremendously when we can deeply believe that we can have agape for ourselves as God has agape for us. But eventually, as we are able to let agape work within us, we experience agape opening us up spiritually. Then we are able to gain the realization that agape is transforming our ‘sense of self’ so that we find out that what we thought of ‘our self’ is not our true self.

I call this the beginning of agapic transformation. (“Agapic” is a new word that came to me the other day. I’m not familiar enough with Greek to know if there actually is a word to express what I was wanting to describe, so I’ll just stick with that word and use it for the expression “Agapic Self.”) In agapic transformation we learn that our true self is spiritual, and thus we are able to get beyond any false identification with the defense mechanisms that developed within us from early childhood experiences and became very confused during and shortly after puberty.

What I’m trying to describe is the original core of the being each of us was created to be. We were created with agape “poured into our heart-center” (as the ancient religious leader, Paul, would say). So that at base of our being we are agape. We can describe that self, which is meant to develop from that new beginning — our true self -- as our “agapic self.” When I capitalized it in the previous paragraph, I was expressing my belief that it is divine: we are a small part of the one, flowing, vast Agapic Self.

But of course, something must have gone wrong in most of us because we grew to think we could ignore the spiritual power of agape in our heart-center. Such ignoring happened as our defense mechanisms grew stronger. Many spiritual traditions give such a process of false identifying the name “ego-identity” (or abbreviated, “ego”). At an important point in your adulthood, you find a deep-seated need to make a choice: either continue trying to function with the dangerous ego-identity or fully accept a new identity with agapic self.

If you have the strength and courage to choose to get beyond any ego-identity, at first you will experience an internal struggling. We are told in Western Civilization that we have to fear the loss of identity. The internal struggling comes from such fear. So first we have to face then overcome that fear. What helps is the realization that such a fear is unfounded.