24 Spirituality Studies 10-2 Fall 2024 1 Introduction You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, but the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. – Williams 1922, 6 Margery Williams Bianco’s famous work, The Velveteen Rabbit, shows us through a moving story how a stuffed rabbit discovers the experience of becoming real (Williams 1922, 6). Through moments of love, joy, pain, and loss, the Rabbit discovers its true, authentic Self. The story implies that the Self is not static but rather involves a dynamic unfolding and is shaped by our relationships and experiences. It emphasizes the importance of genuine connections in the formation of our identities. The rabbit’s journey towards becoming real is facilitated by his relationship with the Boy, highlighting the transformative power of love and connection in the evolution of the Self, as well as a connection with the garden fairy whose kiss bestows upon the rabbit the experience of becoming real. Joseph Campbell in his Thou art That underscores an important idea, which we can connect to the journey of the Velveteen Rabbit. Our entire life journey is not one of discovery of a particular structured entity that we would call the Self but rather a process of ongoing learning and unfolding of who we are. It is through the acceptance of this process of unfolding beyond one’s discovery of an internal structure that Self-development occurs. This is a process described by Campbell that courses over the lifetime as it did for the Rabbit. The fourth function of mythology is to carry the individual through the various life stages and crises of life, that is, to help persons grasp the unfolding of life with integrity. Remember the earlier statement that the experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes (Campbell 2001, 5). This manuscript will build upon Williams’ and Campbell’s ideas of a lifelong unfolding in the discovery of our authentic selves and the experience of becoming “real”. This process has been a quest for many – for thousands of years, long before the journey of the Velveteen Rabbit. Ideas describing the experience of Self-discovery come from psychoanalytic theorists, behavioral psychologists, novelists, poets, philosophers, spiritual doctrines, clergy leaders, physicists, mathematicians, and neuroradiologists, among others. One can spend a lifetime integrating ideas from multiple paradigms, reaching a mirky idea of this entity of the Self. Individuals often successfully pursue depth meditation practices in this quest. Eastern philosophy and spirituality have become relatively mainstream, even within the mental health system, in the form of a more westernized language termed mindfulness meditation. Psychedelic drugs have become the latest curiosity in this pursuit, as individuals seek to discover the part of themselves that can be experienced as “real”. While evolving definitions of a unique structure within the mind visualized as a “Self” have a high degree of utility, perhaps a more experience-near paradigm would highlight a Self that is inextricably connected to the environment in the broadest sense, highlighting the degree to which we are all connected to nature, to one another, and to something greater. Ultimately, in considering the words of the psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, a conceptualization ought to facilitate an experience: “the patient is looking for an experience, not an explanation” (Ehrlich 1970, 182). An individual often seeks an experience, in an embodied manner, a pathway to reach what might be described as their deeper essence – a sense of themselves as “real”. Kavar and colleagues describe through a research protocol the important contribution that a sense of spirituality brings to this experience. Their study identified themes in which spirituality is “a key dimension to Self-understanding and is part of relationships, social engagement, an understanding of meaning and purpose in life, and an overall sense of happiness and joy” (Kavar et al. 2015, 697). The objective of this qualitative historical analysis is to trace the understanding of the idea of the Self, particularly through psychodynamic models, and to build upon these paradigms through ideas from a historical analysis of texts from Jewish mysticism. Original source documents both from the field of psychology and Jewish spirituality are analyzed and integrated with contemporary research regarding models of the Self. Like other spiritual pathways, Jewish mysticism can augment a model of the Self through intriguing internal maps, ideas of relatedness, consideration of the role of language, descriptions of subjective experience, and powerful, metaphoric imagery regarding the
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