Beyond the Small Self: Psychology, Kenosis and the Spiritual Journey
I recently listened to a lecture by Karen Armstrong, the distinguished writer and scholar of world religions. Now in her eighties, Armstrong has spent much of her life exploring the great religious traditions, and there was something moving about hearing her return, again and again, to what seemed to have become for her a remarkably simple truth.
At their best, she suggested, the religions of the world are trying to help us get beyond our habitual preoccupation with ourselves — the endless “me, me, me” of our anxieties, desires, successes and failures. Religion is not primarily about having the right ideas about God. It is about a transformation in the way we live and experience ourselves in relation to others, the world and the Divine.
One sentence in particular stayed with me:
“It’s the emptying of oneself — kenosis — that makes room for the Divine.”
The Greek word kenōsis means an emptying. In the Christian tradition it is most familiar from St Paul’s description in Philippians of Christ “emptying himself”. But Armstrong finds something resembling this movement across the religious traditions: surrendering our need to place ourselves, our desires, our opinions and even our religious ideas at the centre.
What, though, does it really mean to empty ourselves?
Beyond What We Can Think
Armstrong begins somewhere important: with the unknowability of God.
As a child she had learnt a catechism definition of God, but later came to recognise the paradox involved. To define something is, quite literally, to set limits around it. How then can we define a Reality which, by its nature, exceeds anything the human mind can conceive?
She turns instead to the anonymous fourteenth-century English mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing. Its author insists that God cannot finally be grasped by thought. We may know many things about God, but God is not an object that the thinking mind can possess.
Once we think we have God neatly understood, what we have grasped is no longer God, but something we have limited.
Our inner images of God shape our spiritual lives, often in ways of which we are barely conscious. But they can only ever point towards a Mystery beyond themselves.
At some point, knowing has to give way to unknowing.
A Spirituality We Practise With Our Bodies
For Armstrong, this is partly why religion has always involved practice.
She recalls kissing the ground as a young nun and points to Muslim prostration in prayer. Bowing, kneeling, chanting, breathing, becoming still: these bodily actions can teach us something that rational thought alone cannot. As Armstrong puts it, our bodies can teach us things that are “deeper than the rational”.
This ancient intuition is perhaps particularly important in a culture in which spirituality can so easily become something that happens from the neck upwards.
Mind, body and psyche are not separate compartments. What we have lived is carried not only in our conscious thoughts but in our breathing, muscles, posture, nervous system and bodily patterns of contraction and defence.
And this complicates, in an important way, the idea of simply “putting aside” our anxieties and preoccupations in order to move beyond the ego.
The Contracted Self
When Armstrong speaks about ego, I find myself thinking of another Greek word: sarx.
Usually translated in St Paul as “flesh”, sarx does not simply mean the physical body — Paul had another word, sōma, for that. I find it more helpful spiritually to understand sarx as something like the small, contracted self: the ego turned in upon itself, preoccupied with its own security, desires, fears and survival.
There is a striking resonance here with Armstrong’s repeated “me, me, me”.
But as a psychologist, I think we need to be careful.
The contracted self is not necessarily a selfish or morally deficient self. Sometimes we contract because we have been hurt. Anxiety, hypervigilance, compulsive thinking and self-protective patterns may have deep roots in experiences that have overwhelmed us. What appears to be excessive preoccupation with ourselves may sometimes be the psyche and body continuing to carry fear or pain that has never fully been recognised or metabolised.
This is where psychology has an essential place within the spiritual journey.
We don’t transcend the small self by abandoning it. Sometimes we have to enter more deeply into what it is carrying before it can loosen its hold.
The movement inwards and the movement beyond are not necessarily opposites.
From Contraction to Opening
This changes how I understand kenosis.
The spiritual task is not to get rid of the ego, but to allow the contracted ego to soften and open.
Sometimes that may indeed happen through silence, prayer or simply turning our attention away from our endless mental preoccupations. But sometimes the movement towards freedom asks something different of us: that we turn compassionately towards what hurts.
There may be grief to feel, fear to recognise, an old wound to tend, a dream to listen to, or something held within the body that needs the safety and attention through which it can gradually release.
Psychological depth can therefore serve rather than compete with spiritual surrender. We attend to the small self not so that it becomes the centre of everything, but so that it no longer needs to defend its central position quite so fiercely.
Paradoxically, going more deeply within can become part of the movement beyond.
The spiritual journey is not from having a self to having no self. It is a movement from being unconsciously enclosed within the small self towards discovering that we belong to something larger.
Stepping Outside Ourselves
Armstrong uses another Greek word for this movement: ekstasis — literally, a standing outside oneself, the root of our word ecstasy.
We tend to associate ecstasy with extraordinary mystical states. Armstrong brings it down to earth.
Compassion, she suggests, can itself be ecstatic because it takes us beyond the confines of our own world. The word itself comes from the Latin compati — com, “with”, and pati, “to suffer”: literally, to suffer with. She returns repeatedly to the Golden Rule: to look into our own hearts, recognise what causes us pain, and refuse to inflict that pain upon another.
Compassion asks us to put ourselves to one side for a moment and imaginatively enter the world of another — to put ourselves, as she says, “in the shoes of another”. We look at another human being — perhaps an apparently unremarkable stranger sitting opposite us on a bus — and begin to glimpse the mystery of a life being lived within them: their memories, losses, anxieties, hopes and loves. Each person, Armstrong suggests, is a world unknown to us.
For a moment, we are less enclosed within ourselves.
Perhaps this is what genuine transcendence looks like much of the time.
Not spectacular spiritual experience, but an increasing capacity to be reached by what is other than ourselves.
Another person. Music. A tree. Birdsong. Silence. Beauty. Suffering. Mystery.
Armstrong herself admits that she has never been particularly good at conventional meditation. Music, study, poetry and the natural world have opened her more readily. Each of us may need to discover what enables us to become less enclosed within ourselves — what awakens wonder and opens us to a reality larger than our own concerns.
And perhaps that is what spiritual practice, at its deepest, is for.
Not the eradication of the self, but its gradual opening.
Not a movement away from our humanity, but more deeply into it — until we discover within its depths an opening into the Divine.
Armstrong’s words return:
“It’s the emptying of oneself — kenosis — that makes room for the Divine.”
Perhaps sometimes that emptying begins by listening deeply to what the small self has been holding. As its grip gently loosens, a little more space appears.
And in that space, we may discover ourselves held within a larger Mystery, there all along.
