The Significant Self: "[Possesses] the will to know, but what shall it do with its knowledge, and for what reasons does it seek?" (79.42)
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In this gathering, Doug Scott offers a model he uses in the counseling room and traces it back to its roots in the Law of One. The starting point is a term Ra uses only twice — the significant self — which Doug reads as something close to the soul: the self that carries the harvest of all our past lives forward and meets each new incarnation already biased by who we have been.
From there the conversation moves into a working picture of the inner life. Imagine the ocean: at the still, hidden floor lies the anchored self — our true self, grafted into the ground of being. On the surface bobs the floating self — the ego, the buoy tossed by the weather of the day, running on the pursuit of power, prestige, and possessions. A Holy Tether joins the two and can never be cut. And in between travels the significant self, the meaning-maker with agency, the one who chooses whether to live from the anchor or the buoy.
Doug names the two doorways that wake that chooser: great love and great suffering — two faces of one coin called vulnerability. The episode closes with the community thinking out loud together about the Jesus Prayer as a way of "dropping down and in," the ego reframed as a tool rather than an enemy, and the daily practice of letting a reaction rise into the heart before choosing a response for the good of all.
A contemplative hour on agency, the soul, and the self that learns to respond instead of react.
Key References:
- Ra (Law of One): the infant and "the harvest of biases of all previous incarnational experiences" (92.18); the Great Way and the significator (103.11); higher self vs. oversoul (36.4); incarnation as "a course in the Creator knowing Itself" and the between-life review (82.25); the form-maker body after death (47.11); the significator as the fifth archetype of the mind
- Richard Rohr — true self and false self; great love and great suffering as the two transformative paths
- Thomas Keating — power, prestige, and possessions as the engine of the false self
- The Jesus Prayer / prayer of the heart in the contemplative Christian tradition