The "Yes," our "Yes," is our essential impulse toward ourselves and the world. Layer after layer of the "No" gets piled on by all the authorities of our lives from parental figures, through school, and with our peers, friends or not. These layers continue to build through what we see as entertainment and information through the media. It gets layered on through conformity. Our material based identity and ego grow and change with each layer. They defend past choices and conduct that produced dissonances and deny such moments their critical quality. That can stop us from questioning the meaning perspectives that brought us to those choices and conduct and the "No" they spoke. Each layer deflects us from the core of the affirmative becoming self. Each succeeding layer may convince us that we are only the layers, that our life is only an accumulation of these meaningless manifestations of our material life.
All of the voices that spoke the "No" to us, the voices that exuded these layers, eventually and insidiously become our own voice. No matter how much these voices sound like our own voice, they are always external to our becoming self. They remain the Voices of Judgment that spoke the essential "No" to life in spite of everything, but they cannot eliminate our essential "Yes," our essential voice. We may feel and hear that all these voices come from ourselves as a single voice, a voice that keeps claiming that it represents reality, our personal as well as our public reality. That seemingly single voice also comments on the meaning of the world around us through a generally negative perspective, and it generally represses anything that speaks in a positive way, interred and interred over and over again. Our other voice, the Voice of the Self or the Voice of the Becoming Self still sounds within us and keeps us whole.
These Voices of Judgment made something like the interview a fear driven nightmare instead of a pleasure or at least a reasonable, doable task.[175] When my students spoke to themselves about the interview, negative answers came back asserting the reality of those answers: "Face the facts. You're a loser." The interviewer, they heard, would see through them to the essentially incompetent person beneath. Whether they looked into the mirror of mind or the mirror on the wall, the answer that came back to them spoke the "No." All of these "No's" came to feel nearly paralytic, and some students never even made it to some interviews when the "No" became completely overwhelming.
Remarkably, no matter how bad, how negative, how loud these Voices of Judgment became, no matter how painful my students reported their preparation for and performance in the interview, they had all gotten jobs, they had all worked and succeeded in the workplace to one degree or another. We asked, "From whence did that unstoppable resiliency come?"
It came from deep inside all those layers, and no matter how deep and even impenetrable those layers seem, our essential resiliency will make itself heard and felt. It comes to us as our true voice, the Voice of the Self, or the Voice of the Becoming self. This is the voice of what Viktor Frankl calls this the "defiant human spirit" throughout his work.
After all we've discussed by way of barriers to the becoming self, to living as fully as possible, we might wonder if too much stands in the way. According to Frankl and the power of the freedom to choose, nothing is too much. Our essential will to life, the essential health of our becoming self stays with us and continues to inform us no matter what choices we have made that didn't work for us and whatever else has happened. The Voice of Self speaks with that authority and that energy. It is our voice, and we can listen. We can hear. We can find our becoming self through that voice. That voice is our becoming self, and through that voice we can find our liberation and our individuation and autonomy. We can find and live as a whole being and continue our becoming as well.
There is, after all, nothing wrong with us. If that's the case—
What happens now
You have you found out
every negative thought and feeling
you ever had about yourself
IS unfounded, unfair, and untrue?
If you have any questions, suggestions, and gentle constructive comments, please feel free to write: lrcsmr@hotmail.com.