Kamal Ghorui
By Jug Suraiya
In the glow of a new-born day, poetpriest Gerard Manley Hopkins saw a bird soaring high above the Earth, a vision that inspired him to write one of the most joyous poems in English literature, The Windhover, in which the effortless flight of a falcon evokes the universality of Christ’s covenant of transcendence, the affirmation that the kingdom of Heaven is not an ethereal realm out there, but is right here, in this world, in the here and now, in each and every one of us, awaiting the rapture of realisation.
“I caught this morning morning’s minion,/Kingdom of daylight’s dauphin,/ Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon in his riding/ Of the rolling level underneath…/…My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird/The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”
Novelist-philosopher Iris Murdoch would describe Hopkins’s experience as a classic example of what she called ‘unselfing’, a spontaneous meditative process which engages us and jettisons the burden we all carry, that of the ‘fat, relentless ego’ which, like an ill-mannered individual, is forever shoving and elbowing to put itself ahead of others for its own self-serving ends.
Our everyday consciousness is based on what phenomenologists call ‘intentionality’, which, like a movie projector , displays on the screen of our mind the world as seen through the filter of our wants and wishes.
Unselfing is the Delete button, which removes, however momentarily, the self-centred ego from our consciousness and allows it to direct a ‘just and loving gaze’ upon the world as viewed without the bias of intentionality.
Unselfing is the key concept of Murdoch’s 1970 book, The Sovereignty of Good, which lays the foundation of a moral philosophy that goes beyond religion and even the concept of God.
Unselfing is an exaltation of the spirit, a liberation from the shackles of intentional I-sight, and is induced by a contemplation of beauty, in nature, art, or even in everyday things seen through unselfed eyes.
As with Hopkins, it was a bird in exultant flight that afforded Murdoch a glimpse of transcendence. “I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind…brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then, suddenly, I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment, everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.”
Unselfing cannot be brought about by a force of will, for that only buttresses the ego; unselfing involves a will-less surrender of the self to a greater, more intensely felt, reality.
In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch asserts that unselfing removes the barrier of the otherness of others, the individual and the universal become indivisible without the brokerage of religion or God.
Unselfing is an unasked-for benediction, a boon that cannot be premeditated or predicted. It is an unsolicited gift that, literally, catches us unawares.
If we are fortunate enough to receive such a gift, which has no purpose, or use, other than being itself, we can do with it whatever we might. Compose a poem, or write a philosophical treatise, or take a mental image of the moment – an unselfie, if you like – and secure it in the Inbox of revisitable memory.
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