Beyond the Everyday Self

Abstract

This paper begins from empirical research relevant to the sense that there is something ‘beyond’ the everyday self, the work of David Hay in which he asked people whether they had experienced ‘a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?’ About a third of the population reported that they had. I suggest that such experiences arise from a synthesis of an experiential component that is hard-wired, global, and relatively independent of faith and culture, and an interpretative factor that is specific to faith, culture and context. The idea of ‘something more’ is the other side of a restricted naturalism, but there is no need to adopt the dualism implicit in the distinction between the everyday and the beyond. An alternative is an emancipated view of nature in which the transcendent is not distinct from the natural but connected with it. When something beyond is postulated in contemporary culture, it is often not framed in theistic terms but represents a vague sense of something beyond that is neither naturalistic nor theistic.