On the difference between Authentic Self and Unique Self

My thinking on Unique Self, drawn from Hebrew mystical sources, originated in 1989, which was the first time I taught about what I then termed “soul prints.” I still have the video of the first time the term “soul prints” “came down” in a teaching, when I was twenty-six years old, giving a Hebrew dharma talk at the Temple Emeth Synagogue in Delray Beach, Florida. There were five hundred senior citizens at that talk, and I was seeking to communicate to them the Hebrew mystical intuition that their lives were infinitely and uniquely significant, and that therefore they should not spend the last decades of life adrift in the regressive atmosphere of mahjong and card games that dominated the culture of Delray Beach. I said to them, “Not only do you have a fingerprint, you have a soul print,” and at that moment something shifted in the subtle energy in the room, and many of us there knew that some deep knowing had been named. This became a core part of my teaching for the next ten years. 
In my book Soul Prints: Your Path to Fulfillment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), I formally coined both the term “soul prints” and “Unique Self.” On the term “Unique Self,” see Soul Prints (p. 160): “The address of the divine commands us each to realize our Unique Self.” In context, this referred to the internal divine voice that lives in and as the interior face of consciousness. The second mention (p. 164) refers to Unique Self as the expression of the human being living in an evolutionary context. I label Unique Self the core human evolutionary mechanism: “The only path to survival is the path of the Unique Self.” The third usage of Unique Self in Soul Prints (p. 301) is in the context of the obligation to present one’s Unique Self in what is termed there a “Soul Print” or “Unique Self encounter.” The ethical question in such a meeting is framed as “Have I brought my Unique Self to the table?” In the Soul Prints book and teaching, the enlightened nature of post-egoic individuality as an expression of nondual realization is explicit in a number of passages (see for example p. 49 and p. 50) but not sufficiently highlighted.

In what was originally my doctoral dissertation on Nondual Humanism and the Unique Self in the teaching of Mordechai Lainer of Izbica and in the Talmudic and Kabbalistic tradition from which he emerged, the distinction between egoic and enlightened Uniqueness became more dominant as one of the pivoting points of the Unique Self teaching. For Lainer, an essential part of the process of what he termed berur might well be understood as precisely this clarification of Uniqueness beyond egoic separate self. See my discussion of berur in Gafni, Nondual Humanism and the Unique Self (Chapter 10, “The Nature of Berur”). This work originally appeared as my doctorate, taken at Oxford University under the co-supervision of Professor Mosle Idel and Dr. Norman Solomon. It is being published under the title, Radical Kabbalah.

Ken Wilber and I dialogued and debated about the nature of Unique Self enlightenment for some time. When I sent this work to Ken (who had already read my more popular work Soul Prints the night after our first meeting), he immediately evolved his position, and in a series of conversations and emails recognized the Unique Self teaching as a significant new enlightenment lineage that has much to offer the Integral teaching enlightenment. Ken then invited me to give a featured address to a group of some fifty leading spiritual teachers at the Integral Spiritual Center (ISC) in 2006 on the nature of Unique Self enlightenment. In a series of conversations between Ken Wilber and myself as part of the preparation for the ISC teaching, we sharpened the distinction between egoic individuality and post-egoic individuality.

In the months after ISC, a number of teachers who were moved by the Unique Self realization began to incorporate it into their teaching. These included John Kesler, Viddeyuva, Sofia Diaz, John Forman, and others. It was, however, my friend Diane Musho Hamilton who began to facilitate the voice of Soul Prints/Unique Self as part of the Big Mind process developed by her teacher, Genpo Roshi. Diane, in conversations with Ken and myself, was pivotal in the full transition in the Integral world from the term “Soul Prints” and its third-person, metaphysical implications, to the term “Unique Self,” which more readily expressed Unique Self also as a first-person realization. Her teacher, Genpo Roshi, following her lead, integrated the voice and term “Unique Self ” into the Big Mind process and into the official Big Mind book. See Dennis Genpo Merzel, Big Mind, Big Heart (McLean, VA: Big Mind Publishing, 2007), 122–24. It was Ken, in a call in January 2006 before the Integral Spiritual Center meeting, who suggested that I prefer the term “Unique Self ” over “soul prints” in my upcoming presentation, so that the Unique Self teaching would not be confused with the separate-self soul teaching of exoteric Western religion.