Seeing Through the Self
“You are not who you think you are, but you are condemned to be who you think you are” — Sam Harris
Our minds permit, among much else, a brand of awareness capable of observing itself. This self-aware faculty encourages our identification as an unchanging observer of the everchanging world, a constant subject, who I’ve previously committed to naming “Selfy,” looking in from outside of a dynamic world of objects.
Dispelling the illusion of existing as a lurking ego is required if we are to live fulfilling lives full of meaningful contributions of our time and energy. It is necessary if we are to free ourselves from a process perpetuating avoidable suffering. It is necessary if we are to live harmoniously with each other and with all of life.
Surrendering your identity as an ego is a well-trod path in the great spiritual traditions. It is generally recognized that the sense of being a separate ego must be transcended (“death of the human form of God” in the Christian tradition) before one can achieve lasting fulfillment. This fulfillment is achieved by recovering an understanding that we have forgotten, an awareness of our unification with the world (so called “enlightenment” or a “vision of God” depending on your preferred tradition).
No one can free you from a limiting belief in who you are. No one can convince or compel you to freedom. What I hope to do is encourage you to free yourself by popping the bubble of the ego illusion and showing the conceptual door beyond which lies the path to experiential knowledge of who you really are.
A conceptual belief can only ever be a catalyst for experiential knowledge. To truly know yourself as part of the creative process of the universe, inseparable from all that exists, believing this to be true must be a springboard for experiencing it.
Holding this belief can draw your attention to the ways your attention is distracted by your story of being a separate ego, and lead to practices felt that uncover your awareness of your inseparability from the world.
Below is my brief summary of the theoretical justification for who you really are, and a few practices that might facilitate experiential knowledge.
The theory, nutshelled by me:
- We have emerged from life on our world in the same way that apples emerge from a tree or waves from the sea. As Alan Watts liked to put it, “we do come into the world; we come out of it.” The same energy that has traversed our universe since its birth gives rise, under the right conditions, to minds capable of wondering about the meaning of the energy’s flow.
- We have confused our awareness of the world for separation from it. We believe ourselves outside of the world looking in, instead of inside of the world looking around. We imagine ourselves excluded from life and thus prevent ourselves from genuinely living.
- You are not separate from the flow of energy that is the essence of our universe, because nothing is. All that exists is the arising and passing away of the same essential energy. The ocean waves just as the universe peoples, each a manifestation of the same energy rhythmically flowing in accordance with governing principles of which we know so little.
Some practices that may facilitate experiencing a release of an egoic perspective:
- Create moments of physical and mental stillness. I’m not saying you have to meditate, but you might try it. Also, be outside, somewhere quiet, as often as you can.
- Observe in these moments of stillness the arising and passing away of sensations of your body, the arising and passing away of thoughts in your mind, the arising and passing away of feelings about sensations and thoughts.
- Notice that anything that arises in your awareness also passes away, that the stream of consciousness can only flow in because it is also flowing out.
- Consider your thoughts to be the 6th sense, as some Buddhists maintain. When mental chatter is viewed like a sight or sound, arising and passing thoughts become an unexceptional element of your awareness.
- Try to see what your mind feels like when there is no problem to solve. In these moments of stillness, relax the problem-solving aspect of your thinking and see what awareness contains. It can be amazing how aware of your own body and your environment you are, underneath the constant chatter of a mind creating and solving problems.
- Try to find someone behind the present awareness of arising and passing contents of consciousness. Is there a thinker of your thoughts? See if the feeling of being the experiencer of experiences is an exceptional feeling, or if it too arises and passes away.
- See if there is anything outside of momentary awareness. Do memories of the past exist outside of this moment? Predictions of the future? If these are merely more thoughts in the present moment, we’ve lost a key justification for an identity isolated from the everchanging world.
- Bring to mind an especially wonderful memory, one in which you felt extraordinarily connected with another person or place. How self-conscious were you in that moment? Did your ego mediate this experience, layering judgment and bias? My experience has been that the most impactful moments in my life were those in which no concept of separation from the world impeded my raw interaction with it, allowing for an uncovery of the underlying inseparability.
- Do not try to get rid of your ego, believing it to be an enemy to be vanquished. This will only make you an egocentric person whose identity is tied to their pursuit of ego-dissolution. Your ego doesn’t exist. Imagining yourself to be slaying an imaginary dragon perpetuates the illusion and makes you a fool, not a knight.
- Notice how thoughts impede your contentment. Notice what momentary experiences create in of themselves relative to your judgments about them. How much of your suffering is sourced from your judgments about the world, your disappointment and dissatisfaction when reality does not conform to your stories? How much suffering is self-imposed?
- See if relief is granted by allowing experience to flow without impediment. What is your experience of being awareness feel like when sensations, thoughts, and feelings are allowed to arise and pass without judgment or attachment? There is a contradictory component here, where a state of non-doing (non-judging especially) requires a fair bit of practiced doing (particularly attending to attention) to achieve. With patience and awareness, relax into the easeful acceptance of this moment, without filters, without biases, without a problem solver.
- See if the world still feels incomplete or inadequate. Notice whether the operation of the world feels more harmonious when you find yourself to be a part of it, viewing it without concern for its alignment with your imagined drama.
- Notice the suffering relieved by the release of a futile and isolating pursuit of separating your self from everything. See if your compassion is unrestrained by the knowledge of being a self that includes all. Notice whether the wish for the relief of suffering for all beings feels saintly or selfish when you know each being to be you, too.
Reunion
In ego-driven pursuit of connection, we have despaired in personal isolation. In ego-driven pursuit of meaning, we have floundered in personal meaninglessness. In ego-driven pursuit of love, we have wallowed in personal dismissal.
Released from the limiting belief of being Selfy, we realize meaning, connection, and love that no self-centered belief will permit. Knowing ourselves as part of the same flow of energy as the combustion of stars, the waving of seas, and the breathing of trees allows us to begin to understand the process that we call the universe.
Released from the burden of being someone, life looks much less like something out of which “I” am seeking to get something. There is no self that lacks connection with others, and no reason to believe in or pursue a purpose for this imagined identity.
Connection and meaning are innate to who we really are, foundational elements of our existence that are hidden by the veil of self-hood and uncovered by the understanding of ourselves as the universe, aware of itself through our lives.
This reunion with the world unleashes our capacity to love. The envelope of our love is limited by what we believe ourselves to include. The story of being Selfy includes the partners, children, siblings, parents, friends, values, places, and activities that help define who we think we are. These are parts of who I am, and the recognition of my self in these others triggers the feeling we call love.
Relieved of the belief of being a separate self, we are released from the consequent belief in the reality of others. Freed from the futile attempt of loving an imaginary self, we are unrestricted from loving all that we previously imagined to be other. With the whole universe known to be a unity including us, we can experience boundless compassion for all that we include.
Filled with such love, we are motivated to Invest our current knowledge toward relieving suffering for all beings. We are unable to avoid the avoidable suffering wrought by ego-centric seeing, thinking, and acting in pursuit of purpose for our individual stories. We stop creating additional avoidable suffering by understanding the opportunity for each of us to contribute to our shared wellbeing.
We can address and avoid imposing further constraints on the ability of all beings to manifest their unique capabilities. For non-humans, this means understanding the conditions in which plants and animals have evolved and protecting them from our overreach into and destruction of the habitats of their development.
For humans, this means investing the unequally distributed wealth, produced via our unequally accessible collective knowledge, in enabling billions of people to realize their potential. This starts with access to:
- clean water and nourishing food, to nurture bodies and minds;
- reliable and non-polluting energy, to free bodies and minds from physical labor;
- education and the accumulated knowledge of humanity, to enable informed creativity; and
- the global information commons, to benefit from and contribute to the networked knowledge creating process that makes mankind unique.
Altogether, this allows us to invest the awareness that the universe has brought forth through us and the knowledge that we have developed in our search for meaning in realizing our unique capability as life’s most creative creation.
When we come to it
“When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear.
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.”
Maya Angelou, “A Brave and Startling Truth”
Knowledge of who we really are is the first step toward greater harmony within humanity, across all of life, and between life and our universe.
Lovingly investing in freeing living beings from limitations on their potential is more than an ethical response to the knowledge of life’s inseparability. It is an acknowledgement of the trajectory of life and a civic response to the understanding of what life needs from us.
The same energy has made up our universe since its birth, manifesting and transforming in response to governing principles and conditions. Amidst this flow, life emerged as a creative force.
Life advanced for billions of years through the trial-and-error process of random mutation and natural selection. In seeking solutions for survival within a local environment, this process created knowledge of how to live in harmony with the governing principles of our world. The workings of our eyes contain knowledge of the physics governing the transmission of energy as light more nuanced than current scientific theories can accommodate.
This indirect knowledge of our universe has accumulated in the genetic library of life since the emergence of life’s first creations. This library is distributed across the DNA of living beings, continuing to be revised.
The emergence of living creatures capable of not only responding willfully to external information of the world around them, but of also communicating knowledge of how to best use this information to survive, created a step-change in life’s creation of knowledge. Mankind is not alone in this capability, but we appear to be unique. Our combined capacities of perception (vastly enhanced by tool creation), communication, and cooperation enable humans to create, utilize, and iterate upon knowledge exponentially more quickly (See Why, Why, Why).
With life’s creation of beings like us, knowledge no longer accumulates strictly through the linear process of generational mutations and propagation. It grows exponentially through a network of contributing creators distributed across space and time.
Humanity’s self-awareness powers this network in a way that no other (known) living beings have achieved. Detached from raw awareness and impulsive survival, our search for meaning has sent us scouring the universe for an understanding of why we are here. As is often the case, the journey was always the destination.
The power of life’s knowledge creating network is a function of the reach and diversity of the network (i.e., an application/variation of Metcalf’s Law). The knowledge that humanity has contributed to this pursuit of universal knowledge is constrained by our limiting belief of who we are and the resulting misapplication of our attention.
The knowledge we have created has been in pursuit of self-importance and has failed to understand the world as a system of interrelated, inseparable parts. Western science since the Enlightenment, renowned for the productivity and wealth it has generated, has summarily dismissed the encoded knowledge across the kingdoms life has created on earth, electing ignorance to a wealth of knowledge from which we might benefit and to which we could contribute.
Further, the knowledge that humanity has created has always reflected, and continues to reflect, the contributions of a wealthy minority to the creations of their evermore exclusive predecessors. Learning from the past and contributing to the accumulated knowledge of our kind has always been a luxury.
We have the knowledge and resources to free billions of humans from the bonds of subsistence and to enable them to join in the collective creation of a better understanding of our world. What we lack is the motivation to do so.
The understanding of our role in life’s search for understanding, of ourselves as a unique part of this process, can spur our investment in unleashing the as-yet latent creative power of humanity. The knowledge that humanity has developed continues to reflect the contributions of a wealthy minority of mankind to the creations of their ever more exclusive predecessors.
Fully realizing the creative potential of humanity requires harnessing the unique intelligence of diverse human minds in a knowledge creating network. Each mind contributing to the network brings a unique combination of hereditary makeup and experiential knowledge, exponentially expanding the network’s creative power.
Coming to know ourselves as inseparable parts of life’s creativity and investing in enabling each of our kin to contribute to our collective search for knowledge will allow us to determine whether there is any limit to what we can understand. I believe this is our purpose.
In uncovering “who we are” to be nothing less than “all of this,” we realize humanity’s potential to discover knowledge of the universe. Our ability to collectively uncover the secrets of our universe might permit us to create an informed, harmonious coexistence that might be otherwise impossible.
By looking inward and discovering ourselves a part of life, I believe we have the potential to uncover knowledge that allows us to overcome impassable barriers to the continuation of life, perhaps even facilitating the perpetuation of the universe itself.
It seems to me probable that the “Great Filter” that has prevented our universe from teeming with intelligent life is the self-consciousness that has arisen with our socially intelligent species. Given the trajectory that we find ourselves on, it is unfortunately easy to imagine that every other form of intelligence capable of becoming multiplanetary has self-extinguished as a result of failing to evolve beyond eco-centric myopia and its attendant suffering.
Self-transcendence may be the only successful evolutionary path for an intelligence capable of collaboratively discovering knowledge that can permit life’s infinite evolution within an otherwise finite universe. We must wake up to who we really are to fulfill life’s purpose for our lives.
xo,
Adam
