You probably feel like you are more than a constant flow of sensations, thoughts and feelings. Behind the flow of your conscious experiences is an experiencer, someone observing the everchanging contents of awareness.
This someone behind experience is “I”, “Me”, or “the ego” that feels like the center of feeling and control inside our bodies. Whether consciously or not, this “self” is who we identify as, who we tend to think we are. For clarity (and fun), let’s name this individual Selfy.
Selfy feels like the senser of our bodily sensations, the thinker of our thoughts, and the feeler of our feelings. It seems fixed and continuous, in large part because it seems to simultaneously observe the present while entertaining memories of the past and predictions of the future, encouraging the idea that it exists outside of the present moment.
This continuity makes Selfy feel separate from the changing world and even the body from which (as current thinking goes) our awareness emerges. Though we know that our bodies will degrade, fail, and eventually return to the earth out of which they arose, we imagine and yearn for Selfy’s immortality.
Identifying as a permanent, personal ego satisfies an innate human desire for greater meaning than we rationalize from a world of seemingly separate, entirely momentary, forever arising and passing away experiences. We intuitively believe ourselves to be part of something greater than just the contents of consciousness.
This intuition is correct. It reflects an understanding within us that who we are extends beyond our momentary awareness of an everchanging world.
Our answer to this drive for meaning has been small minded, imagining each of us as autonomous individuals instead of understanding all of us as unique expressions of the same essence.
Selfy is a sign of our immaturity on a developmental process toward truly understanding who we are and creating lasting connection and fulfillment in our lives. It is an imaginary friend that we must leave behind to live meaningfully.
Believing this story of continuous, individual identity sends you on a fruitless pursuit of its selfish ends. Its false promises of connection and meaning destroy our opportunities for authentic fulfillment in our lives and encourage us to create and permit avoidable suffering.
This belief is so accepted as to be invisible. It’s time to hold Selfy up to the light, examine it for what it is, and choose whether to continue to opt in.
A Useful Fiction
Selfy’s existence is enabled by the way we think and reinforced by the way we talk. That is to say, it’s not your fault. Nature and nurture conspire to trick you into believing that Selfy is who you are.
We can treat our ego like appendices or goosebumps — a sign of an evolutionary adaptation that no longer serves us. The social advantages of imagined individuality are now far outweighed by the consequences of ego-centric activity.
The internal and external elements enforcing the perceived reality of being a self can be understood by first thinking about how we think about the world.
How we think about the world
What we call attention is the act of our minds attending to just one of the many contents of our awareness, the sensations, thoughts and feelings that arise and pass away in our stream of consciousness. Our way of understanding the world is based upon this “spotlight” attention focusing awareness on one thing at a time. To be aware of everything at once is to attend to no thing at all.
Naturally then, understanding the world this requires we break it into individual things to which we can attend. We must first separate a thing of interest from all that is “not that thing” by drawing lines in space and time. We imagine things to be independent of their environment in order to define and name them. We then forget that this separation is for naming conventions only and come to believe that things are truly independent.
By way of example, bring to mind a particular tree, one that stands out from near or distant memory. To imagine this tree, you’ve drawn lines determining its edges in both space, as it stretches from roots to leaves, and in time, as it ages from seed to a decomposing seedbed.
How does this way of knowing the tree align with its reality?
This tree is intertwined in space via a complex relationship with the atmosphere and ground, converting carbon dioxide, sunlight and water into its body, while receiving from and sending chemical signals out into its environment. Likewise, it is intertwined in time with plants and animals (like us) via symbiotic relationships, providing the resources that sustain lives and receiving the resources that sustain it.
Is this tree the effect of a seed released by a tree before it? Is it the cause of the trees that grow from its seeds, or the life that grows from its decomposing trunk?
No. The idea of causes and effects fails to understand trees and their environment as completely inseparable. “This” tree and the world can only be understood together, as parts of the same flow of energy. There is only this flow, a process in which a sun is shining, air is blowing, water is flowing, and life comes and goes just as waves arise and fall away.
How we think about our selves
What is true of the tree is true also of us, and our discomfort with this truth speaks to the uphill battle ahead. It is relatively easy to believe that humanity emerged from the same flow of energy that brings forth all life on our world. It is shockingly harder to accept that I too am part of this process.
The story of being Selfy tells me that I am apart from the world, looking in on it from outside, as opposed to a part of the world, looking around it from inside. This idea of separation, of being an unchanging witness outside of the everchanging world, is a consequence of our minds’ ability to be aware of being aware.
That is, “I” am not the sensation of coldness in my toes, the thought about the frequency of this sensation, or the ensuing feeling of anxiety, but instead the sensing, thinking, feeling someone. The ego introduces a layer of judgment atop the stream of consciousness, assigning positive or negative value based on a prescribed system of values that is core to Selfy’s story.
This story is solidified by our ability to remember and predict, as this tricks us into thinking that the same Selfy experienced the past and will experience the future. It feels like I am the same Selfy that used to feel his toes in the winter, and I can imagine myself as the future Selfy navigating the effects of even worse circulation.
The belief of being a continuous Selfy encourages us to conform with who we have been and who we expect to become, tying us to a vaguely consistent set of foundational values. Other people assume consistency in your values and anticipate consistency in your actions, and likewise you of them.
The story of Selfy is therefore written in collaboration with the people with whom you interact. Your values are shaped by social acceptance, influencing your judgment of your past, attitude toward the present, and desires for the future.
This story provides social benefit that has facilitated human collaboration to expand from the unit of families to that of a global civilization. These identities enhance social cohesion by enforcing conformance with the stories that we collaboratively construct for and about one another.
Ultimately, the belief of being the detached witness of the arising and passing contents of consciousness is a belief in immortality. We can justify no doubt as to whether our bodies will age and ultimately fail. We experience in every moment the complete momentariness of our lives, the ceaseless arising and passing of sensations in our bodies, thoughts in our minds, and feelings about these sensations and thoughts.
Anchored to memories about who I have been in the past, detached as a witness of rather than participant in the present, and tethered to a story about who I will be in the future, Selfy appears to be outside of the everchanging, momentary flux of reality. Identifying as this metaphysical someone resolves the insecurity of how to feel meaningful in a world where the contents of awareness are forever fleeting and the only constant is change.
Consequences
Believe ourselves to be isolated individuals, we adopt a baseline feeling of being isolated. We frantically seek for connection that we believe we lack. This is a vicious circle, from which we are freed by seeing through the illusion of being an independent Selfy.
Seeking connection for Selfy distances me from the exact opportunities for genuine connection that make me feel part of something bigger. Identified with a story of who I am, my universe of concern is challenged to extend beyond my story.
My compassion for “others” is limited not by my capacity to care but by the importance of every “other” relative to Selfy. Generally, we avoid addressing avoidable suffering if it does not directly affect the leads of our personal dramas.
Moreover, with my intention set and attention focused upon living out my story, my actions are all but guaranteed to create discord in the world. The imagined opposition of “inside self” vs. “outside other” is made real by minds fixated on personal stories and thus blinded to the harmonious rhythms of the world. So it is that we go about, as Watts put it, “seeking meaning from life as it if were a bank to be robbed” and severing connection with the world and everyone in it.
This story prevents us from understanding ourselves to be a part of the world from which we emerge, much less to understand the world’s richness in a manner permitting our harmonious coexistence on it. Our ability to genuinely understand the secrets of our universe will always be constrained by a belief that we are just visiting it.
The believability of Selfy relies upon maintaining present consistency with who I have been and necessitates present alignment with who i will become. This prevents me from living genuinely in this moment, which is the only moment that ever exists.
Our evolved capability to guess at the contents of others’ minds is an incredibly useful adaptation for social dynamics (read “manipulation”). It also makes nearly impossible the separation of intrinsically held values from extrinsically enforced ones.
My imagined future reflects values and goals that are significantly influenced by what I believe the people around me believe are acceptable. The story of “who I am becoming” which guides my thoughts and actions in the present is ghost written by the people with whom I interact (including one-way interactions with people I’ll never meet, living or otherwise).
I suspect a major contributor to common social anxiety is a concern that others’ stories of who are differs from our own in important ways. We fear a disconnect between our own and others’ memories of our pasts, and between our respective visions of our futures.
The concept of an externally held “image” of who I am is fitting not only due to the emphasis on how I look but also to the fixed nature of others’ understanding of who I am. While I focus more on who I am becoming, others (I guess) think more about who I have been. I imagine others’ stories about me to be at most an extrapolation of my worst past actions, in stark contrast with my story reflecting at least an extrapolation of my best past intentions.
The saddest part of this whole created drama is the guesswork associated with these self-imposed constraints. Our tribal impulses encourage us to continually guess and refine our guesses as to what values Selfy must hold to be accepted.
We are nudged from all directions into conforming with imagined preferences. Broader social alignment is eased with common references for normalcy, with the importance of religious institutions and cultural lineages giving way to popular media and advertising (the line between which continues getting fuzzier) as the arbiters of acceptance.
Selfy’s desire to be liked pits acceptance against authentic engagement. We constrain the authenticity of our lives, electing shallow connections for a designer Selfy we guess will be most likeable over deep connections only created when we are genuine. Only genuine people can be genuinely known and genuinely loved.
Disabled from seeing the world clearly, from understanding it wholly, and from thinking and interacting authentically, we are prevented from uniquely creating and contributing with our lives. Contributing our unique, authentic capabilities and passions to a community of which we are a part is the greatest wellspring of meaning in our lives.
The pursuit of fleeting acceptance for our imagined selves prevents us from realizing lasting fulfillment in our lives. The pursuit of personal significance may prevent us from realizing our cosmic significance.
How do we evolve beyond this limiting belief, and what awaits? On to part three — “Who Do You Think You Are: Who You Are”.
xo,
Adam
