Modes of the Self

What do I know about the self, especially myself?  As I write this, I know I am thinking about this and writing about it.  I know in whatever I think, say or do, it is ‘I’ who does it.  I have feelings: anger, depression, affection, guilt, fear etc.  I do various things, like write essays, cook, talk to people, worry about things, or plan for my future.  I desire things.  I remember things from the past. I think about what I am doing now, reflecting on this and various other things.  And I compare myself (or my actions, performances) with others’ and feel good or bad about the results.  I worry about who I am, and what will happen to me when I die, or who I was before I was born.  I remember my childhood and compare my present self with what I was earlier in my life, and what I might be or would like to be in the future.  I try to solve various problems. I try to do favors to other people, or harm or hurt them or their feelings in some fashion. I worry, I feel elated, I feel guilty, I get angry or envious, I plan to take revenge, I feel depressed, and so on and so on.  In all these various activities, ‘I’ am the constant. You can say I have these various attributes such as being greedy, apprehensive, guilty, affectionate, worried, and so on.

I also review, from time to time, various experiences, situations or events of my life and in those moments of reflection, I can find myself with the range of feelings mentioned above and more – bored, depressed, elated, excited, etc. -- and at times ponder on the very meaning of life and living.

The feeling of ‘I’ or the Sense of the Self:  When I think and try to find who I am in all these activities, there is no other constant than the feeling of ‘I’.  And yet I know I am not aware of myself all the time – either I am lost in what I am reading or watching, or in some thought, or in some worry. There is some awareness of myself when I dream, but little or no awareness when I sleep, depending on how deeply I am asleep.  And then I am aware of myself doing these things (except being in highly involved dreams or in deep sleep).  And, of course, I can also be aware that I am aware.  If I look closely into this awareness, it may amount to nothing more than an awareness of a part (or whole) of my body or head (skull), or speaking to myself sub-vocally, or a combination of the two.

“Look at Me and Look at My Beauty!” The sense of the self seems to be bound to the physiological sense of the body. Thus the body seems to supply the substratum for any sense of reference of everything to the self.  This should also be true for the emotional and volitional content of the self. 

But this idea may easily slip into considering the self as something of a derivative of the body, for it seems to imply, somehow, that the self is a byproduct of the body.  While I am introspectively thinking, i.e. reflecting, about me or myself, I can’t seem to help thinking about my feeling of self in some sense rooted in the physical sensations and thus in the body.  This is just how I seem to slip from the subjective into the objective.  Yet, it is not just my body as an object, but as something felt.  In that sense it is part of the subjective.

Although we all believe there is a constant ‘I’ behind our thoughts, feelings, body, emotions and actions, in introspection we don’t find any such thing as the ‘I’ which is currently doing or having all these things.  Even if there is such an ‘I’, it’s not something that can be objectified and viewed as such, especially since the ‘I’ has to remain as the pure ‘subject’ in all such reflections or introspections. The ‘I’ or pure subject, which is doing the reflecting on the sensations or the sense of it, is not itself objectifiable. It just the feeling which is not further reducible, describable or translatable into other categories, subjective or objective.

Self-Identity: How do I know I am the same now as I was yesterday? Simply through memory.  I remember myself doing or saying something yesterday, and the mere feeling that ‘I’ am now remembering that from yesterday (my doing or saying or experiencing something), coupled with the bodily sensations and sub-vocal speech movements, is adequate enough to say that the present ‘I’ is the same as yesterday’s ‘I’. The feeling of self is inherent in our sense of self-identity.

I have my self-image (as to what sort of a person I am, think I am, what I would like to be, or what I think other people think about me), and the notion of myself, which is the feeling that I have been talking about myself.

The self in such considerations may or may not coincide with the idea of a person in common parlance.  Of course, other persons do feature in my thought, responses and actions.  If you or someone asks me to identify myself, I give you my name, date and place of birth, bodily or psychological features and so on. From other people’s points of view, however, my behavior may exhibit various personalities (or rather personality traits), regardless of the fact that I am aware of myself as one.

In moments of reflection, and when I am confronted in my own mind with the possibility my dying or death in general, I am sometimes mortally afraid of death. And what is the ‘I’ that I am afraid of losing when I die?  Mostly this feeling of ‘I’ I now have as well as the awareness of myself and the world. The loss of these would land me in an area of abyss or nothingness which generally makes me panic and take shelter in more thinking or some other mental activity such as worry or panic.  Totally being nothing is not something I can stay in for any length of time without taking shelter in some mental occupation or other, even if it is fearing the state of nothingness. 

The claim that the ‘I’ is an illusion, whether it is made from Hume’s point of view, or Buddhism’s point of view, is based on this inability of ours to be able to view the ‘I’ as an object^.[1]

Bias and Partiality: It’s well known how partial we are to ourselves, what we believe, own, see or do.  When we hear things said about ourselves, we often attribute them to ourselves.  It’s not unusual for people to take remarks, although made innocently about us, are taken personally.  And we react to them, bear grudges and try to retaliate or revenge.  How does this partiality arise?  Once I begin to see the world in terms of the ‘I’, i.e. as ‘my’ world, everything else seems to follow.  For instance, it’s hard to make a statement or express an opinion and not to believe it is as one’s own, and stemming from one’s own special point of view.  The basis of this seems to be that even physically speaking all perceptions and appearances of the world are from a point of view, just as a camera takes a picture from a certain perspective and point of view, or a painter paints a scene from the way it appears to him.  It only seems to be natural and one step away from reflecting on it and thinking it’s my point of view and have a special attitude of ownership toward it.  Besides, we see our own virtues more clearly, or feel symptoms of the body more intimately, because we are with them more closely than anyone else is.  (That’s probably the reason why I tend to think we are our own best doctors, simply because we are always with ourselves to watch not only the innumerable things that happen to us, but also the umpteen number of variations, and tend to correlate them with other things that happen to us as causes or effects of these changes, as for instance, I attribute my present stomach ache to the hard-to-digest food I ate last night at dinner.)  This point of view, we do not have with regard to other people and what happens to them.  We tend to be more ‘objective’, and look for what we might call ‘facts’, although, some of these are quite liable to different interpretations. 

Egotism, Self-Centeredness and Selfishness: We mean different things when we say someone selfish is or egotistic.  ‘Selfish’ generally means that one only considers his own self-interest in utter disregard to how his actions might affect others’ interests or thwart them.   Rather, he acts to further his own interests even when he knows his actions conflict with or hurt other’s feelings or interests.  On the other hand, ‘egotism’ means someone has an exaggerated notion of oneself, is pompous and looks for self-aggrandizement or self-glorification. Self-centeredness is related to these, but somewhat different.  We say someone is self-centered when the person is totally engrossed in one’s own world and interests, but does not consider how his actions might affect others or harm others.[2]

Ownership:  The extension of the idea of identification is all my relationship with things and people around me, the world and life in general. “This is me and mine.  I want this.  I own it.  And I can’t let it go.”  That exactly is the source of the idea of property.  Although this an extension of biological territorial rights, or protection of one’s offspring, it extends, by virtue of the use of symbols and thought, to symbolic property, such as money and wealth in general, as well as glory (which again is an extension of animals responding to petting, kindness and praise), fame and power (an extension of dominion over other animals in the herd), and accumulation of property beyond all measure. 

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I always wonder about where I stand in relation to other people, things and life in general.  Where do I stand in the scheme of things.  There is a constant assessment of how I stand.  Because of my symbolic activity, I not only wonder about my present status in various contexts, but what might or will happen to me in future.  Hence, the prospect of myself ending can create terror in myself, even when there is no imminent danger present now.  This also is related to my being weary of life, boredom, chronic depression, and thoughts of suicide.  Or I can turn to violence to achieve my ends by force, to achieve power and glory or what not, like waging a war.  The question of the meaning of life sprouts in my mind, and I spend the rest of my life finding meaning in the many things I do or seek.

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Self-Alienation and Suicide (Treating the Self as a Thing): The self can go against itself in various forms.  When we have done something we ourselves don’t approve or regret doing, or feel our honor is at stake, we are apt to feel guilty or remorseful.  Also, when we don’t feel we belong anywhere, in any group, we can feel alienated.  Or we feel deeply frustrated when we get what we don’t want, or have failed in a relationship, and resent a person, group, the whole world or our entire existence.  When these negative judgments take us to the extreme we can even contemplate and carry out suicide.

The case is similar with martyrdom.  I disapprove or condemn someone oppressing my nation, religion or caste.  I all these we offer ourselves as a sacrifice to a cause. In all these phases, we look at ourselves as an object, not just as someone we don’t approve of, but someone we don’t want to be, someone we want to be rid of.  There are intense emotions flying. 

In all these modes we look at ourselves as an object, forgetting about who is looking at the self as an object.  The ‘I’ that is judging is itself a judgment or set of standards, with which it is identified, and which is judging the ‘me’ and my performance or conduct.  Not that we actually do see ourselves as an object.  It’s just our positive or negative responses to things we are identified with.  Just as we can’t ever see ourselves as a subject, we can never really see ourselves as an object either.  In either case, these are just thoughts.

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The Ego and Its Dramas:  Here we can look at the various processes through which we form our prejudices, desires, fears, hopes, power trips, feelings of superiority and inferiority, affections, volitions, and so on.  We constantly compare the various objects we previously thought of, and we find one more to our liking and prefer it to another.  Our desires constantly change because of this comparison.  Some desires, especially long-range goals, however, being deep rooted in some basic conditioning, are constant and fixed, and govern our entire lives.  We go through various undertakings to achieve what we want.  And what we find as obstacles we try to get rid of. 

Habits are a way of shortening our undertakings, so that we don’t have to learn each task anew every time we have to do it.  We settle down into certain patterns of acting, feeling and thinking, or a collection of these, which rather define us. Indeed, they constitute the self.  Of course, these are based on our desires, attachments and fears we formed for ourselves before, each of them in turn involving identification[3] with whatever object.

Why is it that I feel flattered or hurt when someone says nice things about me or what I say or do, or when someone criticizes me?  I can’t just see their comments as pertaining to merely what I said or did.  Instead, I feel that I am myself treated as inferior or superior. Worse, if it take the person seriously or believe in what he says, I end up feeling inferior or superior, lost, depressed or elated or guilty, resentful or afraid.  What is said in a sense pertains to me.  It affects my ‘I’ feeling, as it addressed in some fashion or other to the sense of ‘me’, or the image or background which I suppose I am, not just what I have said or done, or my performance.  And what I feel affects my body as well.  My stomach turns, I feel my heart jumping, and so forth.

I am at the Center of My World: All my thoughts not only refer to myself, directly or indirectly, but I am at the center of my world.  My interests are all ultimately bound with what I think I am, as well about what I think about what other people think or expect them to think about me.

In this mental world I build for myself I occupy the center and ultimately everything has to be related to ‘me’ or revolves around me.  This along with our sense of self explains our egotism, self-centeredness as well as selfishness.

The same goes with other people’s comments about my body, appearance and looks.  My feelings are anchored in my being identified by my body, looks and appearance.

How thinking reinforces the self:  It’s not just that thinking is responsible for the self, but a major portion of our thinking is devoted to bolstering the self in some fashion or other.  It’s as if there is someone or something which is constantly evaluating the given situation, or put it another way, each thought is also simultaneously looking at itself and the situation to see where one stands in the scheme of things, and each evaluation leads to further thinking, planning, and acting, which is a never-ending process. Everything one sees and hears one interprets in relation to oneself.

Thinking is also a perpetual comparative process:  I am sizing up other people in relationship, asserting myself or withdrawing whenever I find it appropriate, and maintain my status, at least in my own view, and hopefully to appear in a favorable light to others. 

Also, as thought is driven by my past desire structure, worries and fears, all those come into play in maintaining not just my status quo, but also my continuity, and perhaps, if possible, increased security, as I go on living.  This, in a nutshell, is most of my life and life of others around me.  Of course, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, in terms of wanting to continue a pleasurable state, or shorten a painful one, is at the source of many of these maneuvers.  Mental activity, i.e., thinking ensures my continuity through the pleasure principle, which includes avoidance of pain (and, fear).

To see the end of the continuity is also to see the end of myself, which I try to avoid by any means possible.  It’s this fear of myself ending that is the true fear of death, although this gets portrayed in my thinking as myself dying at some future moment.

It also explains my perpetuation into indefinite future by continuing to acquire more of the things I identify myself with and less of the things I avoid.  Hence, the acquisition of needless property and wealth, sex, glory, fame, superiority, power, and what not.  

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Memory also engenders a feeling of pleasure and meaning of the object as providing pleasure.  And in that very movement, the factor of time gets into the picture, as well as value.  All these are bound up with one another.  Future and past become part of my mental life.

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Dialogue with Self (Internal Dialogue or Self Talk): We are all aware of the incessant chatter that goes on in our heads (minds).  It often appears as if we are talking to ourselves.  Part of the chatter consists of a running commentary on whatever is going on in our minds or out there in the external world.  This part stems from the mere recognition (naming) of what we perceive and the consequent judgment on what we experience.  Another aspect has to do is talk to ourselves about what we want, plan, hope to do, or projecting into the future and talking to ourselves as to what might happen in the future, and how we propose to counter it.  We constantly ‘tell ourselves’ what we should do.

In fact, our whole thought process seems to us to depend on this self-talk.  It’s as though we don’t exist without this chatter going on.

In this self-talk we can feel our speech muscles moving.  And we can even catch ourselves talking to ourselves in dreams, especially if they are vivid enough.

Some of this self-talk is based on self-reflection, i.e. looking back on whatever we thought, felt or experienced a moment ago, and is in the form of a comment on it, and a reflection on that resulting in a further comment and so on, ad infinitum.  The visual, auditory or tactile images may reinforce these judgments, or vice versa; the images may in fact be prior to these judgments.  It’s hard to separate the two and tell always which comes first.  Or we may not have any image accompaniment or support at all. Or on some occasions at least we may have just a glimpse of an image without its being verbalized as such and such.

Self-talk as well as experiences recalled and scenarios imagined -- indeed all dealings with ourselves in terms of self-consciousness can and do only reinforce and strengthen the self.

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The discussion about self-talk is not complete unless includes the voices we hear ‘in our head’ from our past constantly or intermittently.  My boss scolding me, or my grandmother accusing me, or someone praising me to skies, and such, all tend to reverberate in our heads and tend to reinforce our thoughts (positively or negatively). When the identification with them is strong enough, our inner speech tends to assume those voices, or become them, much like when we start humming a tune which has been haunting in our heads from time to time. When any of thoughts gains enough strength it can not only result in emotional conflicts, guilt, pangs of conscience, anger, self-hatred, depression and justifying ourselves, patting oneself on one’s own shoulder, compensating, but also in acting them out in various ways.  After all, most of our action is a result of an idea or thought temporarily taking over our consciousness and prompting us to act in various ways. Some of these thoughts can result in obsessions, phobias, paranoia, etc.

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The Subject of Self-Talk: There is a constant assessment of ourselves going on in the self-talk: how we size up in others’ eyes, how we think we have performed, our successes and failures or disappointments, our plans, hopes and expectations, our remorse, regrets and guilt, our decisions or determination, our desires and fears, attempts to solve various problems either of life, or intellectual or artistic problems, how things will benefit us or hurt us, our possible gains and losses, and so on and on.  The center almost invariably in all this talk is ourselves. This concern may not just remain a concern; it may take the shape of selfishness, conniving, or mere self-centeredness.

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One more thing to be noticed about self-talk is “telling ourselves” that such and such is so and so.  This involves not only believing what we tell ourselves, but also by virtue of our being the belief, for the moment can result in action (or the abandonment of a habit and such). For example, telling ourselves, or simply thinking that not everyone thinks I am a dullard or stupid, can lead us to look at ourselves in a different light, angle or perspective and regain, at least temporarily, our confidence. The same process allows us also to assume various points of view or perspectives and enables to be that point of view or make that assumption, at least for the moment.[4]

The self-talk also has repercussions on how we feel about ourselves and the world, and has effects on the body as well.  And the awareness of these feelings will, more often than not, generate further judgments as well as feelings, producing a continuing experience, say of pain or fear, or love or some other sentiment.  The continuity of experience is created thus through the past experiences lingering in our present and living through our self-talk. This continuity further garners the idea of the self as the center and generator of these thoughts, feelings and experiences.

Of course, the impression we have in this is that it is always the ‘I’ who is doing the talking.  It’s not that we can ever catch this ‘I’ who is doing the talking, thinking, feeling or experiencing^.[5]

Chatter:  Willy-nilly, there is a constant movement of thought within our minds.  It’s not just random memories or hopes or fears sprouting up in the mind; there may well be a purpose in the chatter.  If we exclude the dream world, practically most of the thoughts we go through seem to be resolving some tension or problem.  The aim in all that seems to be to not just ease tension, but also to arrive at some satisfactory solution to the problems, in order to restore the mind to a state of equilibrium.  Recurring dreams also point to unresolved fears, guilt, anxiety or conflict. Of course, this is not always achieved, for there are uncertainties involving the unknown, other people, the turn of events, or the situation not being current any more, and so on.  These easily create a worried state of mind, so that the same thoughts keep returning, or we thinking again and again about the same thing.  And our fears are not resolved either, for we cannot achieve the knowledge of the unknown which alone could ultimately allay our fears.

There may be several reasons why the chatter goes on in our minds.  When the mind is quiet, as I said before, it is unstable.  It wants to go somewhere, think of something.  One main reason why this happens is the seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain, worry, anxiety, depression and so on.[6]  All these movements, of course, only reinforce or strengthen the self.  That apart, the mind at once seeks pleasure and stability as well as security.  It always strives for a state which it can reflect on and gain pleasure from, while at the same time maintaining its continuity, thereby perpetuating itself. But when such a state is indeed achieved, it’s not a one in which the mind can remain at rest.  It has to find a more exciting pleasure, or make sure that the pain does not recur or that it has gone away. 

This is not only true of the idle mind being a ‘devil’s workshop’, but to some degree also of our dreams.  They settle and try to bring the mind to rest, whether or not it is successful in doing so.

But chatter, it must be admitted, is much more complex than that.  Apart from the purely computational functions of the mind and sheer free association, there are all sorts of random thoughts and images thrown into our consciousness, for which there may be deeper physiological explanations we are not readily aware of it and we have no access to.  Also, the ‘firing’ mechanism of the neurons may go awry and create all sorts of mental disturbances.  All such abnormalities and things that happen physiologically automatically are beyond the scope of this book.

Agency: The self is nothing if it is not an agent.  The ‘I’ is not just remembering things but also acting upon them.  It is identified with things.  But this brings with it a sense of wanting to be in charge or control of what it experiences.  This phenomenon is achieved by means of 1) the speech mechanism that is involved in verbally identifying what the self experiences, 2) in the very identification being identified with the experience (or in some sense becoming it), and 3) responding to the world through it.  Not all that the self experiences is translated into action.  It all depends on the relevancy of the current experience to one’s past experience and future projects, because there is no action outside of time.  The past, present and future must indeed be involved in any action, unless the action is one of a pure emergency situation, a mechanical or instinctive action.  Even those might implicitly involve the past and future, for otherwise the action would remain a meaningless jerky reaction.

The self ‘I’ at any moment is some thought or something we are identified with. When we act, i.e. when the self is an agent, it is as if the thought comes alive and takes charge of whatever it is trying to deal with at the time, and initiate actions and emotional or other responses, plan to change things, and so on.  Each thought by itself may seem to be an inert entity in reflection, but when it is assumed, i.e. when the self is identified with it, it becomes an active agent, giving rise to our notion we each of us are a self. 

Emotions and feelings are one side of the response of the self to the environment. Wanting to modify the self as it experiences itself or change the world around are two sides of the same coin.  Will or volition is the way the strength of the response manifests itself.

Generally speaking, most of what is claimed as passive awareness of thoughts, experience or feelings is itself in the form of a response, which is often another thought, and which also involves a positive or negative feeling attached to it, e.g. approval, disapproval, being pleased or displeased or hurt, and so on, which is also how the self perpetuates itself.

How does this jibe with the so-called ‘modular theory’ of the self touted by Robert Wright[7] or other psychologists?  The modular theory tries to split up the self into several modules, each of them organized in its own fashion, but each having a sense of self, and of course, interacting with each other.  The question always is whether there would not be another module which can look at all these modules and say they are all ‘me’.  Then we are back to square one, asking ourselves questions such as my destiny, and what happens to me after I die, and so forth.

All the responses of the self are indeed compartmentalized and form various mental tracks which are more or less organized into clusters, like my responses to work and my responses to my wife or friends.  They are of course also interlaced networks.  The self is never fully integrated.  That is, there is no such thing as unitary self, although at any moment I consider myself as one, which includes my current self-image and projects relevant to the given situation, and so on and so forth.

 

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[1] See below, pp.39,83.

[2] I have discussed this issue in more detail in my self-published book Being Yourself, 2014, available on Amazon.com.

[3] See below, p.71, for a discussion of identification .

[4] This discussion about “telling ourselves” is continued below in the next chapter, pp.59-60.

[5] The neuro-scientific picture of this might be entirely different.  Indeed, scientists may indeed be able to read a person’s thoughts or experiences from the fMRI changes, and might even tell what a person is thinking or experiencing at any given moment.  The neuro-scientist might say, (just as Hume or the Buddhists might say) there is no such thing as the ‘I’ doing any of this activity or being a center of the world.  There are only successions of thoughts and impressions, which constantly ‘interact’ with one another, especially the previous ones, and generating further experiences.  What I present here is what seems to be the case from the personal point of view.

[6] See above under the discussion of mental lag or drag. 

[7] In Why Buddhism is True, Simon & Schuster, 2017, Ch. 8