The Destiny of the Self

“Man is Memory” – UG:

 

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eaning: The concept of self is also connected to the idea of meaning.  Things would not have meaning for us except in relation to (the idea of) ourselves.  If we didn’t believe in our indefinite existence, then we would only have tentative meaning to things.  As a corollary, we would only assign limited meaning to time.  As UG would say, we would be limited to questions like the immediate needs, necessities, projects, such as, “When is my train arriving?” “What time is my next meal?” or “What can I do to take care of things after this flat tire in my car?”  And so on.

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Defense and offence and all the ego-centered activities arise from this life.  All this exists and seems rather inevitable, even if we sever this life from the idea of any after life that I might have.  As long as I envision an indefinitely prolonged life (whether or not there is in fact another life), it doesn’t seem to matter whether I believe in another life or not.  My acquisitiveness and self-centeredness are an inevitable result of this.

And of course, man’s sorrow, as long as it is based on the desire structure and a life of striving for pleasure and avoiding pain, has to follow necessarily.

Most important of all is the role of memory without which there is no ‘I’ or ‘Mine’, no defenses or offenses, no striving for pleasure or avoidance of pain, except bare minimal animal responses. Of course, there can be varying degrees of attachment, identification, and so on, and therefore varying degrees of the self or the ego, depending on the associative structure in a person.   Total loss of memory, like in Alzheimer’s cases, is the upper (or lower) limit.

It’s pretty obvious that there is nothing that could be done by thinking or willing in order to be free from the ego, because that activity is undertaken by the ego.

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The Story Line:  Whatever we experience, it almost never the case that we move on to something else.  The way we derive meaning from the experience is generally by weaving a story around it.  What someone said or did gains more significance in our lives because we connect it with what the person said or did in the past, or what he might do in the future, given his motivations, intensions or purposes.  In respect of ourselves too, we weave similar stories: if we have accomplished something, then we always project it into future accomplishments, overcoming past failures, and so on.  The stretching of the present moment into the past and the future is how the story is created.

Once we create such a story, then we not only identify ourselves with it, but define ourselves or other people through those stories.  Indeed that is how our self image or impressions of other people are formed.  An experience or an act, whether it is mine or someone else’s, is turned into a time line and in my own case it becomes a state.  I am that state for the moment.  What is only momentary is turned into a time line, a state, a character or personality trait and a basis for a judgment either about myself or someone else.  (See also ‘Build-up of Thought’, p 24.) 

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We have all those memories (wanted and unwanted), fears and fantasies, worries and guilt feelings, everything, thoughts and memories seeming to pour into our minds willy-nilly, including the fear of death, have all one thing in common – myself.  I remember all that stuff because that’s the way I continue, I feel I am still there, I am alive, and I will continue.  But for that, thoughts won’t just come by themselves.  Attempting to not to seek the self-continuity is itself born out of the self wanting to have continuity.  So, there is no such possibility.  We may be stuck somewhere there, stultifying ourselves, but there is no escape.

Also, thoughts, memories and emotions occur in our minds from time to time either because of the situation that provokes, or because there is a prior set of mind or background which reacts to these situations.

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All the thoughts I think have the ‘I’ at the center.  I always take my point of view and loathe considering, except for the sake of argument, other points of view.  There is always a partiality built in my dealings.  It’s practically impossible to remove myself completely out of a picture.  It’s just as impossible as getting out of my skin.

The pleasurable or painful sensations I was talking about earlier could also explain why it is difficult for me to take an impartial or objective view of things as these sensations prompt me to be biased either positively or negatively. And the sensations also have a way of reinforcing themselves, burying us deeper and deeper in a given track.

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Self-Investigation and Self-Understanding: Anyway, to revert to the idea of meaning, the problem with the self is this: it’s tied up with the idea of meaning, of the intentionality of images. Thought doesn’t amount to much unless it is infused with meaning.  An experience I remember is not just an experience, but something that I remember (or a thought that I thought).  That means I have to relate to it with some meaning.  And I am now looking for that which says that it is ‘I’ who remembers it.  This is where the utter frustration emerges.  Whatever is the answer that I supply to this question has to be in the ‘objective’ world:  whether it is some unknown subject (what subject?), or some assembly of neurons all of which together or some aspect of Brahman or what not.  None of these deliver the actual ‘I’.  This is the paradox of self-exploration and trying to understand.  Any attempt to understand is, as UG says, is bound to create duality.  That has to leave the ‘I’ out of the picture.  ‘’I’ am trying to understand this.’  You will never catch yourself.  That’s the most absurd thing in the world.

On the other hand, if you really put aside all the objectivity, and remain, pure and simple, as subject, then the world of thought has to disappear.  And that would put an end to the ‘I’, because the ‘I’ exists only in this relationship.  That’s why I keep searching and try to find out, understand and know myself; that’s just a way to perpetuate myself.

But what do I hope to gain by annihilating myself?  In the very asking of the question there is the attempt to watch over my own funeral.  I have to be there!  When you don’t know, there is no point in asking.

All this investigation has shown is the absurdity of inquiry in the self; the inquiry presupposes that somehow one can bridge the subjective and the objective.

They tried to do that in the Upanishads and other places. All that investigation ends up in meditation, which ultimately is meant to stultify thought and put an end to the inquiry.  The result is anyone’s guess.

This is also the trouble with meditations like Vipassana:  The passive observing (which J. Krishnamurti always advocated) is really nothing so passive.  Look at all the analytical observation in vipassana.  You are talking to yourself all the time.  You are very much there.  How do you plan to disappear with all that mental activity? Even those who supposedly succeeded in calming their mind (DMN or whatever being inactive for a length of time), aren’t they doing all the mischief which anyone does normally? Maybe they may call themselves altruistic, working for the liberation of mankind.  When they are not themselves liberated, how could they hope to liberate the world?

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Intentionality (2):  Assume that you are nothing but this brain stem (speaking physiologically), and you are using your inner speech which is essential for thoughts (at least it seems to be central to most of them) to label memories and experiences and spell them out.  While recalling or thinking, thanks to the mirroring of the world, you actually see them as real and imagine yourself to be their center, or, at any rate, attribute them to yourself.  I think the reality of the experience is generated in this thinking of being in the experience; in other words, being identified with the elements of the experience.  I am recalling saying something about me.  There is my image and my speech mechanism repeating those words to myself and in the very process I begin to feel that the words were addressed to me.  Of course, it’s possible to hear those words as just words or sounds which don’t involve you in any fashion.  That is to say, it’s possible to disengage yourself from them, to be ‘declutched’, to use UG’s term.

This indicates that meaning attribution is a multi-layered process:  First there is just some disturbance; or it could be sounds; then words; and words with some meaning; and further the words are being addressed to me; and finally, I feel the import of the words as being an insult and I start feeling upset about them. This process could perhaps be represented either objectively or subjectively.

Then the question arises, which is the most important one, as to who or what it is that identifies itself with what is said?  We can call this objectively a bunch of brain stem cells or an assembly of neurons, which have an integrity or cohesiveness of their own.  Or we could say, it is I with my background and knowledge which is identifying itself with them.  The question of ‘who am I?’ really boils down to this:  instead of the brain stem cells or assembly of neurons, you are looking for their subjective counterpart (or the psychological component) and getting frustrated in the process say that you can’t find any.  Because you are the one who is looking at this process and asking yourself.  Of course, you will never ‘find’ yourself!

To say, there no one who is identifying oneself, there is only identification, is only an admission to this fact.

Intentionality (3):  Although one might argue that the intentional world is one in which the past is looking at the present or a modified past.  But what this misses is how any content of the mind is looked at as an entity, not just as an impression or sensation.  How does intentionality make us feel, for instance, we are actually within situations, past or present or imagined future, and feel as if we are actually dealing with people, not just memories?  Verbalization may have a part to play in it, but the picture is far from clear.

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Evidence: Thus there are some serious questions/doubts about the whole methodology of inquiring into the self:

So, what is the evidence I have to say that I am a ‘self’?  What I can see is that the self seems to be present in its various manifestations (although I can never say, except through my memory, that they all belong to the same myself).  Examples abound:  When you insult me, ’I’ feel insulted.  I see myself in my attachments, my pride, my hurts, my desires, ambitions, hopes, and what not.  I can see myself manifested in acts of aggression, self-centeredness, selfish acts, and so forth.  I see that they all belong to the same myself (that’s the crux of the problem) because each time I see one of these manifestations, I feel them as somehow belonging to ‘me’.  Several memories of this sort are recalled with the assumption that since I am recalling them, it is the same ‘I’ which has all these thoughts and memories, although I have no further evidence of that underlying ‘I’.  This assumption is assisted by my awareness of speech muscles and so forth, as well as the pleasant or painful sensations I experience physiologically in body in various situations, each time reminding me as it is I who experiences them.

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Withdrawal from the Self: Withdrawal from the thinking process is in a sense withdrawal from the self.  When the self is runs into conflicts, or severe frustrations or other problems, sometimes the only way out is to withdraw from the whole process of the thinking about the problem.  Of course, real problems of living, like having to make a livelihood, won’t just go away by doing this.  One still has to eat by finding food.  But when you are muddled with emotional problems, by withdrawing at least for a moment you stop torturing yourself. 

As a simple experiment, quite often when I lay down and try to sleep, I am simply wired and can’t seem to relax enough to fall asleep.  Let’s say the cerebral cortex or DMN or whatever is too active.  The best thing one could do at that moment is to slowly bring the ‘cursor’ down from the area of the cortex down to the lower levels, say of breathing, or throat or whatever and stay there.  It may seem difficult at first, but if you let you attention drop down deeper into the body and you remain passive, you might find that is conducive to falling asleep.

I am aware of how much this sounds like meditation.  But it doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as you don’t take it as sleep pill expecting to always work regardless of the circumstances.  There are several variables in being unable to sleep, including physiological and emotional factors, and this approach or any meditation is no cure all.

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A further note: This can be done in day-to-day living: Let all thinking and thoughts go; and we seem to be left with just awareness of things (including my body), without necessarily differentiating or identifying the objects.  No naming.  Therefore, no objects delineated as such, unless called upon by circumstances.  Then there is no self nor is there any awareness of the self.  That means you can arrive at some state in which there is no self, and also no world.  But the moment thought operates, divisions take place, both the world and the self exist, and the whole process of the self begins. Notice that at this point nothing means anything.  We are, as UG might say, like ‘babes in the wood.’ Life, death, suffering, pain, wars, violence, and famines – nothing means anything, because at that moment we cease to perceive them as such and such, let alone assign any significance to them.  I can’t say this is or is not a sustainable life, but anyone can realize how this is indeed possible.

 

 

The Illusion of the Self 

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he idea that the self is an illusion is age-old.  The Buddha’s Skandha theory is just that.  That there is no permanent self, an agent, someone doing things from behind the scenes, someone enjoying, suffering experiences, someone who has a character and being responsible for his actions, having voluntarily chosen by him, and all that.  It’s interesting to note Nagarjuna’s comments on the self.  The self is not an entity outside of the aggregates, i.e., thoughts, sensations, etc.  It’s nothing without yet.  Yet they themselves have no substance of their own.  It’s just a conventional reality, although it’s not totally unreal.  We, of course, take that to be a permanent entity outside of the aggregates.  That’s where the mistake is.

But here in Nagarjuna there is no explanation (empirically, I mean) as to how the mistake arises.  Can we penetrate that illusion?

The problem with the Skandhas as well as UG’s idea that there is no self, but there are only thoughts, occurring from moment to moment, or Hume’s idea that the self is only a ‘bundle of impressions’, has one big problem.  If the self is some thing that is composed of the skandhas or impressions, then what about the impressions themselves? What are they composed of?  Do they have an independent existence of their own?  Same goes with UG’s thoughts?  If there are only thoughts, what are thoughts made of it?  He says that they are nothing but ‘noise’?  What noise?  Noise as is heard by the mind subjectively?  The problem with any of these explanations is that it only leads to an infinite regress of ‘it’s nothing but…’s. 

Something similar can be said about the self as an agent?  A Buddhist or UG would say that there is no self doing anything, that ‘agency’ is an illusion.  There are only individual thoughts (impressions) succeeding one another.  Actually one could say the same thing about any motion.  There is nothing moving; there are only individual states successively replaced by one another. 

Unfortunately, this is not very helpful either.  You can’t excuse your behavior by saying first I had such and such a desire, and then some action followed.  I don’t exist.  And I didn’t do anything.  This won’t sell in any market place.  Who is it that didn’t do anything?  The problem is objectively speaking everything seems to happen in my consciousness, as if I have no role to play in anything.  But viewed subjectively, the same scenario would better be interpreted or understood as my willing and carrying out my intentions after weighing the alternatives. 

 Yet, it’s for this ‘I’ we desire, we avoid, we are ambitious, accumulate, fear, are aggressive and so on and so forth. And these include the fear of death.  All these result from this belief in the ‘I’, based on our inability to truly view ourselves objectively as we view others, or simply as persons in the world.   No matter how much we objectify our beliefs, and prejudices, we cannot totally objectify ourselves.  For we then do not need to accumulate or fear anything.  It’s useless to call this an illusion, for it seems as if we can never be totally free from this feeling of and belief in the ‘I’ or the identity of the self.[1]

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The reason, I think, behind the illusion of a unitary self is this: although the self is nothing but a set of conditionings or habits, each conditioning operates with a sense of ‘I’, for it is associated with the same sub-vocal movements, body sense and so forth, it feels as if it is the same self which is acting through these conditions.  I think that explains the feeling of a unitary self running through all our reactions and interactions between ourselves and the world.

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First, what does the illusion consist of?  Not just that it is an independent entity apart from our thoughts, feelings, emotions, efforts and the body, but also that is permanent, acting as the center of our world (i.e. the world that we put together).  Permanence and independence means not only that there is someone or something underlying these and possesses them, but also endures them.  This idea lends itself to the belief in some sort of immortality or, at any rate, an existence beyond death. Indeed, we cannot even imagine our self not being there, for in that very imagining, our sense of self is implied (like imagining presiding over our own funeral).  Suppose we didn’t have that belief, and further suppose that we will perish with our body, how does this illusion change?  Or rather, how would our life be different?

We keep accumulating money, property, fame, power and so on, not just that we are afraid of ourselves being without them, or that we are afraid of being nothing, but also that we will be needing them in some indefinite future (which extends without limit to infinity).  We keep accumulating on the basis of some sort of indefinite existence beyond the reasonable present or future.  Suppose we stop believing in our continuing into an indefinite future. Further suppose we set definite limits (5 years, 10 years 30 or 50 years).  Then how would that affect our living?  Unfortunately, that can easily be turned into a con- game we play with ourselves, because we still have a future limit at the end of which we have to conceive ourselves ending.  But we can’t!  The only possible way that could be achieved is through stopping to think about it.  That is easier said than done.

Thus it is not only not possible to think about our own ending, but it’s not possible to break up the illusion of the ego or the self through any means such as thinking.

And the fact, of course, remains that we only exist for a limited time and then we have to go.

What is not clear so far is what would a life without the illusion be like?  Accept the ending and not accumulate?

UG’s answer is that this amounts to clinical death.  We have to go, and what remains we will never know.

But who is saying this to whom?  A teacher to a listener.  Why is he saying this?  To stop the questioning.  He knows that it won’t stop with this conversation.  He would say that he has no illusion that it would.  He would say that he would only ‘sing his song and go.’  And he did.  Nothing ever changes after him.  We are stuck with ourselves.  He, however, remains fool-proof in his death!

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The idea of permanence is a relative notion:  There is the sub-vocal movement in everything we think and consciously do.  Even if there is only a collection of neurons collectively doing this activity, it is something doing this activity.  There is a neuronal movement – i.e. there is at least that kind of thinker for that moment.  In a series of such movements, more or less similar to each other or different, there is also another neuronal activity remembering these acts as one’s own acts, and positing an identity among them.  In other words, in all these thoughts, I am the common denominator.  Now, whether I think I am permanent or not, there is the identity of me, whether or not there is a neural correlate for this ‘I’. 

There is nothing absurd in thinking that the ‘I’ of yesterday is the same ‘I’ as today.  And that I prolong in time, going through changes and so on.  And yet, there is something timeless about this ‘I’.  I think we believe that in some sense or other the ‘I’ remains the same regardless of the changes it goes through.  It is just this belief, not as much that the ‘I’ is something permanent, something that underlies the fear of death and craves for immortality.  I can never believe that there really is a beginning or end to me.  I can’t conceive of it for the reason that I simply believe I am timeless. 

Although, on the one hand, I believe that life won’t last forever, although I don’t quite know when it will end.  Therefore I keep accumulating property, things and so on.  My mind cannot essentially distinguish between permanence and eternity. 

Of course, I can revert to the neurological picture of the ‘me’ and of what goes on in me, and then I might come to realize that I indeed won’t last beyond a finite time, however long that may be.  But that’s just a temporary measure.

So the illusoriness of the self is not only that the ‘I’ is something independent of my thoughts and actions, but also that it is permanent, and perhaps eternal.  This is illusory only because the permanence of the self or its identity is only relative permanence.  But what I demand from my notion of myself is absolute permanence, indeed, eternity.  We never, however, realize that the neurological facts don’t bear this out.  One might want to transfer this argument from neurology to psychology.  The result would not change.  The conditional or relative permanence is all we can have and anything else is pure conjecture and belief.

 

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[1] Indeed, the prospect for human living without the sense of the ‘I’ or the self doesn’t seem very promising.  Can we imagine a life in which we fight for our survival and self-preservation, as well as procreation, and civilization in which there is no such sense of ‘I’? Practically all the things we do and strive for are done for the survival of the psychological (so-called illusory self).  Take money making, acquisitions, building structures, making music, and mathematical or scientific achievements, for instance.  How many of these would remain if the sense of the self is gone?  I just can’t even imagine.

 

The Idea or Image of Myself

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ow do I get the idea or image of myself, given the consciousness I have, and the speech and thought mechanisms that operate in me?  The recognition of any sensation, part of the body, object (or anything else) brings automatically with it the knowledge that it is my body part or my sensation. To accomplish this I tell myself that it is such and such using my speech muscles, while simultaneously I am also aware of the body part or sensation.

I put together the various sensations of the body as a body image.  Perhaps the same can be said about the various mental impressions or feelings put together (or synthesized, to use Kant’s term).  Now, suppose that instead of the Transcendental Ego, we say that just an assemblage of neurons automatically put these different components as the self or the mind or the body, and also somehow generate the notion of the ‘I’ (i.e., the transcendental ego).  I still wouldn’t know, for one thing, how the putting together takes places physiologically, or how the ‘I’, my self is really explained by this process, for another.

If, on the other hand, with UG we want to say that it is thought which puts these together, I make thought an agent, something which does the synthesizing, assuming we know what thought is in the first place, we still don’t know how exactly thought puts them together.  Also, if thought is a passive thing that happens to us, it’s not clear how it can actively put anything together.  The only thing we know here is that the synthesis is accomplished by means of memory and recognition.  (When UG says thought divides itself into two, he probably meant as the subject and the object of thought).  When we recall or remember or recognize a sensation or an experience, there is a concomitant awareness of myself as having these sensations, (especially if we say so to ourselves), but also a feeling that they are my feelings or sensations.  This memory of the sensation or impression has to be accompanied by a body feeling, especially of the speech muscles, of the mouth, the head, and what not.

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Of course, there is a lot more to the ego or self than this mere sense of ‘I’.  Here in this very feeling of ‘I’ is implied the background knowledge that operates in making judgments and drawing conclusions from what the ‘I’ sees.  It is this background knowledge, along with the sense of the ‘I’, that is responsible for the self-protectiveness, self-preservation, aggrandizement, offense and defense, inferiority and superiority, and such.  For, in the thought process that is initiated by the knowledge there is a constant comparison going on as well as a division between the self and the rest of existence, as for instance, when I say to myself, “I see this.”

Sub-vocal movements and verbalization:  The sense of the self, as well as the illusion of the self, are ultimately based on recognition.  And recognition, to repeat, most usually, but not always, takes place through verbalization, but we are aware of it as speech or subvocal movements. Indeed, recognition of an image or an experience or any other memory implies some sort of verbalization, even when we are not explicitly aware of the verbalization as such.  And this is also the basis of the inner dialogue we carry on with ourselves. One aspect of this verbalization is what we call “telling ourselves”.  We say things to ourselves and we also resolve in our minds to do various things, as if this is a preamble to our subsequent actions.  To be sure, there can be action without any explicit self-command one issues to oneself.  This verbalization (sub-vocally) is necessary for us to feel things as real, as also to assess any given person, situation or experience.

Self-image, Self-worth, Self-esteem, Pride and Superiority:  Basically we form our self-image on the basis of what we think or imagine others think about us.  Also, in our day-to-day dealings with ourselves and the world, there is a constant self-evaluation taking place.  We compare ourselves, what we say and do, and our performance with those of others, and feel good or not so good, depending on where we find ourselves on a scale of worthiness.  Feelings of elation, frustration, disappointment or depression necessarily follow these evaluations.  In the very comparative process, there is an inherent compensatory mechanism of trying to make up for feelings of lack and inadequacy or insufficiency or inferiority; hence the constant striving for self-fulfillment.  And it’s never enough to attain a certain level of performance.  There is always someone else to beat, whose performance level we must surpass.  In fact, feeling superior to others is one way we make up for our feelings of inferiority. We gain a sense of power in seeing ourselves outdoing or performing better than other.  If we don’t do as well, we could feel inferior, deprecate ourselves or feel useless.

How Do I Appear to Myself? In general, my self-image is formed by how I envision others view me, my appearance, performance, behavior, my treatment of them, my relationship to them, and so on.  This is subject constant revision, based on the ever-changing information I gather from around me, from what other people say or do, the way they look at me, and the way they react to me.  This revision can easily be noticed when we look at ourselves in the mirror, how we adjust, change and correct our appearance and looks, and so forth.  Only rarely do we arrive at a place where we say or act just as we wish we ought, without regard to others’ opinion. 

Shame, Self-loathing, guilt, remorse, suicide, inferiority and compensation: These are all related.  In each of them there is an awareness of the self as an object, either to be proud of, or to be ashamed of, to build up on, on to harm oneself, or even to try to eliminate oneself through the process of suicide.  What we normally do not realize is that what the self is trying to get rid of is no other than oneself, and thus one is caught various conflicts, dilemmas, shame, suicide, compensation and such other dramas. (As we generally are aware of such strategies of the self, I don’t need to go into their details.)

Morality:  Our sense of right and wrong is based on not only what we feel when others hurt us, but also when we judge others as right or wrong or guilty by switching positions and roles.  We place ourselves in the position of someone who is hurt or wronged and through that feeling judge someone else who did that to the person as wrong.  However, the switching of the roles, which is the basis of moral or legal contracts, is all polluted when our personal interests vitiate the picture.  More often than not, we don’t see ourselves (and can’t) as someone who hurt another person, especially in moments we are driven by our desires and act through them, for there is no awareness of ourselves or what I am doing, but only the other person and what he or she has done to me. However, on after some thought or reflection, we look at what we have done rather in an objective fashion, at least sometimes, and tend to not only admit it to ourselves, but to feel guilty. We now have a different picture of ourselves.  At other moments, our dealings which start with mutual exchange of favors or goods on equal or fair terms soon become corrupt when we start digging the ground under each other.  Indeed, much of human generated evil and mutually caused suffering stem from our inability to put ourselves in each other’s shoes.

Summary: Here is where the interplay between the subjective and objective approaches to the self occurs:  On the one hand, I am talking about the neuroscience aspect of the self, the Default Mode Network (DMN) and such, and at the same time I am also talking about from my own introspection how the self is formed and how it functions.  But what’s interesting is that both these approaches are ultimately from my point of view, and are, in that sense, subjective. Instead of saying subjective, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that they both represent my thinking process, as they could also be someone else’s. 

 Furthermore, the ‘I’, the real subject is never explained by either of these approaches, because it is not something that can be explained by any method. Thus, there is an ambiguity in the very notion of the self.

 

 

The Person: A Conglomerate of Selves

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 think even the concept of ‘person’ is so vague and ambiguous that it should be left alone, and a fresh start to the whole project is called for, say, starting with myself as including my body.  I see two different angles to approach the body-as-self from: 1) the body as I experience it, i.e., as body.  And when I think or feel anything as ‘I’, it is part of what I am which is thinking and feeling.  In my responses to the world, the sense of self is automatically implied.  We cannot react or respond to anything without the sense of self.  That is why, for instance, when someone passes a judgment at what I have said or done or written, it my self which reacts.  You cannot separate the self from the reaction or what is heard.  In the very hearing there is the self and its reaction as well projecting into future possibilities.  And 2), there is the body as a living thing, to be observed, dissected and so on.  The first of these can be termed subjective and the second, objective.

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Many Selves: It is, of course, tempting to think there is one unitary self around which all the contents of consciousness are more or less loosely organized.  But that doesn’t quite explain our behavior on different occasions.  Although the feeling of ‘I’ or myself seems to be present ubiquitously in all our conscious mental life, we not only shift from one point of view to another, depending on our current desire or fear or identification, but we are also detached from our past selves from time to time, not always consciously connecting one item or experience of consciousness with another.  To allude to our common divisions like our ‘office self’ from our ‘home self’, we also have loyalties divided between people, depending on to whom we currently feel we owe our allegiance to.  This division in our self-structure also explains how there is a gap between our resolutions and actions, but also the unawareness of some of our actions done quite automatically, without our knowing that we are even doing them or have done them. The only way all this multifarious self-structures can be explained is by assuming there are many selves, each of which is organized around a group of thoughts, experiences, desires, intensions, fears and so on, and connected with each other more or less loosely through our memory.

Roles and Role-Playing:  As civilization becomes more complex, there is a need for specialization.  It’s the specialization that assigns a role for individuals.  A person while at home is a parent, a husband, a son, a wife or a daughter, and while at work, he or she is an office-worker, a business man or woman, a doctor, an engineer, and so forth.  And each of these roles specifies different behaviors appropriate to the role.  Our thinking process is dictated more or less by the role.  And each role we assume is our self for the moment.

When, for some reason or other, I find myself out of one of these roles which I consider as ‘essential’ to myself, say because I have retired from my job, or am divorced or what not, I feel as if I am lost.  Just like when my basic beliefs are questioned by another, I feel a loss of myself, or feel that I am groundless, at least for the moment, and quickly try to fortify my beliefs if possible, or substitute them with others.  The same goes with loss of a role: I find a hobby, volunteer work, another partner, and so forth, and then I am identified with them.

Yet, I feel all these selves are in some sense or other are myself, or part of myself, at any rate.  To be sure, there is a feeling of ‘I’ attached to not only each of these selves, but indeed, to each element of these selves, inasmuch as we are conscious of them.  And each of these selves operates as though they are an independent person

Although these personalities, each having its own traits or character, character being a set of traits, consistent and constant within that self, is more less connected with the other persons in us.  And each can look at the others from its own point of view.  When we look at an issue from the perspective of different selves, as the points of view being different, the responses may conflict.  We may thus have a dilemma to resolve.  In cases of intense dilemmas or conflicts, we may become wavering, ambivalent or totally inconsistent in our responses and behavior.  Then the personalities or selves may eventually end up in being dissociated with each other.  The inconsistencies may indeed be a consequence of the temporary forgetfulness stemming from the temporary dissociation.  When such inconsistencies are point out to us, we tend to brush away those remarks, justify our behavior, feel guilty or respond in others ways.

When the dissociation between the selves is complete, i.e. when there is no linkage between them through memory, we have the abnormal case of dissociated or multiple personality.

*                                  *                                  *

In further and further reflections I find myself as a person with a past, a present and a future.  All my many selves may be more or less organized through my life ambitions, goals or desires; the more capable I am of reflection, the higher the integration.  I now have a destiny to fulfill and I spend my lifetime achieving my goals, overcoming the many obstacles that may present themselves on my way.  This life also implies worrying about my future, my relationships with other people, my likes and dislikes of them, my loves and failures, as well as my fear of death, as the final end of my life. 

*                                  *                                  *

The problem of the illusion of the self is that when I look into myself, I am trying to catch myself as an object, which I can never find.  But that doesn’t gainsay the importance of all the integration that goes on within my psyche which lends itself to the ‘I’ notion, i.e. a notion about myself as a unitary person.

 

The Origins of the Self

 

M

emory: Memory has a vital role to play in the formation of the self.  Memory retains much, if not most, of what has been experienced in the past, and makes it readily available for remembrance, recognition and recall.  Our knowledge is acquired first through our senses and through our memory retained, and then processed through various mental functions to generate further conclusions which also go to form the content of our memory. 

When we initially presented with anything, that is, when we experience anything for the first time, we barely have any notion of it unless and until our past operates on it and generates recognition and then the memory process takes over. 

We are not passive when we experience things or events.  In the process of recognition, there is the awareness of myself as recognizing the object as something, but further, there is also, depending on our background, an attitude taken toward the object, either favorable or unfavorable or indifferent.  This attitude in some sense is built into the process of identification.

The problem of the self hinges more on the feeling of me and the mine.  I see a television set.  I like it.  Then I want to make it mine by buying it.  Same goes with a watching a person who is sexually attractive or what my background considers as beautiful.  A remembrance of this is bound to generate the ‘I’.  And reflection on a series of memories is bound to generate a constant (perhaps underlying) ‘I’; through reflection I unite these memories as my memories. 

Identification:  Identification has everything to do with how the self is formed. Let’s look at this from a neuroscience point of view: Whatever I am presented with, whether it is a verbal command, or a pleasant or painful sight, music, problem or what not, in the initial moment, it is just us.  We don’t differentiate between ourselves and what we experience.  Here is where I think the mirror neurons may be at work. It’s just in that very moment the self is being formed.  But then there is also the awareness of what we have been exposed to a moment ago, and because of the previous identification, we now have a sense of ‘I’ am listening or watching ‘that’.  This in ancient Indian philosophy is described as the object being reflected in the internal sense (or antahkarana).[1]  And that seems to be the source of the ego or the ‘I’.

How does identification, the feelings of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, the I-sense, get created?  It is still a far cry from the self.  I see a nice chair and for the moment I am attracted to it.  ‘I want this chair,’ I tell myself.  In that very moment there is the self operating.  I was identified with the chair a moment ago, and now in a reflected moment, the chair becomes the object of my thought and becomes at the same time the object of my desire.  So here, there is memory operating in the reflection, and that is turned into a thought, which automatically splits itself, to use UG’s phrase, as myself and what I think about or desire.  The attraction or repulsion has already occurred in a previous moment.  Compound this process by a million times, we have our mental life.  The very moment I reflected in the object I was previously identified with, or thought about, is the beginning of the mental life in which mental objects represent objects I was previously exposed to.

*                      *                      *

Identification in some form or other fills our lives and relationships with others as well as with groups.  We can identify ourselves with practically anything, either positively or negatively – with our beliefs, ideas, bodies, sex, race, religion, caste, nationality, with music, art, groups and subgroups of various sorts -- there is literally no end to the list.  In some fashion or other, the world becomes our world, because the world is ‘me’.  I am involved, interested, concerned, attached, repelled, or am in conflict with the various elements of ‘my’ world.  In fact, the conflicts (such as wars, exploitation, oppression, hatred) as well as attachments, loyalties, admiration, submission or domination, name it, they are all based on my being identified with each of the elements of relationship.  I have no separate existence except in relation to the things or people I love or hate or am indifferent to.  The wars of the world are wars within me.  When I accuse the President of this or that, I am the President as well as the accuser.  No wonder most of our psychological problems can only be resolved by looking them in relationships.  If, for instance, when I am depressed, I am only depressed in relation to something concerning which I am frustrated. 

Conditioning: Without conditioning and a series of habits, our living becomes impractical, and indeed, impossible.  We would lose our skills, our abilities, our manners, our styles, and indeed the entire gamut of our relationships with ourselves with others and the world in general, for almost all of these are based on habits.  Most of these are acquired through conditioning.

Traces of the Past:  Before we discuss conditioning, we need to go into the phenomenon of our past influencing our psyche and our behavior.  Everything that happens to us, and every experience we have leaves an trace in our psyche[2].  All the experiences have a drag or pull, as well as a flavor or ‘taste’ to them. They also have a tendency to repeat themselves, primarily because they were felt as pleasant or painful in their first occurrence. As I said above, such a drag keeps us in a ‘track’ of mind until the ‘energies’ are discharged or dissipated.

Furthermore, each time an experience is recalled, it tends to reinforce itself.  Notice how the first time when we are introduced to something, we may be somewhat neutral or indifferent in our attitude to it, such as smoking (or even irritated by it), but on the subsequent occasions we are less and less inclined to treat it with disgust or repulsion, until we get used to it.  By then it has become a habit, which develops a force of its own and makes it harder to quit. Past traces, in my conjecture, are physiological, and by their sheer force and strength have a way of thrusting themselves into consciousness through our thought process, creating duality and the consequent tensions and conflict.

Each time an image (be it visual or auditory), a thought or a previous action relating to habit occurs in our mind it pulls all the relevant knowledge and experiences surrounding it, as well as our previous responses to the habit, which too can have a snowball effect.  As this involves the thought process, coupled with self-talk and body awareness, we have the feeling of the self or the ‘I’ as the subject component of the thoughts and experiences.

Each cluster of habit unified by knowledge and experiences is a unit self.  Since we have many such habits which constitute actions, experiences, thoughts and beliefs, we now have a conglomerate of selves.  However, in reflection and otherwise through memory, we do connect various instances of the habits as well as the habits with other habits and other parts of our mental life.  In that reflection we get the notion of unitary self.[3]  

*                                  *                                  *

What Pavlov and others called conditioning is a subset of habit formation.  Conditioning is habit formation hooked to an artificial stimulus.  Crying when in pain is a natural response.  And if we cry just because someone says you should cry, and that becomesa habit, it’s conditioning, because it’s reinforced positively or negatively with a reward or punishment of some sort.  As I said in one of my articles, the self is nothing but a set of habits, but I could have said it’s a series of conditionings. 

The relationship between habit and conditioning is more subtle than even this. Whether we are induced to do something on a certain occasion, or we just stumble into an action or experience, they all leave an impression on us.  Initially, they leave either a pleasant or unpleasant or neutral sensation or feeling with us.  Then either we tend to do the same thing again, because it has left us with a pleasant impression before, or because we are repeatedly induced by others to do the same thing, each time with some reinforcement; or negatively speaking, we avoid doing the same thing or resist it because of the painful sensation it left with us before or after a negative reinforcement, such as a scolding or physical punishment.    In either case, the result is the formation of a set of habits. Of course, behind all this habit formation and conditioning is the pleasure principle: pursuing what is pleasant, avoiding what is unpleasant or painful and being indifferent to the others.

Take for instance, the idea of saving, whether it is money or food or something else.  Our parents keep telling us we should save the money, of course, giving us each time some rationale for doing so, and the practice seems pleasant, or not painful at any rate.  It is reinforced.  It is not only an instilled habit, but a conditioned habit, because of the positive or negative reinforcements that went with it.  Saving becomes a style of living, which can persist throughout one’s life.

Same with results of comparison of our performances with others (especially other kids when we were young):  we were told repeatedly to work harder, to catch up with other kids, excel in our performances, and so on.  We either start feeling inferior or superior, depending on how we fared in the comparison.  Each time we don’t quite perform according to an accepted norm or as well as someone else, we do not just feel badly for the moment, but that experience leaves us with an indelible mark.  We start to worry constantly about our performance, as there is an underlying feeling that we might not be performing as well as we could.  If the feeling of our inferior performance is registered repeatedly, we start branding ourselves as not just inferior to someone or someone else’s performance, but as an inferior person.  And this, of course, is a conditioned response.  The feeling or attitude toward ourselves lies at the root of our mental life and governs our behavior through compensatory measures.  We are not always aware of this feeling or attitude.  But it determines our relationship to our work, to others, and to life in general.  Thus formed, the feeling becomes a part of the general motivational network. In other words, it becomes what one might call our ‘unconscious’.

Indeed each of these basic conditionings, being a habit or set of habits, constitutes the self and governs our interactions with our world and ourselves.  This, I think, is what’s behind my assertion that the self is nothing but a set of habits.  When I talk about the self here, I really mean the self as a person who has a certain personality, set of propensities, character traits and so forth.

We still don’t quite know how exactly conditioning works:  you can’t quantify it:  an experience even if it is mild can leave a lasting impression and mould your character, such a simple act of kindness or generosity. Take another example:  A single bit of remorse can turn into guilt and become part of your memory that can last for decades, and keep sprouting in your consciousness from time to time, even for no apparent present reason, and prick your conscience.  And the will doesn’t seem to have much control over its arising or bothering.

The feelings of gratitude or guilt, for instance, arise from assessment and judgment of the situation in which they arise.  When I judge something, the whole of me, with my previous knowledge and experience seems to be acting as a unit and assessing the current situation on the basis of the norms it already had acquired in its past.  That explains why different people not only experience the situation differently, but also assess it and judge it differently.  When the will is operating to control these feelings, it is operating according to a different set of standards, and may or may not succeed in controlling the given feeling.  It all depends, of course, on which side is stronger.[4]

Most important to take into consideration here is verbal conditioning.  It has a lot to do with the self since the self and its awareness are mediated through language.  It also plays a significant role in habit formation and perhaps also conditioning and mimicry.[5] There are much subtler forms of conditioning:  A simple frustration, a feeling of hurt, feeing of losing one’s ground, a feeling of infatuation for someone, situations which might generate a momentary feeling of euphoria, and so on, leave such an impression on us that the traces of some of these feelings last the rest of the day, or for prolonged periods of time, and can leave one with long-lasting crippling psychological or emotional problems.  Conditioning also provides us with techniques and modes of managing our time, boredom and our relationships, and even temporary emotional problems such as bereavement, frustration, loneliness and depression.  But when these techniques prove inadequate, especially in dealing with emotional states such as boredom with life, chronic pessimism, and serious mental illness such as chronic depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder or bipolar mood disorders, we seek the help of professionals or other providers of counsel such as spiritual teachers.

 

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[1] Unfortunately this Samkhya notion of antahkarana has three aspects to it, the attending, thinking (the intellectual aspect) and the ‘ego-maker’, which in turn has three aspects: abhimana (attachment), asmita (the ‘I am’-ness: i.e. the I-sense), overrating one’s ego-centric point of view, and atman (the ‘I’ or self).  None of these notions really elucidate how the notion of the ‘I’ itself arises.  My attempt is here to delve into that notion.

[2] In Indian philosophy these are called Samskaras

[3] See next chapter.

[4] Such, indeed, are the sources of our personal morality.

[5] This may also involve mirror neurons.

 

 

Who am I?

I

n all the reflective processes we undertake and undergo, there is a constant nagging thought that someone or something must be doing all this thinking and reflection.  Not only that: Sages like Sri Ramana Maharshi even advocated a meditation method of inquiry into oneself in the form of asking oneself repeatedly the question of “Who am I?”, which is a process of exclusion of all the contents of the mind or consciousness that present themselves as objects of awareness and arriving finally at pure consciousness, the non-dual awareness, which is our true ‘self’.  But, unfortunately, even if we arrive at a stage of meditation, it being a state, none of that lasts forever.  We must descend into our thought processes eventually, and then we are back in the world of duality.  Unless this is a final realization when one transcends totally the world  of duality, one is bound to return to the thinking process and worldly life and start asking the questions of who am I and where do I come from, or what will happen to me when I die, and so forth.

Spiritual teachers, whether it is Ramana Maharshi or UG, may say that this is a state where questions will disappear finally, never to occur again.  But then what is not clear in their teachings is how one operates in day-to-day living still using thinking processes, which seem inevitably to lead us to questions like the above.  One possibly could attain a permanent outlook on life from which one could view oneself and the world around sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), to borrow Spinoza’s phrase, i.e. each as part of one whole being.  At least this is one way one could understand non-duality. But short of such a realization, those of us who still labor under the illusion of duality (if it is indeed an illusion), are bound to keep asking such question. 

Until the doctor arrives: The questions ultimately boil themselves to duality itself:  What exactly does this mean?  There is the opposition or division between me and the rest of the world.  The question of ‘Why is anything there in the first place’ is bound to occur at some stage or other.  Or to put it more concretely, ‘Why is that there?’, as the ‘I’ is the ‘I’ only in relation to or contrast to the ‘that’. But unfortunately, this can only be asked upon the premise of duality.  To pick something as the ‘this’ or ‘that’ is itself separating it from ourselves.

*                      *                      *

As soon as I ask the question:  ‘Who am I or what is the self,’ I seemed to be bogged down by the problem that whatever answer I give, I seem to only hit the ‘objective’ aspect of it.  Looking into myself as to where is my self, or what is the self that is thinking all these thoughts, can never give the right answer.  It only presents, at best, something like consciousness, or an assembly of neurons which have the property of self by virtue of its consciousness and so forth. Or to take Hume or the Buddha, the self seems to be nothing but a bundle of impressions, or an aggregate of Skandhas[1].  Or even the idea of a person, which again is expanded only in terms of something objective, seems to miss the point.

*                      *                      *

Why ask the question of ‘Who am I?’? What exactly is the question or questions that one could ask about the self?  Why am I so concerned about the question of the self, in the first place?  The first answer that comes to mind is the fear of death:  You can treat it as a mere thought (or emotion, if you will), but there is the question of why the thought of death causes so much fear?  That leads to the immediate answer is that it is the loss of self or oneself that one is afraid of – you imagine that there would be no such thing as ‘I’ when you are dead.  There would, of course, be neither the world nor you to look at it; nor would there be an ‘I’ presiding over your death (or funeral).  Also, there is the fear that there will be a permanent loss of consciousness, although we indeed lose our consciousness temporarily, whether in sleep or anesthesia or even simply when you are lost in an emotion or conversation or a task[2]. 

Thus the question arises as to who or what is this ‘I’ or self I am afraid of losing or not being there.  Then we ask the question of who am I in the scheme of things, as if any answer would satisfy me.  But would it?  Such as that God created me, or matter evolved into me, and so on.  Let alone the question of why is there anything instead of nothing, there is this fundamental question of who am I is not satisfied by any answer, because why am I, or why am I here always remains, in the form of ‘Why that?’ to any answer supplied -- the killer ‘whys’!  Simply to say, as UG would, that we will never want the question to go away, will not do, because that would imply the loss of the self which is not wanting itself to go away.  That simply begs the question of who am I, I am afraid.  Only if I know, in the first place, what my self is, can I be worried about whether I am afraid of this ‘I’ getting lost.

The possible answer is that my ‘self’ is all the things I am identified with, perhaps, as UG would say all the experiences I have had.  But unfortunately, that too begs the question: who is the identifying entity?  None of the answers seem to fit the bill.

You can just say simply the question cannot be answered because any answer that is supplied leaves the subject (the ‘I’ side) of the question out of the equation.

*                      *                      *

The Self Comes and Goes: A possible satisfactory answer seems to lie in just simply dying (psychologically or ‘clinically’ as UG would say).  That happens sometimes anyway.  But UG says that the self is always there, even in deep sleep (this was part of a conversation I had with him in front of a camera in Mill Valley a long time ago).  Then how can UG simply be without the ‘I’ or the self?  Or is it that it comes and goes from time to time, as he says happens in his own case.  (As he says, “it’s millions of years old, it won’t die!”).  He says he lives in two frames at the same time: the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’.  How is that condition different in you and me?  If he lives like that, what indeed constitutes the freedom from the stranglehold of thought (which generates the self or the ego)?  Is it just his ability, then, to move from one situation or thought to another without a drag (from the previous situation or thought to the present one)?

So no matter which way I look at it there seems to be no satisfactory answer.  The only possibility seems to lie in being in states of consciousness free of thought at times when it is possible or when one could achieve them.

 

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[1] The five aggregates (heaps) are: form (rupa), sensations (vedana), perceptions (samjna), mental activity or formations (sankhara), and consciousness (vijnana).

 [2] In case of an intense emotion or conversation or task, it is really self-consciousness we lack, not consciousness as such, since without consciousness we wouldn’t be accomplishing any of those tasks.