Another internal conversation with my self, spinning around in the infinite loop of ‘me’.
I’m sitting in the corner of the café, looking at the wan reflection of this body in the window. I think I know what’s going on, inside this body and outside it. But it’s pretty obvious that I don’t. This brain — part of this permeable, complicit collection of cells and tissues and organs and the environments they pass through, in what we label a “body”, as if it were some concrete, separate, independent thing — has invented a model, and it seems most of us have come to mistake this model for reality.
This staggeringly complex and uniquely-human model — the ‘reality’ of the brain’s conceived universe — has seemingly evolved to suit the requirements of the rest of the collective we call ‘body’, to seek information that might inform the collective’s entirely autonomous ‘decisions’ on what it/they will do.
Yes, it’s only a model, an evolved wild guess about what the universe is really about, but this model has seemingly enabled what we call our ‘selves’ to successfully navigate their way through this universe without becoming shredded and destroyed — so far at least. So, absent a better way of ‘making sense’ of the world, we have come to accept this model as not just a model, an approximation or representation of reality, but as reality itself, as the ‘truth’ of what actually is, and what actually happens. How could we have come to make such a colossal error?
One explanation: As an essential orientation device, the brain has placed something it labels a ‘self’ in the centre of its invented model. It doesn’t matter that it’s only an illusion. The brain is unable, and will never be able, to conceive of an accurate representation of the universe. It can only ‘know’ what the body’s senses’ signals seem to be suggesting, and try to ‘make sense’ of it. And therefore, this apparently useful model of everything ‘separate’ from everything else, infinitely divisible, moving through something it labels as ‘time’ and ‘space’, with the ’self’ at its centre, is all it has to go on. It’s the only way it can make sense of anything.
No other living creature, it seems, has fallen into this trap of mistaking its imagined model of reality for ‘the real thing’. It takes a large, complex, conditioned brain to be able to even construct such a model, before one can make the mistake of confusing it with reality.
This brain is increasingly disturbed by the seemingly growing evidence that its model of the universe, and indeed of all the model’s apparent ‘components’, is a total fiction, completely unrepresentative of the real universe. This brain now hypothesizes that the ‘real’ universe is actually just ‘this’, ‘everything’, indivisible, with no need for space or time to explain its seeming presence and continuity.
Whatever the hell that means.
Why has this brain come to be disturbed by this unprovable and impotent hypothesis? In part, it’s because ‘I’ have come to know and trust several people who seemingly have, for whatever ‘reason’, completely and unintentionally lost this illusion of self and separation. And they function perfectly well without it. They seem to be telling me that this complicated model, the source of so much of our fear and anxiety and anger about what is happening (or might be, or might have, or might in the future), is completely unnecessary to our capacity to thrive, even in this complex, prosthetic human-constructed world. And they don’t posit any other model of reality. Everything just is as it ‘obviously’ is, they tell me. There is no reason for it to be so, and we cannot possibly understand how or why it actually is as it is. And we don’t need to.
This brain is disturbed by this, but this model is the best it can do at making sense, so it shrugs and continues to use it. It has no alternative. The sense that it’s living a complete lie is compartmentalized, set aside for future consideration.
Here in the café, all of these things that ‘I’ think of and see as ‘real’ — bodies, each equipped with a ‘self’, and windows and lattes and tables and things ‘happening’ involving all these seemingly separate things — all of these things are just part of the model and the story it tells to inform the collective we call ‘body’ what to do. The only thing, therefore, it can possibly do.
It’s kinda like I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of a huge windowless, dashboard-less vehicle moving at what feels like a very high speed, when all I have to navigate by is a tiny screen depicting a toy car driving through a cartoon-character city, with a joystick being the only means of controlling the toy car on the screen, and hence, at least according to what I’ve been told all my life, also controlling the giant car that I’m in.
I am of course both terrified and bewildered at finding myself in this seemingly insane, dangerous and stressful situation, responsible for my life and welfare, and others’ as well. The passengers in the back seat are hysterically imploring me to keep the toy car on the screen from crashing, which is not reassuring.
Except it’s actually even worse than that. I’ve been trying to steer the little toy car with this joystick for a long time, and I’m sure I’ve made what I would think would be fatal mistakes as I did so, and now I’m beginning to wonder whether my actions with the joystick on the car on the screen are in any way connected to what is going on in the ‘real’ world outside this hermetically-sealed and otherwise seemingly uncontrollable giant ‘real’ car we’re tearing along in.
What if I’m right in this even more terrifying belief? What if I have absolutely no say whatsoever about what is happening with, and outside, this huge, speeding vehicle?
I certainly don’t dare share this newest fear with my passengers, or take my hand off the joystick for even a second, in case, as I’m sure my passengers believe, I really am in control of the vehicle we’re trapped inside, dependent on my skilful navigation with the pathetic joystick.
You get the idea. No metaphor is perfect, but it’s the best this brain can come up with.
That’s where I seem to be now, as I gaze at the evening streets outside, with pedestrians scurrying for cover from the rain, and this strange thing I call a body — ‘my’ body even — reflected back at me in the window. This reflection of a body seems to lift the mug of tea in its hand to its lips and drink. Who or what is doing that? If, as I’m starting to sense (although my ‘self’ seems unable to fathom it), there is no me, nothing separate, no space or time, what am I to make of the seeming existence of all of these things and all of these happenings?
The obvious and completely unacceptable explanation for this seeming delusion is that ‘I’ am just the model, or at least the brain’s invention at its centre. Without this constructed model, this concocted toy representation of reality, there could be (and most likely is) no ‘me’. And there’s the paradox. ‘I’ cannot possibly understand what really is, because ‘I’ am not; ‘I’ have no place in what really is. ‘I’ cannot imagine my own absence.
‘I’ am merely an ephemera, an evanescence, the collected residue of my brain’s relentless and futile sense-making.
I watch the cars driving by, windshield washers flapping, their drivers carefully controlling their vehicles. At least so it appears. I look again, and now I see just collections of atoms and molecules seemingly aligned into patterns, conditioned by chemicals within them to move in certain ways, for no ‘reason’. Even the explanation of ‘evolution’ that has led to a wildly improbable number of what we label as human bodies, is just another story. It’s just another attempt to make sense of everything from within the sealed confines that the atoms and molecules that seem to have aligned into what these strange human brains have conjured ‘us’ up within, and conjured up within ‘us’.
An impossible, preposterous attempt to ‘make sense’ of what might be happening outside the model, and the story of ‘me’.
