A little bit of navel-gazing about human nature (particularly my own) and the nature of reality. Probably only of interest to those with similar proclivities.
AI tries to make sense of the puzzle of me. Evidently, the pieces don’t fit.
Over the years, and especially recently, I’ve been writing about our essential nature: Who/ what we are, what drives our behaviour, what determines our beliefs and worldview, and what we care about (what brings us joy — our ikigai). Mostly to try to understand why things are the way they are.
Understanding this, and our ‘way of being’ in the world, is an elusive proposition. If time and causality are even real, how do we even begin to assess who we ‘are’? We immediately encounter a host of paradoxes, limitations to possible enquiry, and dubious premises:
- Is there such a thing as a ‘self’, and anything ‘separate’ from ‘everything else’ at all? How can we even speak about who ‘we’ are if we are inseparable, just part of a much greater whole?
- If we stripped away all the accumulated gunk of a lifetime, resulting from being conditioned by ‘our’ bodies and by ‘our’ ‘culture’ (whatever the hell that is), what would we find underneath? The essential ‘us’? Or nothing at all?
- Even radical non-duality speakers who say there is no ‘us’ assert that these bodies we call ours seem to have certain clear preferences, loves and aversions. With no ‘one’ ‘controlling’ them. And no necessary reason for them. Can there be a ‘person-ality’ without a ‘person”, and, if so, what the hell is it?
- What is the essence of the wild animal that remains in each of us, hidden beneath all that accumulated gunk and buried under the weight of what we consider to be ‘our’ thoughts and ‘our’ uniquely-human feelings like shame and hatred, and ‘our’ stories that try to make sense and meaning of everything? What would we be without ‘our’ thoughts, ‘our’ judgemental feelings, and ‘our’ stories?
- Are we nothing more than just ‘our’ bodies, and their staggeringly complex chemical reactions? If Gould and Lewontin are right in saying that any analysis that attempts to study any ‘object’ stripped away from its environment will be inevitably and hopelessly flawed, how can we get a sense of who ‘we’ are, without acquiring, impossibly, an absolute knowledge of everything?
- If we’re not even our bodies, what’s left for us to ‘be’? Is this why the religious and spiritual among us desperately grasp on to the concept of a ‘soul’, or a ‘real’ but non-physical ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’, when even a basic understanding of science reveals such a thing as ridiculous, something they must believe simply because they want to?
I have no answer to these questions. There may be no answer to these questions. But to say that it’s all an unanswerable mystery that cannot be solved seems terribly unsatisfactory to me. I can’t just accept that. I can accept that I don’t know, and will never know, a lot of things. But surely I can at least have a coherent, credible theory of who/what ‘I’ am, and beyond that, what my (or this body’s) essential ‘way of being’ is, underneath all that cultural, conditioned gunk, no?
For the moment, I’m reasonably content to think of ‘me’, my ‘self’, as nothing more than a self-recursive contraction of energy, a convenient but fictitious mental construct, a ‘story’ with no necessary purpose or meaning. And I’ve come to believe, for now, that no other living creature has, or needs, this fictitious tool of ‘self-consciousness’ — they thrive without it, probably better than humans debilitated by the veil of confused ‘meaning’ that this fictitious construct obscures everything with.
Am ‘I’, then, nothing at all, just a hallucination of this body and its brain? I think that’s plausible. But this body I call ‘mine’ — science tells me it isn’t ‘real’ either. If as they (including Einstein) assert, time isn’t real, just a figment of the brain’s imagination, then there can be no continuity, and what we call ‘this body’ in any ‘instant’ is not a substantial thing, because this seemingly ‘same’ body an instant later is something entirely different. Everything that appears is ‘constantly new’. It’s just the brain furiously stitching its perceptions together that produces the appearance of real things, like bodies with brains, moving through time and space.
What I find particularly astonishing, and hard to grasp, is that non-human creatures apparently don’t do this ‘stitching’, again because they don’t need to, in order to apparently function perfectly well. They need not think of ‘themselves’ as real or separate, or of things existing in time and space. Those ‘creatures’, after all, are just inseparable parts of a larger whole. What we humans perceive as separate creatures are just unimaginably vast and complex cooperatively ‘self’-organized collections (scientists call them ‘complicities’) of what we call organs, environments, cells, atoms, and other labels we use to try to describe ‘everything happening’. Our patterning brains ‘make sense’ of these apparent happenings (eg the theory of evolution, apparent structure of matter), but, in the immortal words of Grace Slick, that “doesn’t mean shit to a tree”. There is no need for anything to make sense for everything to function perfectly well just as it appears to do.
So, then, maybe there’s no ‘self’, nothing ‘separate’, no real ‘time’ or ‘space’, no distinct ‘bodies’ or ‘creatures’. Does that mean ‘we’ are essentially nothing, or inseparable parts of everything seemingly happening? Is there nothing under the gunk?
I come back to the term ‘way of being’, as kind of an existential fleshing out of this apparent creature’s ikigai — what brings it joy. My ikigai has changed and evolved a lot over the (apparent) years. And so has my ‘way of being’.
What do I mean by ‘way of being’? I’ve canvassed several others (yes, including AI) for a synonym to make it clearer, but can’t seem to find anything in any language that really conveys what I mean better than those three words given equal weight. The original meaning of the word bearing was much broader than its current sense of ‘posture’, and connoted ‘how one carries oneself’, not just physically but in the larger sense. Demeanour, how one ‘conducts oneself’ is likewise close, but has also come to mean more our style than our substance. Similarly, the term disposition, originally describing the ‘mixture’ of qualities that make us ‘us’, has taken on a much narrower meaning.
So I asked myself, if I want this term ‘way of being’ to be meaningful, maybe I could start by asking what I mean when I say that my ‘way of being’ has changed? To a large extent, my ‘way of being’ is influenced by my conditioning and the circumstances of my (apparent) life. I always used to be anxious, for example, and ‘now’ I seem to be more equanimous and emotionally resilient (though there are moments!). But that’s strictly part of the ‘gunk’, the conditioning of me and the changes in my circumstances. Strip away the gunk, and what is left of my ‘way of being’, and has it really changed?
Part of my true animal ‘way of being’, I think, is revealed by my ikigai. I am essentially lazy and hedonistic, the poster child of a person who seems driven to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Is that essential to every animal, including human animals? Maybe. I’m not sure. I’ve known cats and dogs that seem to have very different ‘ways of being’ — temperaments, as we sometimes call them, and ‘energies’ that don’t seem to be entirely determined by their life circumstances and the way they have been conditioned by humans.
My ikigai is full of three types of pleasures — sensory, aesthetic, and intellectual. I am insatiably curious and love my creature comforts, and I love learning new things. Those traits have been encouraged by my cultural conditioning but they seem intrinsic to my ‘way of being’. And I’ve never been a thrill-seeker — even back before I was conditioned to be anxious in middle childhood, I could not understand the appeal of roller coasters, for example.
What else? What is my ‘way of being’ beside what brings me (and doesn’t bring me) joy? If I hadn’t been brought up civilized and domesticated, but had instead been raised in a pre-linguistic human culture, what might I (or this apparent body) be like, that I can still recognize in ‘myself’, under all the gunk?
I think a sense of wonder is part of it. Although that sense has often been suppressed and occluded by the fears and anxieties that bedevilled me much of my life, it is seemingly always there, another part of the intrinsic me. It doesn’t take much to evoke it, and when it takes me over, it positively shines. And when I don’t feel it, I feel bereft, as if a part of ‘me’ is missing.
Related to that, perhaps, is a playfulness that has gotten a bit rusty over the years, from lack of practice I suppose. To most of the people I know, play is about rules and about winning. I’m impatient with the former and disinterested in the latter. For me, play is about laughter, about fun, about collaboration, and about making things up, improvising. I find competition stressful and unnecessary, no fun at all.
I’ve often been told that I’m unusually generous, but that doesn’t seem to be anything that’s been consciously cultivated in me or by me. Maybe deep inside me there’s an ancient sense that I actually am just a part of an inseparable larger whole, so giving and sharing doesn’t cost ‘me’ anything. Though I admit I am stingy with my time, and remain a poor listener, so perhaps I’m giving myself too much credit here.
And for all my deep distrust of stories, due to the enormous damage and destruction they often seem to lead to, I am also seemingly an inveterate imaginer. I love to make things up, to imagine possibilities, and to tell stories about how things might be different. I do this not out of the desire to be of use to my fellow humans (though occasionally that has happened) but because I find it endlessly interesting. Would I, or could I, imagine such things without the conditioning of language and abstraction and conceptualization? Maybe not. Did pre-linguistic humans ‘see’ animals and faces in the clouds? Maybe.
I have no idea why it seems important to me to paint this portrait of ‘who’ I ‘am’ — what this animal’s ‘way of being’ is, and what brings it joy. One of my ikigai joys is solving puzzles, so maybe that’s a part of it. Or maybe it’s just an expression of that whole ‘wonder’ thing.
This portrait is far from complete, and seems to be constantly changing. Especially with the realization, which I can’t quite internalize and grasp, that there is no ‘one’ to portray! But I can’t seem to help myself. Like writing, this ‘self’-exploration just seems to be part of who I am, my ‘way of being’ in the world.
Even if there’s no me, no being, and no way.
