One of
my perennial themes is the elusiveness of the self, and the notion that self
cannot change self.
Now, we
use the word ‘self’ in two different senses. First, we use the word to describe
the ‘person’ each one of us is---the ‘real you,’ so to speak---and that is a
most legitimate use of the word. However, we also use the word to refer to what
we mistakenly perceive to be our real identity. Let me
explain.
We perceive life through our senses and by means of
our conscious mind. Over time, beginning from the very moment of our birth,
sensory perceptions harden into images of various kinds formed out of
aggregates of thought and feeling. In time, the illusion of a separate
'observing self' emerges, but the truth is that our sense of mental continuity
and identity are simply the result of habit, memory and conditioning.
Hundreds of thousands of separate, ever-changing and ever-so-transient mental
occurrences—in the form of our various likes, dislikes, views, opinions,
prejudices, biases, attachments and aversions, all of them mental images—harden
into a fairly persistent mental construct of sorts.
This mental construct is, however, nothing more
than a confluence of impermanent components (‘I-moments’ or ‘selves’)
which are cleverly synthesized by the mind in a way that appears to
give them a singularity and a separate and independent existence and life of
their own. The result is the ‘observing self', but it is little more than a
bundle of remembered images from and out of which further thought and new
images—yes, more of them—arise.
In an
earlier post I wrote about one of my favourite authors and
philosophers Albert
Camus, pictured. On a recent trip to France – well, on the long plane
flight from Australia to France and, two or three weeks later, back again – I
re-read two books of Camus, namely, La Peste (English: The
Plague) and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (English: The Myth of Sisyphus). Now, there
were a
couple of passages in Le
Mythe de Sisyphe on the elusiveness of the self that I must have
overlooked when I last read the book. I will quote from the English translation
by Justin O’Brien:
Of whom and of what indeed can I say: ‘I
know that!’ This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This
world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my
knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of
which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but
water slipping through my fingers. …
Camus makes the point that we can only perceive life through our senses and by
means of our conscious mind. We are in direct and immediate contact with both external
reality and internal reality, but what about the so-called ‘self’? As Camus
says, the moment we try to ‘seize’ this self, or ‘define’ or ‘summarize’ it, it
evaporates. Who is the self that is to seize, define or summarize the other
self? Are they not one and the same? They are indeed. The Indian spiritual philosopher J. Krishnamurti
often made that point. What's more, the idea in our mind that there is
some ‘thinker’ or ‘thinking self’ within the mind is fallacious. There is no thinker apart from the
thoughts. There is only a person in whom thinking is taking place.
Yes, there is only thinking, and it is the thinking that
creates the mental construct of a self and of a notional, but not actual, thinker. The latter is, well, illusory in the sense that it
has no separate, independent, and permanent existence apart from our thoughts
or the person each one of us is. Yes, the thoughts, or rather the thinking, come first, not the so-called thinker.
It is the process of thinking that creates the idea of there being a thinker. Actually, the
thinker (that is, the ‘thinking self’ in our mind) and the thinking are a
‘joint phenomenon,’ as Krishnamurti used to say. They are one and the same. Krishnamurti
wrote, 'When you look at a flower, when you just see it, at that moment is
there an entity who sees? Or is there only seeing?' Camus understood this. In
his Carnets,
1942-1951 (Notebooks, 1942-1951), Camus wrote that he was ‘happy to be both halves, the
watcher and the watched’. Well, why resist it? We are indeed both halves of
this joint phenomenon.
Now, back to Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Camus writes:
… I can sketch one by one all the aspects
[the self] is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to
it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility
or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine
will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my
existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never
be filled. …
I
agree with There is the self that knows, the self that judges, the self that
gets angry easily, the self that takes offence, the self that cares, and so on.
These are, as Camus points out, all ‘aspects’ the self is able to assume. But
what do all these selves add up to? The answer—nothing. We cling to the self as self. We even
manage to convince ourselves that we ‘belong’ to that self, that we really are
those myriads of I’s and me’s that make up our
waxing and waning consciousness. However, when we get right down to it, these selves are simply a
manifestation of cognition by which, in conjunction with the senses, we apprehend
the phenomenal world.
Camus
then goes on to say:
… Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In
psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates’ ‘Know thyself’
has as much value as the ‘Be virtuous’ of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia
at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects.
They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate.
Camus
says that we will forever be a stranger to ourself. I beg to differ. Each one
of us is a person—a person among persons. In that regard,
I am greatly indebted to the writings and ideas of the British
philosopher P F Strawson who, in his famous 1958
article ‘Persons,’ articulated a concept of ‘person’
in respect of which both physical characteristics and states of consciousness
can be ascribed to it.
Yes, each one of
us is a person among persons. We are much more than those little, false
selves---all those waxing and waning ‘I’s’ and ‘me’s’---with which we tend to
identify, in the mistaken belief that they constitute the ‘real me.’ Nothing
could be further from the truth. Freedom comes when we get real, that is, when
we start to live as---a person among persons.
You need not be
a stranger to yourself. You can get to know the person that you are. It isn’t
easy. It takes time. A lot of time—a whole lifetime, in fact. So, how can we get
to know ourselves, that is, the person
that each one of us is? By self-observation—that is, observation without the
observer. You see, there is an 'observer' when we operate from our conditioned
mind, that is, from the self that judges, the self that likes this, the self
that dislikes that. Where there is an observer, there is a distorting lens
which experiences, processes and interprets---and distorts---all that happens
in our lives through an amalgam of thoughts, feelings, images, memories,
beliefs, opinions, prejudices and biases---all of which is the past and
for the most part conditioning. I love these words from P
D Ouspensky (In Search of the Miraculous), who is
quoting his teacher George Gurdjieff:
Self-observation
brings man to the realization of the necessity for self-change. And in
observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about
certain changes in his inner processes, He begins to understand that
self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening. By
observing himself he throws, as it were, a ray of light onto his inner
processes which have hitherto worked in complete darkness. And under the
influence of this light the processes themselves begin to change.
By all means, observe your anger. Observe what you instinctively
like or dislike, or judge or condemn. Watch your various selves in action.
Learn from them. But never identify with them. They are NOT the person that, in
truth, you are.
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