What is your True Identity? Part 2

A way of thinking

One of the reasons why it is always so difficult to grasp another way of viewing the self, and that our identity may be something different than what we thought is because of the way our minds work, or at least how they have been conditioned to work.

In the next few minutes reading you will witness me dismantle this conditioned functioning of the mind. But do not worry, the aim is not to destroy or undermine. Your much preferred mode of deciphering reality has its pride of place. There is just the matter of reestablishing priorities, by recalling and remembering something like a forgotten, older, wiser family member to oversee an effervescent youngster that has run far and run wild, forgetting its roots. Poetic language aside (much more on this later) there is a more wholesome way of relating to your ‘self’.

At times this may seem like an intellectual exercise but I assure you it isn’t. Underneath all of the bluster and mental gymnastics is something very very simple and easy. It just takes a while to get there, a lot of rubble to clear.

So: humans have the ability to fracture and condense pieces of a seamless reality into neat mental concepts and ideas that are static and have boundaries. They are finite and separate from each other.

The way we think is one that judges, categorises, compartmentalises, puts things in boxes, gives things labels, definitions. Phenomena is almost frozen into clearly defined, unchangeable forms. Giving something a name or label is almost like nailing shut the potential to be something different or more than.

Emptiness is not nothingness

This is what the much misunderstood Buddhist concept of ‘emptiness’ is referring to. They say that everything, including the self, is indeed ‘empty’.

This doesn’t mean that there is nothing, more that the identity of everything is subject to the way we reduce things to static forms we have constructed mentally. We impute meaning, rather than things having actual identity or meaning of itself. If that is difficult to grasp, use the idea of ‘car’ and ask the question ‘is it still a car’ after the removal of each piece of its frame and structure, to the point where it is lying in pieces on the floor. At what point does it cease to be a car, or indeed become a car?

It’s very hard to say at which precise moment it ceases or begins to be one. People differ on what they think, there is no one clear answer. The point is not to prove there is no car, but that there is nothing certain or fixed. It depends on many factors and many contexts, therefore evading the system of thinking which relies on static forms.

Or a tree. Where does the the boundary of the tree stop? At the edge of the leaves? The leaves and their function are in direct relationship to the temperature, the air molecules and the suns rays, the photons that cause photosynthesis, which produces life energy for the tree.
What about the roots? does the boundary of the tree end there? Well, they are in direct communication and relationship with the soil and it’s nutrients. The soil is the earth, so on and so forth…

These examples show how it’s almost impossible to define the edge, the boundary of ‘things’ and that our words and labels do not give justice to reality.

That we can do this at all is very much taken for granted. We live in this mental realm populated by forms without much realising, and there’s an unspoken rule collectively agreed on that this is the true realm of existence. That we live in a world of separate, static objects and ideas.

This is the medium through which we understand our world.
It’s like the old saying that the fish doesn’t know it’s in water until it’s removed from it.

A System of Value

This mental realm is characterised by the system of value we have for everything in our world which is subject to it.

Including our own experience.

What gives things any value at all?

What is it being judged against?

The answer? Its usefulness to us.
Our own quality of experience and our perceived survival depends on it.

Even though this is incredibly fundamental, it remains subjective. True nature is being measured by its usefulness to us as humans.

When we declare we want to ‘save the world’, for instance, on closer inspection what we want to save is our preferential world, the world we live in, the structures we have built in the form of society and culture. I’ve mentioned before that there is a difference between the world and the earth. It’s the collectively agreed on idea of what the world should consist of so that we are able to survive better in it, and live more comfortably.
The earth itself is able to regulate itself, with a rise and fall of temperatures over millennia.

So, everything comes back to our own subjectivity.

We then use this same mechanism to define who and what we are.

Our sense of self is implicit in the value system we use to judge everything by.

‘The language we use is a restriction’

Sorry, the above sub heading was an excuse to use one of my oldest song lyrics from circa 2002. I digress…

What we use in order to do this is language itself.

We use LANGUAGE to uphold this system of mental concepts. language communicates these ideas to one another. Language is what gives the name for everything and allows us to judge. Language binds this whole system together.

So, the illusory self has this alliance with language. When we think or speak about our ‘selves’, without realising, it’s dependent on language and words.
Language joins forces with our ability to form abstractions (mental concepts) of the physical reality we live in.

I’m really sorry to knock good ol’ language, as it is one of the most phenomenal aspects of being a human being. Clearly one of the bedrocks of what sets us apart from other species psychologically and evolutionarily. Language is at the core of what defines us. However it leads us astray. Why?

Language is linear, meaning that all words come one at a time, one after the other, in a sequence. It provokes and supports a reality that is one event after another, one thing causes another thing, another event, in a ‘cause and effect’ way. We know that reality isn’t like this, whether we are speculating or using science. Reality is holistic, with many things interacting, moving backwards and forwards all at once, depending on each other, sustaining one another, in an endless multiplication of interactivity with no start or end point. There are many causes and they all change in various contexts, depending on where you draw your boundary on space and time, and depending on perspective.

Language is part of the system that sees everything as separate, linear and sequential whereas in fact everything is not. Everything is connected in some way. There is not one example anywhere in nature where one thing is without influence from its external factors. Everything is in relationship with everything else. This is known as interdependence, another concept front and centre in the Buddhist and Taoist philosophies.

Why question it all? Aren’t we getting on just fine?

You may ask, why would you question all this? These are the very fundamentals of the human experience and everything is functioning rather well with them in place.

I mean, what would we be, or indeed do, without these things?

Well, you would think that wouldn’t you? (That without this we are nothing) and you would think that there is no other way to be or to live, or to experience or make sense of things.

Not so fast. The foundational qualities of what I have just described are less of a reason to presume their ultimate validity, but more of a reason to see just how much the human experience may be building on the wrong platform, with consequences.

In our defence…

Ok, I’m talking heavy there. For the record I’m not suggesting there is anything wrong with all of the above per se, and that we are doing it wrong (ok we might be a bit doing it wrong), and get rid of the system and of language, and of the need to see ourselves in the way we have and do.

That would be impossible. It’s an inherent part of being human that we do this. It’s part of the evolution of our consciousness that we have developed this way of reducing phenomena into separate things and mental concepts. It serves a purpose. It’s closely intertwined with our survival, the necessity to know the world around us.
The purpose it serves is a supplementary purpose, not THE purpose. This system, this way of seeing things is a helpful addition, not the whole picture. It has value, it is needed, but is one half of the story (maybe even less than half).

Wild Child, Running Wild

As I mentioned at the beginning, the alternative is not difficult to do, to see or to implement. We just have what I would forgivingly envisage as a noisy toddler screaming for our attention. That noisy toddler is this automatic way of seeing the world and ourselves, as a world of separate things, the mental projection of our reality, tied in with fear and survival.

I would couple many modern human problems we face to this system of separating. As well as identity crises, it accounts for the disconnection, the alienation, the depression, the angst and anxiety, the addictions, the destructive competition and much more.

The Yin to the Yang of the mental world is the world of experience, of ‘being’.
When you stop, become still, silent, pay attention, use your senses, become the observer (not the thinker) you have crossed from the realm of the mental to the experiential. You have left the world of abstraction to the world of the actual. It’s that simple.

In this mode, we are available to the fluctuations of the reality we are in and connected to it all. We can listen, understand, yield to, surrender to the infinite forms of information that are throbbing and bustling and changing. This is where we become MORE THAN that self we have been clinging to.

After all I’ve said, why attempt to describe this? To resort to the very thing I maintain is inadequate? To squeeze the truth into yet more mental concepts and ideas?

cont in Part 3