The nature of the “I”

The “I” is easily defined. It is what I mean when I say “I”. There is no confusion about it, no argument as to whether this “I” is real. René Descartes nailed it: cogito, ergo sum. Such simplicity has been wrecked by the introduction of “ego”, a weasel word so tricky as to defy all argument as to whether it points to anything real. Examples:

How can I rid myself of my ego? As hard as I try, it keeps coming back. I have meditated, fasted, taken vows of silence—but after years of work, my ego is still there.

“My ego”? Who is the owner of this ego? How can I prove it is not the ego talking? No wonder I cannot get rid of “it”. We are one. (1)

Or there is the profane use of ego in the sense of egotism, as in:

Thoughts of [Duncan] Bannatyne, full of ego & Viagra, pounding away . . . [part of a tweet from English journalist Katie Hopkins]

To some, egotism itself is the enemy. It must be defeated through cunning, or disguised through treachery, as in this piece of advice to writers:

Don’t begin paragraphs with “I.” For that matter, try not to begin sentences with the personal pronoun. Avoid “me” and “my” when you can. Writing memoir, don’t say, “I remember that in my childhood nothing happened to me.” Say, “In childhood nothing happened.” (2)

I found this peculiar: the author pretending to be a camera, an impersonal object. Why? “I” suits me perfectly. It reminds me that I can only say how something is for me: not how it is for anyone else, or in itself, if that means anything.

I have in fact been thinking of writing a memoir. Something always happened, especially in childhood—a great jumble of things. Some I remember without any effort. Others I can recall if I try, or if something prompts the memory. Am I to decide which details matter more than the others? How can I tell my life-story so that it makes sense to anyone else? I would have to explain why I did things and why things happened to me. And since I don’t really know, I would have to make something up. It would be the rambling narrative of someone without the skill or imagination to write a novel. In any case there’s a frightful glut of memoirs and novels. So I shall sweep away the detail, and see what’s left—not much! “Things happened, I did what I could. I ended up here, which is exactly where I want to be.” I think that’s the truth and nothing but the truth. For my purpose, it’s the whole truth.

It’s clearly not enough for my imagined reader, who wants to know how and why. I could cook up answers, but they would be worthless, at least to me, for I would know they were cooked up. If explanations are required, this one from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” must answer my case:

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

I was that fool; I persisted; now I’m here.

Folly: The quality or state of being foolish or deficient in understanding; want of good sense, weakness or derangement of mind; also, unwise conduct. (3)

That was me. Further details unnecessary.

Wisdom: Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends . . . opp. to folly. (3)

I wouldn’t call my present state wisdom. I would call it gladness. I don’t know if I have the capacity of judging rightly. I follow impulse as I’ve always done. The difference now is to welcome the outcome. It’s as if my life till now has been a training course: one that nobody designed, nobody supervised. If you can’t imagine such a thing, look around, see Nature. It is harder to see nature by looking in a mirror. Nature is the sum total of Evolution’s achievement. There may be extra stuff, that I for one am not immune from wanting to believe.

I was born, grew up and discovered myself to be me. I wasn’t aware of my profound not-knowing, not till much later. And yet, somehow, I chose impulse as my principle guide. I did things, suffered; did nothing, also suffered. I can’t say that things went wrong, because I can’t really know that things would have been better had I behaved otherwise. In any case, I’m not sure that I could have behaved otherwise. But if I could, I might not have ended up here, in this place that’s exactly where I want to be. I don’t think I could have found shorter cuts than the winding paths I actually took. I persisted in my folly, lacking the wisdom to do otherwise.

In short, I find myself ready to dispense with the “what? how? and why?” of my life. My interest now is in the “I” itself; how the “I” stands in relation to everything else.

I mentioned above a piece of advice to authors: “Don’t begin paragraphs with “I,” to which I responded “Why?” The blogger who quoted it seems to have an idea. She said it called to mind another quote:

When you’re speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice. (4)

This echoes a phrase which has been brought up several times in the annals of this blog: “The personal is the universal”; which echoes “Atman is Brahman” and the Sanskrit “Tat tvam asi” which means “Thou art that”.

There’s a muddle here, a muddying of the waters. When I say “I”, it is my own personal “I”, the only one I know and can know. “You”, “he”, “she”, “they” each have their own “I”, unknowable by me. This is intrinsic to the definition of “I”. “Universal voice” is a weasel word along with “ego”. So is “truest, most intimate voice”: when I’m speaking that way, I make no claims to universality. Others may recognize what I’m talking about, or not. But then, we are weasels in a world of weasel discourse, where nothing is clear-cut. It takes effort to enter a world of clarity. In reference to previous posts and their comments, such entering may be called “awakening” or “passing through a portal”.

The nature of the “I” is to be separate from all the rest of creation. This is a deprivation. It afflicts homo sapiens alone, out of all species. But there is a get-out. Ancient wisdom says that this separation is illusory. It is also necessary, to compensate us for being the most vulnerable of the hominids. Even our birth is fraught with risk, and then the newborn remains helpless, and matures with severely attenuated instincts. So we survive with an illusory separateness along with a self-aware consciousness. Characteristically, it aids our survival and fosters development of advanced intelligence. It may or may not develop further, to a point where the “I” becomes transparent, aware of its illusoriness. Then it is able to transcend the “I”, seeing that the self and the other are not different. They are not simply “cut from the same cloth”. They are not even cut. There is simply one cloth.

I don’t know how it’s possible to reach this point, other than by persisting in one’s folly.
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1) Eckhart Tolle has an explanation of ego, as used in a spiritual sense, here. He speaks of it as a carapace: “like a big beetle. This protective shell works like armor to cut you off from other people and the outside world. What I mean by shell is a sense of separation”. A beetle needs its carapace, which makes me wonder if the metaphor is helpful to his argument.
2) avoiding the use of “I”: See this blog post by Maria Popova. She was quoting from Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty. Out of curiosity I checked the first line of a memoir he wrote 21 years earlier: “I’ve never worked a day in my life.” It’s stuffed—over-stuffed in my view—with “I” thereafter.
3) folly, wisdom: Definitions from OED (Oxford English Dictionary)
4) “speaking with the universal voice”: Cheryl Strayed, in a podcast, I think.

I don’t know

Bluebells at Christmas Common in Buckinghamshire, April 2011

I don’t know if body and soul can exist separately. I don’t know if there is a God separate from creation. I don’t know if a theory of everything is possible, so that what I think and feel can find its place in science. I don’t know whether it’s love that makes the world go round. I don’t know if love is the word I want. It’s such a worn-out coin, the inscription has almost rubbed off. I don’t know if language can express my thought. I don’t know if it’s possible to think without language. I don’t know what others feel. I don’t know what I lack or what I ought to strive for. I don’t know if I ought to use the word ‘ought’.

I don’t know if my gladness and love is conditional. I don’t know if it makes sense to talk of my inner life and my outer life. I don’t know how I shall die or when. My body fears death but my ego does not.

Is the universe moving inexorably towards an Omega Point, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin claimed? Do things happen because they are meant to happen? What is “meant to” meant to mean? I don’t know.

I like my not-knowing. As soon as I know something, I know that the other person, who knows the opposite, is wrong. I prefer to tolerate him along with his prejudices as I tolerate myself along with my own prejudices. A prejudice isn’t the same as knowing, but a rule-of-thumb substitute for knowing. For example, I am prejudiced in favour of things as they were in the days of my youth, when (for example) we used ‘Man’, ‘he’, ‘him’ to include both sexes without being accused of sexism. I recognize my prejudices as being such, and don’t take them seriously. I know that some of them are wrong. (So I do know something.)

Not knowing isn’t the same as not caring. I care about the questions, not so much about the answers. Everyday life carries on, either way. Everyday life is the abode of gladness.

The trivial round, the common task
Will furnish all we need to ask

Questions without answers are open windows that let in fresh air, so I can breathe freely. I can wander through the Garden of Eden, enjoying the fruit of every tree, knowing only that I am naked.

Cuttings

See footnote (1)

My last two posts, along with their comments, threw out several shoots worth developing further. So I’ve taken cuttings, as gardeners do. Given time and care, they take root and expand. Here’s one:

When we reach the end there is nothing left to do but give and receive. (2)

I think the best way to give is to share what has been given to us. This may sound obvious. Yet someone might say, “I didn’t receive anything. I made something out of nothing, by my own effort and sacrifice. And so I got money as my just reward, and I choose to give some of it, to what I think is a deserving cause. And so I shall leave this world a better place.” I didn’t mean to talk about giving and receiving in terms of money. Indeed I was about to say “money has never interested me” but then I remembered a period in my life when I realized I could earn a lot, and started to worship it like a miser, sacrificing home life to travel long distances each day, or else come home at weekends only. It was bad for the health, I hardly saw my children, and there was little joy in it. “So why?” I don’t think it’s useful to seek for reasons. Better to ask myself whether I could behave like that now. No, I could not. And now a reason comes to me immediately, without rationalization or excuses. I’m no longer driven by impoverishment of spirit. The parched desert of soul in which I dwelt then has been watered with blessings. And here I shall use poetic language from the Bible, despite never having been a Christian, because I don’t know another way to describe such inward states. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Somehow one leads to the other: don’t know why. (Dark Night of the Soul? (3)) The word translated as “blessed” was the Greek makarioi which “expresses a permanent state of felicity, rather than the passive reception of a blessing bestowed by another” (4).

So I find nothing to regret. The destination validates the journey, however long and painful. I arrive at blessings which take the form of a feeling within, which is then magically mirrored in the world around you, so that you feel completely at home. The fear of death has evaporated. You are filled with a gratitude that impels you to give back.

Sri Ramana Maharshi

In that cutting I started with “When we reach the end”, referring in the original context to some old men I met who had retired to the fringes, leaving the main action to younger ones. Yet the blessings can come at any age. Take Ramana Maharshi. He was a normal child in India till an experience aged 16 in which he was suddenly overwhelmed by the fear of death. It made him wonder “What am I? What is this ‘I’?” And then he understood, and it stayed with him ever after. (5)

On this same topic, “when we reach the end”, I like this:

This is a test to see if your mission in this life is complete, if you are alive, it isn’t. (6)

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Here’s another cutting from recent posts:

I once visited an exhibit of Egyptian art which included a piece called ‘Portal Between Two Worlds.’ It wasn’t the work of art that impressed me but the concept that passage between an inner world and an outer world is accessed through a portal. Sitting here trying to respond to Vincent’s post I intuit that it is mankind who is the ‘Portal Between Two Worlds’. Passing through the portal we participate in the individual or the universal. The particular world is ever with us but the infinite world is always available. (7)

I liked this comment for the way it instantly made me want to argue with it, and aver that there is only one world. On reflection, I agree that man is the uniquely the portal between two apparent worlds. What is the function of a portal? In the first place to divide one place from another. A door is made for closing; but it can be opened too. Separation first, then reconnection. In the entire universe there is but one world, except in man’s mind, where there is a portal, not known to all, and stiff to open at first. The other creatures have no ego to separate them from their surroundings. Evolution gave them an adequate set of instincts for survival, without need of our complex I-consciousness which is able to think that which is not, and gain a monstrous power by artificially untangling the whole into distinct compartments. Thus “every [other] animal is like water in water” (8). Since they don’t have the consciousness to be individual, they “participate in the . . . universal”. For all I know, “the infinite world is always available”—to them. Whereas we have to make a pilgrimage, a lifelong spiritual quest.

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And another cutting:

I recall that on two or three occasions in the past I, not particularly willingly, mapped out the route my life has taken. Much of what it revealed I already knew up to a point, but what also surfaced was trauma, psychological denial, and a great deal of pain as well as unexpected pleasure. Even my unwillingness to take that journey told me something.

I agree that probability plays a large part in the process of living, but not in the apparently random manner it seems so often to display. For every action there is a consequence, relatively predictable or otherwise. As you say, correctly I think, one cannot know all the answers, but then that is not a requirement for a life well-lived. (9)

The house on the Canadian Estate, near Nottingham,
where I lived from 1967-1971,
as photographed by Google in 2008

This comment prompted me to ponder the pains, denials and unexpected pleasures of my life between 1967 and 1972, and what drove me to do what I did. On the surface, we were a happy little family, with a nice house in a pleasant village, a fine place for our little children to grow up in, ten minutes drive from my job with its prospects for a long-term career in local government. So why did we let it go irrevocably, go to live in a country commune whose hedonistic lifestyle so disgusted me in the end that we let that go too, gave away our remaining possessions (furniture and books from the house) and drove off in a small van to destination unknown after joining a crazy enthusiastic guru cult? Was it for the fun, a belated discovery of the swinging Sixties? Did it make sense to swap mere restlessness and boredom for what turned out to be prolonged misery?

“For every action there is a consequence, relatively predictable or otherwise.” Yes maybe, but it doesn’t seem like that to me. Probability? Randomness? Yes, these things can be observed in the laboratory, isolated from this outside world where everything is mixed together in a tangle.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. (10)

So what does make us humans tick? Perhaps it is wrong to generalize: there’s a broad spectrum of types, each one of us is unique, “there’s nowt so queer as folk” (11). Some people are sure they run on rational self-interest, and perhaps they are right. But I’m not one, as my life-story lays bare.

As far as I can see, my own life is directed by the interplay of two forces. a) An inner necessity impels me forward, along a consistent trajectory, whether I understand it or not. Once it was more or less blind, but gradually my eyes open to become conscious of a pattern. b) The world is what happens beyond my control. We might call it contingent reality. Nobody can plan or predict what happens. Billions of “inner necessities” clash or harmonize every second. Their outcomes spill on to my path. The dance is constantly dynamic.

I strongly recommend studying one’s own life, keeping one’s distance from all preconceptions and hand-me-down ideas. Then we can make close observations of phenomena, without jumping to instant conclusions. Then we can speculate freely on the meaning of any patterns we perceive. Ultimately, our observations will be absorbed into science, and perhaps contribute to a theory of everything.

I’ve copied below the blurb of a book long in my possession. (12) It’s remarkable for observations on the course of many lives, and its speculations as to their meaning. I’m dubious as to its conclusions, but that doesn’t detract from its interest:

Have you ever wondered why it is that one person can grow up with every conceivable advantage, and yet seem incapable of mastering even the simplest things in life?

Have you ever known someone who, despite being highly intelligent, keeps on repeating the same mistakes again and again?

It is only when we begin to view the human experience as the evolutionary process of a soul that we can begin to understand all these strange forces at work in our lives.

We see ourselves as human beings searching for a spiritual awakening when, in fact, we are spiritual beings trying to cope with a human awakening.

But what causes us to seek these experiences in the first place?

What is it, precisely, that sets certain life patterns into motion?

Why do these patterns emerge in our own behaviors repeatedly?

. . .

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(1) Drawing at top: From 1992-4 I worked for Eurotunnel and spent much time away from home. The illustration shows an engineer in the service tunnel, part of a series of drawings commissioned for a brochure I designed in French and English for distribution to staff as part of our Total Quality campaign in the period before the official opening.
(2) Last sentence of “Chance Encounters”, posted 25th December 2015
(3) Dark Night of the Soul, a poem by St John of the Cross. It has become an accepted term in the Catholic tradition meaning “spiritual dryness”, as Wikipedia says, adding:

The ‘dark night’ of Saint Paul of the Cross in the 18th century lasted 45 years, from which he ultimately recovered. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, according to letters released in 2007, ‘may be the most extensive such case on record’, lasting from 1948 almost up until her death in 1997, with only brief interludes of relief in between.

(4) Charles Ellicott, A New Testament Commentary for English Readers, 1878
(5) Gabriele Ebert, Ramana Maharshi: His Life, 2015, drawing on Narasimha Swami, Self-realization: Life & teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, 1944
(6) Richard Bach, Illusions, 1977 (as a quote from the “Messiah's Handbook”)
(7) Comment by Ellie appended to “Many are the Ways”, posted 4th December 2015
(8) Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, 1973 (posthumous), tr. 1989
(9) Comment by Tom appended to “Chance Encounters” posted 25th December 2015
(10) John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911, Chapter 6
(11) English proverb, in Yorkshire dialect
(12) Steve Rother, Spiritual Psychology: The Twelve Primary Life Lessons, 2004