The nature of the “I”
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.
19 Comments:
“In childhood nothing happened.”
Sounds exciting.
At any rate, that really was bizarre advice that they gave about not using "I." In certain types of writing and dealing with certain types of subject matter, then yes, absolutely, the use of "I" can be too personal, too informal, or it can too easily lend itself to personal opinion or even just the appearance of personal opinion where personal opinion is unwarranted. Given the task, of say, writing a science textbook (or really any school or scholarly textbook) you'd want to avoid using "I" as much as possible for all the reasons listed above. But a personal memoir!!!??? Whaaaaa????? You might not want to start every damn sentence with "I." But awkwardly working around using it altogether??? If I opened a book and the first thing I encountered was some stilted, affected nonsense like, "In Childhood nothing happened", I think I'd start looking around for a chair with an uneven leg that the book could prop up and at least serve some useful purpose.
Yes, if you look at this memoir you may wonder if the real agenda of this part of his Essays After Eighty is to sneer exaggeratedly at his own earlier work, which as I say in the footnote above, is littered with “I”, possibly of the self-obsessed and boastful kind, I cannot judge from a sneak peek. Like some reformed alcoholics, he may have turned into an evangelistical puritan.
Funny that Jack Kerouac should come up in that post, since I was going to say that one of my favorite "memoirs" actually begins with the word "I."
"I first met Dean...."
Or as Mr. Hall would put it:
"First meeting Dean, he decided not friends we would be, because like a stuffy, pretentious twit talked."
I hear a lot of talk about how "writing can't be taught," but what I actually tend to find is just a lot of writers that give awfully dumb advice.
Hi Vincent. So the hoary old problem of the ego has once again raised its head. I suspect that this will be the case for many a year, decade even, since it is the nature of the ego to presume to know itself, and protect that sense of knowing. Of late I have been sensing a different approach to this which calls itself ego, a progression from my experience of Iceland, reported in my latest post.
Rather than go into my thoughts here, which would take up too much space, I will try to respond in a new post of my own. I must, however, thank you for, 'The Nature of the "I" ', without which I would have continued in my search for a subject about which to write, and to write is now overdue.
Hoary, yes, but my claim is that the “ego” (mythical bogeyman of spiritual progress) doesn’t exist. There is only the “I”, and we cannot do without that, just as a beetle cannot do without its carapace. As products of evolution, we are made this way.
Setting my claim to one side as only an hypothesis, I look forward to hearing from “this which calls itself ego”, and will revisit your latest post.
Hmmm, not sure why the ego should be getting such a bad wrap. Sure, there's plenty to be said about someone having a "massive" or "overblown" ego, but I'm not sure why the concept of ego itself is being talked about like some kind of scandalous party crasher, but whatever keeps you guys mentally employed, have at it, I guess.
BTW, the sentence I like most in that lovely page of Blake (Blake always has so many wonderful phrases) is: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time". This exactly and beautifully encapsulates all that I long-windedly tried to say above.
Now, Natalie has something to say that I can understand. Very nicely put!
I didn’t mean that the “I” is illusion, sorry if that impression came across. What keeps me mentally employed is to avoid weasel words and aim at clarity.
We evolved from other animals to have an “I”, which is to be celebrated & not treated like a scandalous party crasher. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Precisely! We are productions of time, that is to say, evolution. Blake’s words were inspired. He didn’t know what we know now.
I spoke rather briefly of the “necessary illusion of separateness”. To know what this means, one has to have seen through the separateness, as through a transparent window, to what lies beyond. And then one sees that we are not separate, but connected, in a way we cannot normally imagine, to everything and everybody. There is only One. But we can’t be in this consciousness all the time., for we would have no fear. And then we would not be safe to cross a busy road, as I’ve written about a couple of times.
So what I am trying to say is that the “I” by its nature gives us the sense of separateness to ensure our survival. This makes up for the lack of ironclad instincts like those that protect the other animals.
But the “I” also by its nature allows for the sense of separateness to be transcended, when we feel ourselves safe enough. And then in those moments we truly know. It is a kind of awakening. The “I” in all its glory remains intact; but has touched a bigger, eternal “I”.
The production of time is also in love with Eternity.
A special thanks for your last post Ian. I may have nothing to add but I have thoughts to share.
We are born as a little bit of protoplasm which has been differentiated from the non-living by the definition of a perimeter. That is not much to start with so things rapidly get more complex. Before separation from the mother, the cells have multiplied and organized. The senses which developed in utero begin connecting the newborn with the exterior world even before birth. The sense of being a separate individual, an "I" develops from not having control of ones comfort. Thus the dualism of the "I" and the "not I" is introduced. All sentient beings share development to this stage.
It might be said that the "I" is the awareness of being separated from the amorphous outside which provides data to the senses.
I ask how this "I" bears the image of God. Perhaps the image we bear is of the paradoxical nature of God. The paradox of the "I" is that although each is unique, yet each develops is the same way from the same material. The uniqueness must come from that original breath of life. All that follows is dénouement.
Blake delighted in exploring the paradoxical. That wisdom can come from folly, or that Eternity should find the limitation of time to be of value, impress on us the differences are reconciled by changing perspective.
Vincent, I did understand what you were saying originally. But my point is that the sense of separateness we feel (or think we feel) is not the external one of being separate from nature, the physical world, but our inner, intellectual divisions, giving labels such as "ego" to aspects of ourselves that we reject, or simply don't understand, or accept as defined by whatever theory we choose to believe in. the "Divided Self" is the problem because we believe it's divided. There's no small "I" and Big "I": those are only concepts, names we give to states of mind and feelings and perceptions. In reality, the "me" who is formulating these words and typing them, responding to your "you" who wrote the post, is the REAL McCoy, jut as your "me" is real in this world at this time. When we die we won't be the same kind of reality (I think we'll be another kind of reality but that's just my intuition, there's no proof of it). Meanwhile, Blake certainly knew more than we now know, in a wider sense. "Inspiration" may be a more reliable path to knowledge than knowledge. But that's just my opinion and no opinion is the whole truth.
Well, unless my eyes (or perhaps my "I's" in this case) deceive me, you did say a few comments ago up that the "ego doesn't exist" and that "there is only the 'I.'"
To me, this sounds like someone saying, "I would never own a car, but I do have an automobile."
In other words, you'll have to forgive me, if I don't quite grasp the nature of the hair you're splitting.
I think Natalie answered that point comprehensively in the comment she made just before yours.
The “I” is inclusive and splits no hairs. The "ego" is usually a weasel word making some artificial distinction to suit the context. As in my first two quotes in the main post.
Um, might point out that the "I" is the first letter of Ian.
However, pedantics aside, self prefers to read scripts without a predominance of the "I". Very boring.
'I went into a room. I then spied an interesting thing. I then made a decision to investigate'.
Frankly, from my point of view - the fewer "I's" in a script the better. If the writer is writing in 'first person' it only takes an intelligent reader to understand that.
(am, of course, suppressing my 'ego' ... heh).
Ah, Davoh, am reminded that you routinely omit the first person pronoun; when cornered you have been known to use “self” as a substitute.
Your enclosure of ‘ego’ in single quotes, as if to question its right to existence, is much applauded by self at this end.
To be fair, Davoh throws quotes around a lot of words.
From a writing standpoint, the sample text demonstrating the predominate "I" is boring mostly because of the plodding pace a which it doles out narrative and the unvarying sentence structure. It would be just as dull with "she" or "you" or any other pronoun in its place.
"She went into a room. She spied an interesting thing. She yawned and took a nap. Zzzzzzzz."
"at which..."
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