The Real, the Unique and the Essential

A metaphysics is a map. As with all maps, it is not the territory it maps. And as with all territories, there may be many maps of the same territory: Different maps mapping different aspects of that territory. They may map these aspects more or less accurately, more or less completely. Maps are of interest because they are of practical use: they help us navigate the territory, reveal unnoticed aspects of the territory, even give us sometimes a virtual tour of the territory.

The metaphysics which interests me at this time is a map of the territory of the self. It grows mostly out of my confusions and frustrations in dealing with the question “who am I?” As with most maps, it draws heavily on the explorations of others, on the maps they have previously drawn (both recent and some quite yellowed with age), on the general background knowledge (such as that the world is round), as well as on my own explorations of this territory.   Its particular expression is also influenced, of course, by the map drawing conventions of our culture: in particular our linguistic categories.

And so to the map itself:

The universe we appear in is one interrelated system. It is not any kind of Cartesian dualism of two or more types of fundamental substances, such as spirit and matter, which do not interact but yet in some unspecified way influence each other. There is just no coherent way to draw such a dualistic map in detail. 

Within this one interrelated system there are occasions of awareness: Awareness which on subsequent reflection we can describe as the becoming aware of beliefs, desires and bodily sensations, and of the objects of the external sense perceptions. One of our fundamental cultural conventions is to abstract from these occasions of awareness two poles:  subjects and objects of awareness. We abstract someone who is aware, the self, and we abstract the things of which the self is aware. The things of which the self is aware we furthermore, for good reason, classify as either private or public depending upon whether we believe others can also be aware of a particular instance of that type of thing.

We then take all the public stuff and construct a map of an external world. And we take the private stuff and construct a map of a self which experiences this outer world as well as experiencing “itself”, its own private stuff. And soon enough, we have the idea of bags of skin and bones in this external world, each with their own bunch of private stuff. Quite early in the stages of development in childhood, this process of abstraction has become automatic and we seem to ourselves to be subjects experiencing a world of objects. This becomes our fundamental map of our life: The constructed picture of an ego with which we identify and which we call the “self”. A self, isolated from other such selves and from the external world behind the screen of its perceptions, yet living as such strangers in a strange world.

The modern world is in large parts a story of human beings navigating their individual and social lives on the basis of this map. This map came into cultural prominence in the West during the Renaissance. It has guided important aspects of the development of modern societies and their cultures, providing the conceptual underpinning for such cultural memes as the idea of individual responsibility, the dignity of each individual, the “rights of man” and the gradual elimination of slavery.   It has also contributed to a pervasive sense of anomie, to a culture of excessive narcissism, and various types of exploitation.

The confluence of a set of personal and cultural experiences and the arrival into the cultural awareness of the West of quite different maps of this same territory arriving from the East, brought to many of us the realization that the map by which we had been navigating life was just a map, one way of looking at life. Other maps, other ways of looking at life also existed. And this juxtaposition of radically opposed viewpoints of the same territory stimulated the examination of both.

The experiences were largely those brought on by the psychedelics and the “summer of love” of the 60’s. These were experiences which suggested that in some way we were much more interconnected than our old maps would suggest, and that rather than being isolated individuals staring longingly at each other through the windows of our five senses, we were somehow in much more intimate relationship with each other and the Earth we lived on. We were opened up to experiencing a world which was (in Norman O. Brown’s terms), polymorphously erotic. And as forms of meditation and other ways of exploring consciousness (e.g. the Eselan progams, and later Grof’s breathwork) caught on we began to see that this sense of oneness was not just some drug induced hallucination, but a repeatable, recoverable perspective on life. Occasionally also some caught glimpses of an impersonal awareness within which all seemed to arise and which seemed to be the one ground of all that came into being. In Paul Tillich’s phrase: the “Ground of Being”.  

Against the background contrast between the killing grounds of Vietnam and Cambodia versus the loving grounds of the Height Ashbury and Woodstock: “Make love not war” became the slogan. Inter-Connection rather than separation the fundamental drive. After the erotic heat subsided, though, there came the desire to reexamine our place in life. These events had shaken up our previously unreflective adherence to the old map of an alienated ego in a bag of skin and bones striving to survive in a hostile world. Our task became to articulate a mythos, draw a map, which did justice both to the experiences of oneness and to the uniqueness of each of our own lives.

The initial attempts to draw this map were often based on what was probably a misinterpretation of some of the maps that came from the East. Essentially they suggested that the only thing that was real was that ground of being, that unqualifieable emptiness which appeared as the fundamental unity in deep mediation or other forms of altered consciousness, consciousness itself. All else was an epiphenomenon: an image in a dream, an illusion. To hold these others to be real was to be deluded. In particular to hold that there was a self that was other than this emptiness which showed itself in that state of consciousness was the fundamental delusion which led to that undercurrent of dissatisfaction with life we were experiencing. And as the only thing that was real, this ground of being was the ultimate subject: “tat tvam asi”, that art thou. That was your real self, and the real self of every sentient being. Thus there was only numerically one “real self” which manifested as all sentient beings and the world these beings experienced. 

But by relegating the empirical self and its actions and experiences to the realm of delusion, the richness of lived life was lost. Endeavor became classified as an ego-trip. Human tragedies became classified as bad dreams from which we just needed to awaken. Living this mythos, you lived either in a perpetual Nirvana, disassociated from life, or in a continual frustration because you had not yet reached this Nirvanic state. For most of us, this did not fit our actual experience of life. Two moves now turned out to be necessary. 

The first was the re-affirmation of the traditional insight that the ground and the manifestation were not two separate things. Rather that they, the formed and the formless, were, in an important sense, aspects of one reality. Both the dualism of sprit and matter, and the dualism of form and formless were misleading abstractions. The manifest world is the “external” aspect of that which we experience as our “real self” in its “internal” aspect. Internal and external aspects of the same reality, much in the way the experience of the color red may be the internal aspect of that which in its external aspect may be a certain pattern of activation of the rods in our eyeballs and the associated neural processes that activation generates. This insight, that all the states and stages of conscious experience are those of one reality, reestablishes us in the world of experience, not as images in some type of delusory dream but rather as partaking in a world which is fundamentally real.  

The other is a map that has recently emerged which includes (and transcends) both our sense of oneness and our sense of being separate agents in the world. It is based on the realization that awareness of the world is always from a particular perspective. There is no manifest world without it manifesting from a particular perspective. And there is a multiplicity of these perspectives through which the world manifests. Thus there can be one source of the manifestation, and yet a multiplicity of perspectives, a multiplicity of viewpoints, each unique, through which this one source manifests. This is the main outline of the map of the “Unique Self”: Each sentient being is a unique self in the sense of being a unique perspective through which the universe manifests.  If we take the interior view of the universe to be this experience of the real self, we get Ken Wilber’s formulation: the “Unique Self” is the real self + perspective. The map is thus of one universe, experiencing itself through a multiplicity of perspectives. You and I each are one of these perspectives and also a manifestation of the one universe itself.

What is “perspective”? In part it is certainly the sensory perspective on the manifest universe that each sentient being has. In the case of humans, it is the perspectives on the world we get through each of the senses.  But it is also the changing set of desires, beliefs, intentions, memories, goals and shadow elements. And also the physical, social and cultural contexts in which we manifest. Karma. Note that this could be and often is a disorderly set of items. The process of living in the manifest world is in large part a matter of becoming aware of these items and bringing some semblance of order into them as we assign energy to one or another subset of these items: “encouraging” this subset of beliefs, desires, intentions rather than an alternative set which also may be present and to some degree shaping also the physical, social and cultural context. 

When successful, living “sharpens” the matrix of a particular perspective into a more coherent, directed, less conflicted perspective. This process of living is capable of producing focused power as with world class athletes, performers, scientists, artists.    This process of living (successfully or not) shapes the unique self by emphasizing some aspects, the “essential” ones, and de-emphasizing or eliminating others, which then, by definition, become the “non-essential” ones. Thus we create the “essential self” in much the way the existentialists thought of it. This essential self is, of course, in large part shaped by social and cultural influences (by the internal and external “we” aspects) and reciprocally contributes to the shaping of this social and cultural context. “Existence precedes Essence” becomes “The Unique Self precedes the Essential Self”.. and all is grounded in the Real Self (Brahman). Life becomes a process of pruning, focusing, sharpening, creating the drama of the self. An unsuccessful life can become an unweeded garden.   Effective gardening tools are available in the various therapeutic and coaching disciplines. The manifestation, Life, evolves. 

The unique self is by definition embedded in a whole complex of factors (beliefs, desires, social institutions, personal relationships, etc.), each of which can be viewed from both an interior and an exterior perspective, and from a one and a many side. These factors are constantly changing.    It is probably not possible to cleanly split this set into “mine” and “other” subsets. The line between the unique self and other unique selves is a shifting one, useful only sometimes, depending upon context. Only the real self remains watching, fundamentally unchanging. 

The unique self unfolds in the process of living. The essential self needs to be constantly reconstructed in response to this unfolding. Is there an “entelechy” that directs this process of unfolding? In the case of humans, it is a combination of “internal” and “external” factors that guides this unfolding: Environmental factors such as food, shelter, carcinogenic substances, etc. Social and cultural factors such as schooling, laws, wars and tax incentives. Internal factors such as desires, beliefs, intentions, goals, focus. Obviously these internal factors themselves were in part brought about by other factors, including external ones. There probably is no “core” set of internal factors which are somehow “pure” from external influences.. nor would any such set, if it existed, be particularly desirable: We would want our beliefs, desires, goals, and perceptions to be shaped in part by the environment in which we find ourselves.

The situation with respect to what guides our development, and in particular whether we have much choice in the matter is analogous to the hoary question of “free will”. The best we can do is to say that if an action was intended then that action was free. And admit that in some cases the beliefs or desires on the basis of which the action was intended where themselves forced upon us in ways we would consider coercive. The search for an “uncaused cause”, a “prime mover” leads ultimately only to the real self: all that is.    The search for a set of uncaused, “pure”, goals may be equally unproductive: All we can do is to take the unique perspective in which each of us find ourselves and make something of it, build upon its foundation a life and thus an essential self which we consider a worthy flowering of life. 

Questioning what God or the Universe or Life “wants from us” may be heuristically useful, but is misleading. Heuristically useful, because it may give us a larger perspective on our life, and thus help create a better and more beautiful manifestation of our lives. The danger is that a compulsive search for what my “real” goals are, what my “essential task” is, what “I was called to do” can easily lead to a life of inaction and irresponsibility: a perpetual waiting mode for my “true direction” to appear rather than an active responding to the circumstances of my life and the opportunities my perspective provides. There is indeed a surge of energy when one has focused in on something one desires to do, but this is probably due more to the resulting alignment of my desires and intentions, and the dimming of intentions which counter these or distract from these. The “true direction”, the “essential task”, the “calling” is something which we create as we define our essential self.

The real: I Am.

The unique: I am here now.

The essential: I am becoming.