Our Symbolic Life Appears To Be Closing Itself Into A Trap Of Its Own Making
And Possible Ways Out Are Bordering On Madness
With access to the internet & a passion for pop-science i’ve spent the last couple of years having the lingering intuition that i’m some kind of mechanical being. My external world & other people appeared like that too, even those who once were “heroes” or “great villains” were now just the passive product of circumstance, having little to no consciously held reasons for doing what they do & little to no merit/or blame for being where they are (sadly, i’m not going to end up here saying that this has changed much). But it’s not so much that “they” have lost their aura of heroes or villains, those auras were always inside me. It’s “me” who lost its auras.
Without realising, at some point i must’ve became hooked on the pleasant feeling of gathering information for the sake of gathering, ignorant to the fact that however much information i’d manage to amass in my memory-burrow there’s no eventual benefit that would be able to compensate for the loss of my naive sense of self & it’s aura (naive sense of life) that i tarnished in the process. The “unexamined life” does have a certain effortlessness & coherence to it, and it’s full of meaning! Philosophical & scientific views held without wisdom threaten our culturally developed experience of self. More importantly, they also threaten our deeper, naturally evolved sense of self. And some mystical views are just as perilous: i remember the intensely negative and confusing experience i had after encountering D.E. Harding’s The Headless Way, pointing my index finger towards my eyes and discovering that in that direction was nothing resembling the image i naively had of myself. Everything from sounds to smells were pointing towards/ending in something that wasn’t “me”! Amazing was the fact that i could’ve lived my entire life not suspecting a thing, just as countless others today and throughout history who hadn’t benefited from the same symbolic schemas & sufficient leisure.
Things then started to nudge me out of my pop-sci mindset and ambition.
An important insight for me was the fact that even if some form of wavefunction monism, computationalism, strong eliminativism are the case, they nonetheless must be able to maintain the rich, continuous, spontaneous, absolutely convincing self i was as a kid & teenager. This was a shift in intuition, from <understanding myself as an appearance mechanically driven by blind momenta> to realizing that <allowing for a spontaneous unexamined sense of self to naturally manifest/take over will act as if able to organise those blind momenta into maintaining the self>. What i mean by the latter is that the physical organism (neuro electrical & chemical activity, hormones, epigenetics, etc) seems to have evolved to organise itself around the maintenance of this immaterial mirage we call “self”, without which it would have a hard time building civilization or even remaining alive — implying that the self has a certain reality to it. The concrete is propped against the insubstantial. Of course, whatever is Real stands true in all cases, and any insight i’d have is very likely itself the result of blind forces and chance. But then again, it seems that there’s no other escape for our conscious rationality than adopting some sort of groundless belief — just deciding that the charioteer is real and able to whip and steer wild horses. Isn’t this what everyone’s already doing? Taking this decision is made easy because there are nonetheless states that unambiguously feel better than others — local maxima in stability and consonance, and magic. So, from this perspective there’s no conundrum about what to choose: my biologically evolved self-centredness, adorned with a cultural narrative-self. Although, mystics and buddhists keep enticing us to things beyond this “local maxima”. They say that the most consonant & beatific of all states, even beyond the concept of state altoghether, is a timeless experience of selflessness & effortlessness (alas, the not-so-fine print states that you — the willful self — have to let yourself be snuffed out in order to allow for that elusive phenomenal flower to bloom).
A second insight came to me while listening to a senior British lady philosopher as she tried to save the “soul” from her ghostbusting physicalist interlocutors (off course i didn’t liked her speech very much but i was lucky i listened). I don’t remember exactly what she said but my realisation was that in the past few years i’ve slowly shifted my phenomenal experience from maintaining a full & vibrant self to one of being a zestless observer perceiving/appreciating symbolic models of itself. The lady philosopher must of said something about the fact that we’ve become bewitched by 3rd person symbolic constructs and ignoring the 1st person dimension that is the sacred heart of our life. I was a prime example, displaying all the symptoms of someone who internalised this greater cultural mindset. For me the weight of reality was shifted towards the 3rd person/symbolic pole of experience, making for a very dull conscious life. Listening to that debate was itself precisely to the scope of enriching my schematic panorama!
Human selves may be illusions but they’re nevertheless extraordinary natural manifestations that allow for a great variety of particulars, each having their own immense subtleties — as far as we know they are the jewels of natural creativity. Just by believing in her soul, that lady philosopher has/is one. My instinct to criticise her was similar with shouting at a wine aficionado that taste & smell appreciation are highly influenceable hallucinations of the nervous system and not qualities inherent in the wine. I’d be right in some way but certainly irrational in my attempt to tell somebody that she cannot enjoy her-self or her wine. One thing would be clear though: I... certainly wouldn’t be enjoying the wine!
But of course, the problem is not with the use of symbolic thinking per se. This very recognition discussed here has happened with the aid of the linguistic scaffold, and very likely that’s where part of the solutions are. Paradoxically, even such a thing as mindfulness or meditation is developed & taught through language (and at first, we deploy it via linguistic aids too). I vaguely remember reading an article about Clive Barker, the author famous for Hellraiser, but the following words have stuck with me (although i haven’t managed to find them again under any form): “Language is protean, it gives us everything while demanding just a little of our imagination in return.” I think most of us are ignorants with respect to the logos’ power to shape experience. We kinda get it that our society — with its goods & services, traditions & institutions, stories & all manners of reifications — is “made out of words”, but we fail to see our-selves being as considerably shaped by them. And it should go without saying: we cannot fathom what are the possibilities, what possible poets, Christs & tathagatas are present within us. Our being is able to represent to itself only a fraction of the possibilities that are weaved inside it.
I’ve been told about a French philosopher who didn’t liked the idea of the transcendent, instead believing that the principle of self-transcendence is implicit & is acting in the plane of immanence itself. He didn’t believe nature to be under some transcendental ordering principle. Instead of the God trying to control creation under a plan there’s only a wild untamed creation, less interested in preserving some right state than in evoking “intensities” (i.e., creatively exploring contrasts). We, as part of creation, are in the search of this intensity, whose opposite is boredom. And when life gets too hectic, the same principle of intensity persuades us to slow down, go simple. Again, determinism being true wouldn’t change a thing: subjectively i’m still finding myself making choices no matter what. And some of them, likely the most important, are regarding my subjective identity. Of course, it’s unlikely we’ll manage to reach beyond what’s culturally expected of us. Becoming good accountants, dentists & cooks is probably wise considering our immediate context. Although for the mystic, being an accountant is just as crazy as anything else!
The Dao doesn’t care, it will explore and eventually find many & all things. But for the individual, which is where everything gets cashed out, we need to develop a “mental judo”, a way of developing our sense of balance within our experience, opening our instincts towards grasping what’s relevant, towards being fluid and using our mind’s natural currents, knowing how to absorb shocks when hitting the ground. Buddhism comes to mind as a possible “mental judo”, sadly nobody will ever know the true extent & depth of the Buddhist writings; many remained untranslated, many are lost, and still, too many are available for any one human to grasp. Zen has recognised that neither eternalism nor emptiness reveal Reality, and understood that whatever one does, if he’s rejecting something (even such things as “self”, “reincarnation”, “desire” or “god”) in the pursuit of Reality, then he’s bound to ignorance & unwise actions. As a consequence Zen enabled a turn towards maya, allowing for the emergence of poetry, art & craft — recognizing the reality & merit of the world of forms (as opposed to some pure & perfect state of consciousness). And there is at least one individual today who takes dharma further, western Buddhist teacher Rob Burbea. He practiced Buddhism up to a point where he had tasted the emptiness of existence (that is: everything is contingent, relative, has-no-essence, it doesn’t exist as a thing in itself, and to the degree it appears as such it still doesn’t have an identity on its own). But soon another intuition emerged naturally out of that: emptiness is a most fertile ground, its nature is highly creative. In this state of apprehending emptiness everywhere (1st person & 3rd person) the mind unlocks greater degrees of freedom for association-making, which means greater ability for meaning-making. A science oriented person could see this in terms of a phase transition, where the thermodynamical depth of our being (especially the brain) is more free to show creativity, less constrained by higher order patterns. I imagine the difference from a fascist or communist social body, with their top-down laws & bureaucracy, mores & architecture, to one where these higher-order constraints brake down into some form of liberalism. Perhaps this is what poets did all along, only there weren’t any means to teach this to the rest of us. Burbea is deffinitely a poet at heart, he oftentimes recounts intensely vivid & meaningful encounters with reality (he has pancreatic cancer, so very likely this also contributes to his mindset). But he also insists in the need of developing a compass-like intuition, one suitable for navigating this madness. Perhaps one can indeed grow a finer sensibility for what states/experiences are more suitable for themselves, but in the same time I’m wary about one’s ability to ground any moral values in emptiness. This is one of his teaching sessions at the Gaia House retreat centre, one that i’ve especially enjoyed.
I think that both Burbea & Deleuze, the French philosopher, fall into a postmodernist view that promotes self-authoring, a poetical discovery of existence as opposed to soulless mechanical deconstruction. Someone once said that there’s another evolution opening up on top of the aimless biological evolution — one that would parasitise & eventually hijack the biological — an evolution in which beings become more & more able to appreciate & revel in their phenomenal existence. Burbea teaches exactly that!
However good or bad the initial social consequences, this kind of meta-realism will eventually take hold on conscious minds. Like developmental literature says, what structured the (unsuspecting) self in a previous stage gets to be an object for the self in a later stage, and thus open to his conscious manipulation. Today, our sense of self is a puppet animated by evolved emotions & cultural stories. But as we’re becoming increasingly aware of these things and able to refrain from them or play with them we’re only kicking the question further down the road: “Who’s doing all this?”. Perhaps self becomes increasingly mysterious to itself as it develops. Life becomes mystic art and we’re in need of highly sensible shamans like Bourbea.
So, perhaps the next step in Life’s coming-of-age is one where, after seeing its cultural tethers & insubstantial idols, the mind becomes dizzyingly free to select among them & personally responsible for reifying them. It appears to me that whenever Life becomes self-aware it should seek to incorporate within itself many of the external feed-back loops that secure its wellbeing (within a certain limit because in seeking godhood you’re in risk of either becoming a Gordian Knot of self frustration, or bored to death). Thus, stopping “behaving nice” because of social customs & the policy-enforcing social gaze, and, starting “being nice” because you’ve internalized the world’s dynamics & understand the consequences intimately.
A self-authoring self isn’t free from the deterministic laws of nature, it’s just that this “pattern in the rug” has contingently unlocked the ability to play with its own threads in just such a way that it doesn’t unravel itself in psychotic frays. Dynamic equilibrium pushed into a new dimension.
What will be hard would be our struggle with the question “who does all this?” I don’t think anyone knows, not the scientists, nor the clerics. Perhaps the closest are the mystics, those who have the deepest sense of “not-knowing” there is. But how can we integrate such a wild intuition in our daily life? The best answer i’ve heard was in a line from the season 2 of Fortitude, when the sheriff gets asked how will he be able to find an answer to the difficult situation. His reply was: “It just presents itself!”. But, the thing is, we’re all doing that already, just without being conscious of it. We don’t have the sensibility of a mystic.
We naively think that we know stuff just by our mere familiarity with it. A fistful of dirt is enough to trigger a sense of “well known” that fringes on the dreary. But that stuff has all the properties of existence within it — it is Existence! Do we really “know” such a thing? Can we ever?!
I wrote this at the end of an essay:
I think we can all take comfort in the facts of abstract logic (where a formal system cannot fully describe itself unless it also contradicts its premisses), or those of science (where in your exploration you eventually remain without means to bridge the observer-observed asymmetry), or those of philosophy (where, as we attempt to define everything in terms of other things, we arrive in a situation where once there’s nothing left that ‘something’ is not, it loses all meaning), or those of cognitive studies that point to the fact that the mind must involve some misrepresentation of its own/or the environment’s states to be able to work — it must have some flight of fancy to initiate action. Both existence & transcendence involve an irrational magic component, there’s no other way. Be in communion with that by refraining yourself from thinking you know Reality, for once you do this it becomes a lie!
Cosmologist Janna Levin said in an interview that she wanted to write a nonfiction book about “what can and can’t be known”, attempting to structure the whole thing kinda like a formal mathematical proof, and finding herself not being able to do it properly. She had to throw everything and start again, this time structuring it as a story. She thus ended up stating the same thing on two different planes (through the content and structure of the book): “there are some truths we cannot get at.. except by stepping outside.”
Another philosopher said that language acts like a fly bottle, once you’re inside, you don’t see its walls for what they are, namely limitations. He believed that the role of philosophy was to help the fly get out of the bottle by making the walls opaque, therefore open to perception.
Buddhism does something similar, it uses language (and “conventional knowledge”) against itself, opening a gap in its walls & allowing the mind to expand beyond them. This beyond is not something fixed, positive, explicit, but the unpinnable & effervescent lived sense of mystery. In Zen you cultivate the sense of the fundamental mystery of existence. You deepen this experience until “mystery replaces the earth under your feet, the marrow of your bones and the food in your bowl”. The “inner” of your bone marrow, the “outer” of the earth under your feet, and the food in your bowl that “bridges” the two, annihilating any duality (me versus the world).
So while our symbolic life appears to be closing itself into a trap of its own making perhaps deepening into mystery is a way out of the fly bottle. The downside is that it sets you free in the middle of nowhere with nowhere to go. Is this a false concern forced by the invisible glass walls, destined to evaporate outside them?
