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Myth of Myself

Chapter One

I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, the most fascinating problem in the world is “Who am I?” What do you mean and what do you feel when you say the word “I”? I do not think there can be a more fascinating preoccupation than that because it is so elusive and hidden. What you are in your inmost being escapes your examination in rather the same way that you can not look directly into your own eyes without using a mirror, and that is why there is always an element of profound mystery in the question of who we are. This problem has fascinated me for many years and so I have asked a number of people, “What do you mean by the word ‘I’?” Now there is a certain agreement about this especially among people who live in Western civilization, and we have what I have called the conception of ourselves as a skin-encapsulated ego.

Most of us feel “I”—my ego, my self, my source of consciousness—to be a center of awareness and of a source of action that resides in the middle of a bag of skin. It is very funny how we use the word “I.” In common speech, we are not accustomed to say, “I am a body.” We rather say, “I have a body.” We do not say, “I beat my heart” in the same way we say, “I walk, I think, I talk.” We feel that our heart beats itself, and that has nothing very much to do with “I.” In other words, we do not regard “I, myself” as identical with our whole physical organism. We regard it as something inside it, and most Western people locate their ego inside their heads. You are somewhere between your eyes and between your ears, and the rest of you dangles from that point of reference. This is not so in other cultures. When a Chinese or Japanese person wants to locate the center of himself, he points to what Japanese call the kokoro and the Chinese call shin, the heart-mind. Some people also locate themselves in the solar plexus, but by and large we locate ourselves behind the eyes and somewhere between the ears. It is as if within the dome of the skull there was some sort of arrangement such as there is at SAC Air Force headquarters in Denver where men sit in great rooms surrounded with radar screens and all sorts of monitors, watching the movements of planes all over the world. So, in the same way, we have really the idea of ourselves as a little person inside our heads who has earphones on which bring messages from the ears, and who has a television set in front of him which brings messages from the eyes, and has all sorts of electrodes all over his body giving him signals from the hands, and so on. He has a panel in front of him with buttons and dials and things, and so he more or less controls the body. He is not the same as the body because “I” am in charge of what are called the voluntary actions, but what are called the involuntary actions of the body happen to me. I am pushed around by them, although to some extent also I can push my body around. This, I have concluded, is the ordinary, average conception of what is one’s self.

Look at the way children, influenced by our cultural environment, ask questions. “Mommy, who would I have been if my father had been someone else?” The child gets the idea from our culture that the father and mother gave him a body into which he was popped at some moment; whether it was conception or parturition is a little bit vague, but there is in our whole way of thinking the idea that we are a soul, a spiritual essence of some kind, imprisoned inside a body. We look out upon a world that is foreign to us and, in the words of the poet A.E. Housman, perceive “I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.” Therefore we speak of confronting reality, facing the facts. We speak of coming into this world, and there is a sensation we are brought up with of being an island of consciousness locked up in a bag of skin. Outside us we face a world that is profoundly alien to us in the sense that what is outside “me” is not me, and this sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility and estrangement between ourselves and the so-called external world. Therefore we go on to talk about the conquest of nature, the conquest of space, and view ourselves in a kind of battle array towards the whole world outside us. I shall have much more to say about that in the second chapter, but in the first I want to examine the strange feeling of being an isolated self.

Now actually it is absolutely absurd to say that we came into this world. We did not: we came out of it! What do you think you are? Suppose this world is a tree. Are you leaves on its branches or are you a bunch of birds from somewhere else that settled on a dead old tree? Surely everything that we know about living organisms—from the standpoint of the sciences—shows us that we grow out of this world, that each one of us is what you might call a symptom of the state of the universe as a whole. However, that is not part of our common sense.

Western man has, for many centuries, been under the influence of two great myths. When I use the word “myth” I do not necessarily mean a falsehood. The word myth signifies a great idea in terms of which man tries to make sense with the world; it may be an idea, or it may be an image. Now the first of two images which have most profoundly influenced Western man is the image of the world as an artifact, much like a jar made by a potter. Indeed, in the Book of Genesis there comes the idea that man was originally a clay figurine made out of the earth by the Lord God who then breathed into this clay figurine and gave it life. The whole of Western thought is profoundly influenced through and through by the idea that all things—all events, all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers, all grasshoppers, all worms—are artifacts; they have been made. It is therefore natural for a Western child to say to its mother, “How was I made?” On the other hand, that would be quite an unnatural question for a Chinese child, because the Chinese do not think of nature as something that was made. Instead, they look upon it as something that grows, and the two processes are quite different. When you make something you put it together: you assemble parts, or you carve an image out of wood or stone, working from the outside to the inside. However, when you watch something grow, it works in an entirely different way. It does not assemble its parts. It expands from within and gradually complicates itself, expanding outwards, like a bud blossoming or a seed turning into a plant.

Yet behind our whole thought process in the West is the idea that the world is an artifact and that it is put together by a celestial architect, carpenter, and artist, who therefore knows how it was done. When I was a little boy I asked many questions which my mother could not answer. She used to resort in desperation to saying, “My dear, there are some things that we are not meant to know,” and I would say, “Well, will we ever find out?” And she would answer, “Yes, when we die and we go to Heaven it will all be made clear.” So I used to think that on wet afternoons in Heaven we would all sit around the throne of grace and say to the Lord God, “Now, just why did you do it this way, and how did you manage at that?” and He would explain it and make it all very clear. All questions would be answered because, as we have in popular theology understood the Lord God, He is the mastermind who knows everything. If you ask the Lord God exactly how high is Mount Whitney to the nearest millimeter, He would know exactly, just like that, and would tell you. You could ask any question of God, because He is the cosmic Encyclopedia Britannica. However, this particular image, or myth, became too much for Western man because it is oppressive to feel that you are known through and through, and watched all the time by an infinitely just judge.

I have a friend who is a very enlightened Catholic convert, and in her bathroom she has an old-fashioned toilet, and on the pipe that connects the tank with the toilet seat there is a little framed picture of an eye. Underneath it, in Gothic letters, is written “Thou God seest me.” Everywhere is this eye—watching, watching, watching—watching and judging you, so that you always feel you are never really by yourself. The old gentleman is observing you and writing notes in his black book, and the idea of this became too much for the West. We had to get rid of it, and so instead we developed another myth, the myth of the purely mechanical universe. This myth was invented at the end of the eighteenth century, and became increasingly fashionable throughout the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, so that today it is common sense. Very few people today really believe in God in the old sense. They say they do, but although they really hope there is a God, they do not really have faith in God. They fervently wish that there was one, and feel that they ought to believe that there is, but the idea of the universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman is no longer plausible. It is not that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow does not go with our knowledge of the vast infinitude of galaxies and of the immense light-year distances between them, and so on.

Instead, it has become fashionable, and it is nothing more than a fashion, to believe that the universe is dumb and stupid, and that intelligence, values, love, and fine feelings reside only within the bag of the human epidermis, and beyond that it is simply a kind of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces. For example, courtesy of Dr. Freud, we have the idea that biological life is based on something called “libido,” which was a very loaded word. This blind, ruthless, uncomprehending lust is seen as the foundation of the human unconscious, and to thinkers of the nineteenth century like Hegel, Darwin, and T.H. Huxley, there was similarly the notion that at the root of being is an energy, and this energy is blind. This energy is just energy, and it is utterly and totally stupid, and our intelligence is an unfortunate accident. By some weird freak of evolution we came to be these feeling and rational beings, at least more or less rational, but all this is a ghastly mistake because we are here in a universe that has nothing in common with us. It does not share our feelings, has no real interest in us, and we are just a sort of cosmic fluke. Therefore, the only hope for mankind is to beat this irrational universe into submission, to conquer it and master it. Of course all this is perfectly idiotic. If you think that the idea of the universe has been the creation of a benevolent old gentleman, you soon realize He is not so benevolent after all, and He takes an attitude of “this is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you.” You can have that idea on the one hand, and if that becomes uncomfortable you can exchange it for its opposite idea that the ultimate reality does not have any intelligence at all, and at least that would get rid of the old bogey in the sky in exchange for a picture of the world that is completely stupid.

Of course, these ideas do not really make any sense because you cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of an unintelligent universe. You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. Here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples; and we call it an apple tree because the tree “apples”—that is what it does. Here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that, at least on the planet earth, it “peoples” in just the same way that an apple tree “apples.” Now, maybe two million years ago, somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at this solar system, and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said, “Just a bunch of rocks,” and they went away. Later on, two million years later, they came around again and they looked at it and they said, “Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks but it is peopling, and it is alive after all; it has done something intelligent.” We grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree, and if evolution means anything, it means that. But curiously, we twist it. We say, “Well, first of all in the beginning there was nothing but gas and rock. Then intelligence happened to arise in it like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing.” However, we are thinking in a way that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks. Where there are rocks, watch out, because the rocks are going eventually to come alive and they are going to have people crawling over them. It is only a matter of time, just in the same way the acorn is eventually going to turn into the oak because it has the potentiality of that within it. Watch out, because rocks are not dead.

Now all of this depends on what kind of attitude you want to take to the world. If you want to put the world down, you might say, “Oh well, fundamentally it is only a lot of geology, sheer stupidity, and it just so happens that a kind of a freak comes up in it which we call consciousness.” Now, that is an attitude that you may take when you want to prove to people that you are a tough guy, that you are realistic, that you face facts, and that you do not indulge in wishful thinking. However, it is just a matter of role-playing, and you must be aware of these things; these are fashions in the intellectual world. On the other hand, if you feel warm-hearted towards the universe, you put it up, instead of putting it down, and you say about rocks, “They are really conscious, but it is a different form of consciousness.” After all, when I tap on this crystal, which is glass, it makes a noise. Now that resonance is an extremely primitive form of consciousness. Of course, consciousness is much more subtle than that, but when you hit a bell and it rings, or you touch a crystal and it responds, inside itself it has a very simple reaction. It goes “jangle” inside, whereas we go “jangle” with all sorts of colors and lights and intelligence, ideas, and thoughts, and it is more complicated. Yet both are equally conscious, but conscious in different ways. Now that is a perfectly acceptable idea. All I am saying is that minerals are a rudimentary form of consciousness, whereas other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals. What they want to do is to say everything is kind of drab, whereas what I want to say is “Hooray! Life is a good show!”

Nevertheless, as we study man or any other living organism and try and describe him accurately and scientifically, we find that our normal sensation of ourselves as isolated egos inside a bag of skin is a hallucination. It really is absolutely nutty because when you describe human behavior, or the behavior of a mouse or a rat or a chicken (or any organism you want to describe), you find that as you try to describe its behavior accurately you must also describe the behavior of its environment. Supposing I walk and you want to describe the action of walking. You cannot talk about my walking without also describing the floor, because if you do not describe the floor and the space in which I am moving all you will be describing is somebody swinging their legs in empty space. So as to describe my walking, you must describe the space in which you find me. You could not see me unless you could also see my background, that which stands behind me. If the boundaries of my skin were coterminus with your whole field of vision you would not see me at all. You would see the things that filled your field of vision, but you would not see me, because in order to see me you have to see not only what is inside the boundary of my skin, but you have to see what is outside it too.

Now, that is terribly important. Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery—the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets—is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together. There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides, and the conspiracy is to look as different as possible, and yet underneath to be identical. You do not find one without the other. Tweedledee and Tweedledum agreed to have a battle. So there is a secret: what is esoteric, what is profound, and what is deep is what we will call the “implicit.” What is obvious and in the open is what we will call the “explicit.” So, I in my environment and you in your environment are explicitly as different as different could be, but implicitly we go together. This is quickly discovered by the scientist when he tries to describe exactly what you do, and since the whole art of science is to describe your behavior, it is not something that can be separated from the world around you. The scientist realizes then that you are something that the whole world is doing, just as when the sea has waves on it the ocean is waving. So each one of us is a “waving” of the whole cosmos, the entire works, all there is, and with each one of us it is waving and saying, “Yoo-hoo! Here I am!” yet it does it differently each time because variety is the spice of life.

However, the funny thing is we have not been brought up to feel that way. Instead of feeling that we, each one of us, are something that the whole realm of being is doing, we feel that we are something that has come into the whole realm of being as a stranger. When we are born we do not really know where we came from because we do not remember, and so we think when we die that is just going to be that. Some people console themselves with the idea that they are going to Heaven, or that they are going to be reincarnated, or something, but people do not really believe that. For most people it is implausible, and the real thing that haunts them is that when they die they will go to sleep and are never going to wake up. They are going to be locked up in the safe deposit box of darkness forever and ever. However, all of this depends upon a false notion of what is one’s self. Now, the reason why we have this false notion of ourselves, as far as I can understand it, is that we have specialized in one particular kind of consciousness. Generally speaking, we have two kinds of consciousness. One I will call the “spotlight,” and the other the “floodlight.” The spotlight is what we call conscious attention, and we are trained from childhood that it is the most valuable form of perception. When the teacher in class says, “Pay attention!” everybody stares, and looks right at the teacher. That is spotlight consciousness; fixing your mind on one thing at a time. You concentrate, and even though you may not be able to have a very long attention span, nevertheless you use your spotlight: one thing after another, one thing after another . . . flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. However, we also have floodlight consciousness. For example, you can drive your car for several miles with a friend sitting next to you, and your spotlight consciousness may be completely absorbed in talking to your friend. Nevertheless, your floodlight consciousness will manage the driving of the car, will notice all the stoplights, the other idiots on the road, and so on, and you will get there safely without even thinking about it.

However, our culture has taught us to specialize in spotlight consciousness, and to identify ourselves with that form of consciousness alone. “I am my spotlight consciousness, my conscious attention; that is my ego; that is me.” Although we very largely ignore it, the floodlight consciousness is working all the time, and every nerve ending that we have is its instrument. You can go out to a luncheon and sit next to Mrs. So-and-So, and you go home and your wife asks you, “Was Mrs. So-and-So there?”

“Yes, I sat next to her.”

“Well, what was she wearing?”

“Well, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

You saw, but you did not notice. Now, because we have been brought up to identify ourselves with the spotlight consciousness, and the floodlight consciousness is undervalued, we have the sensation of ourselves as being just the spotlight, just the ego that looks and attends to this and that and the other. So we ignore and are unaware of the vast, vast extent of our being. People, who by various methods become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness, have what is called “a mystical experience,” or what the Buddhists call bodhi, an awakening. The Hindus call it moksha, or liberation, because they discover that the real deep, deep self, that which you really are fundamentally and forever, is the whole of being—all that there is, the works, that is you. Only that universal self that is you has a capacity to focus itself at ever so many different here-and-nows. So, as William James said, “The word ‘I’ is really a word of position like ‘this,’ or ‘here.’” Just as a sun or star has many rays, so the whole cosmos expresses itself in you and you and you in all the different variations. It plays games: it plays the John Doe game, the Mary Smith game. It plays the beetle game, the butterfly game, the bird game, the pigeon game, the fish game, the star game. These are games that differ from each other just like backgammon, bridge, poker, or pinochle; or like the waltz, mazurka, minuet, and tango. It dances with infinite variety, but every single dance that it does—that is to say, you—is what the whole thing is doing. However, we forget and we do not know who we are. We are brought up in a special way so that we are unaware of the connection, and unaware that each one of us is the works, playing it this way for awhile. So we have been taught to dread death as if it were the end of the show because it will not happen any more. Therefore we are conditioned to be afraid of all the things that might bring about death: pain, sickness, suffering. If you are not really vividly aware of the fact that you are basically “the works,” chances are you have no real joy in life, and you are just a bundle of anxiety mixed in with guilt.

When we bring children into the world, we play awful games with them. Instead of saying, “How do you do? Welcome to the human race. Now my dear, we are playing some very complicated games, and these are the rules of the game we are playing. I want you to understand them, and when you learn them when you get a little bit older you might be able to think up some better rules, but for now I want you to play by our rules.” Instead of being quite direct with our children, we say, “You are here on probation, and you must understand that. Maybe when you grow up a bit you will be acceptable, but until then you should be seen and not heard. You are a mess, and you have to be educated and schooled until you are human.” These attitudes which are inculcated into us from infancy go on into old age because the way you start out is liable to be the way you finish. So people are going around feeling fundamentally that they do not belong because their parents said to them in the first place, “Look, you are here on sufferance. You are on probation. You are not a human being yet.” So people feel this right on into old age and figure that the universe is presided over by this kind of awful God-the-Father parent who has our best interest at heart, and is loving, but “Who spares the rod, spoils the child. Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth.” So, where is it going to hit next? You do not feel that you belong, and so we get this ghastly sense of what I call the “Christian ego,” and it is a little bit Jewish, too, who really feels that he does not belong and is a homeless orphan. The Christians say we are sons of God by adoption; not real sons but only by adoption, grace, and sufferance. So there comes a sensation so characteristic of Western man and, indeed, of all highly civilized people, of being a stranger on the earth, a momentary flash of consciousness between two eternal blacknesses.

Therefore, we find ourselves in constant contentiousness with everything around us, not only with other people but with the earth, with the waters, and the symbol of it all in our culture is the bulldozer. Where I live aboard a ferryboat there are opposite us across the water some lovely hills. They are going to put houses there, but they are going to try and put the sort of houses you would find in a suburban tract lot on a hill. A good architect can make a house fit the hill and he does not have to destroy a hill to put a house on it. If you want to live on a hill, obviously you want to live on a hill, and you do not want to destroy the hill by virtue of living on it. Yet that is what they do, especially in California. In California where we have lots of hills, they always scrape the tops off them until they are perfectly flat. They put the houses on, and then scrape the hill off in terraces all the way down. Of course, by doing this they upset the ecology of the hill and eventually all houses fall down, but the builder says, “So what?” By that time the payments have been made and obviously the builder does not feel that the external world is his own body, but of course it is. The external world is your own body extended, and an intelligent architect always goes up to the hill and says, “Good afternoon. I very much want to build a house here, and I would want to know what kind of house you would like built on you.” Instead of that, he has a prejudice about what kind of a house is a house, and he has to make the hill submit to this prejudice, and so he has to ruin the hill and get rid of it pretty much to put a house on it. He is absolutely out of his mind because he does not realize that the external world is his body, and when he realizes that he will get his mind back.