INTRODUCTION
Part One: THE SENSE OF SELF APPEARS
I. This strange thing called “me”.
II. What am I? Descartes’ answer.
III. To have Consciousness or to be Consciousness?
IV. Oneself as an absolute.
V. How consciousness grasps itself. What is a “mental event”?
VI. How consciousness grasps itself. The self enters the stage.
VII. The nature of the self. Consciousness and matter.
VIII. What am I? An enquiry into the self-aware self.
IX. The self is a concept. What is a concept?
X. Self and the meaning of things.
XI. The self as a focal point of consciousness.
XII. Action in the world (the Useless Self).
Appendix I. Error, Ignorance and Illusion.
Appendix II. The individual thinking subject in Spinoza.
Part Two: THE SENSE OF SELF DISAPPEARS Consciousness functions without identification with the personal self.
XIII. The testimony of the “Enlightened”: There is nobody there. The interior resonance is finished. XIV. The self and personal consciousness are by-passed. XV. Suzanne Segal: “The experience of personal identity switched off and was never to appear again”.
XVI. U.G. Krishnamurti. After a physiological transformation, the “continuity of thought” has come to an end. The State of Unknowing: “There is no center here. There is no self here.
XVII. More on the state of No-Self.
Part Three: RE-EVALUATION
XVIII. The so-called “Mystery of Consciousness”.
XIX. Consciousness and the brain.
XX. Consciousness and death.
XXI. Time, Space, Matter, and the Self.
XXII. The intelligence of matter.
XXIII. Intelligent design and Darwinian evolution.
XXIV. Knowledge, Thought, and the individual Self.
XXV. Meaning.
XXVI. Purpose.
XXVII. Abstraction.
XXVIII. How to create an object (and Space, too).
XIX. Knowledge (I).
XXX. Why the self? (The joke is on us).
XXXI. The “continuity of thought” and the self.
XXXII. The I and the Illusion of the ego.
XXXIII. Matter is always right. Man thinks, and errs.
XXXIV. Is a river person? Human action.
XXXV. From error to illusion, and back.
XXXVI. Pregnant contradiction.
XXXVII. Philosophy and religion (error and illusion).
XXXVIII. Knowledge (II).
XXXIX. Self, values, and the meaning of things.
XL. Conditioning is intelligence (U.G. Krishnamurti).
XLI. Suffering and compassion.
XLII. The human condition (I) (Desperate quest for identity).
XLIII. The human condition (II) (Desperate quest for the absolute).
XLIV. Thought is the enemy (U.G. Krishnamurti).
CONCLUSION.
The sense of being a person, an individual, a self is at the center of our subjective life. The concept of an autonomous self is at the center of our political and social life. Yet the self is not a clear concept. We take it for granted, but do we really know it? The question is never really asked, because the sense of self is the very core of our being; if it is questioned, the danger of falling apart, from within, is too great.
In 1969 I presented a doctoral dissertation (University of Paris-Sorbonne) on the subject of “Error, Ignorance and Illusion.” It was an attempt to define the limitations of the human mind, in the hope of explaining and labeling the various woes and miseries affecting suffering humanity. I used the systems of Spinoza, a Jewish-Dutch philosopher of the XVIIth century, and of Sri Aurobindo, a XXth-century philosopher and mystic from India. While the two systems are very dissimilar in their developments, they both have the same starting point: an Absolute One and Infinite. The differences were due to two very separate conceptual worlds. I decided that those differences, far from being negatives, were in fact useful: they were like two lights shining on the same object, but from a different perspective; each one, by shining from a different angle, could give information that the other one would leave in the dark.
The three concepts of Error, Ignorance and Illusion define all the limitations of the human mind. (See their complete definitions in Appendix I at the end of Part I).
Error is a limitation of the mind at the level of mental activity: we are conscious of something, but our subjective knowledge of an object does not agree with the object itself. For instance, we are in error when our senses deceive us. The senses, together with our subjective interpretation (our "feelings") can induce error. Or, the senses can give correct information, which can become error because of a lack of additional (and necessary) other information. For instance, my eyes give me the correct information that the image of the sun is a flat disk that seems to be one foot in diameter, but I would be in error if I thought that this is what the sun is. The added information of the distance between the sun and my eye will rectify part of the error. Thus, lack of information can be a source of error.
We can also be in error when we start out with some correct information, but manipulate it in such a way that we derive an incorrect conclusion. For instance, my senses do not deceive me in providing the information that all healthy and uninjured cats and all dogs have four legs. But it would be wrong to say that all cats are dogs, or even that all cats are like dogs. Likewise, the Englishman landing in Calais may get the correct information that a woman who happens to be there is a redhead, but he will be very wrong if he comes to the conclusion that all women in France have red hair. Almost all logical fallacies are well known, and have been described and classified since Aristotle’s time.
Ignorance was defined as a limitation not of knowledge but of consciousness. We can see that many sentient beings (human babies, animals, and even plants) are sensitive to their environment and react accordingly, without being aware of what’s happening. There is some consciousness or awareness of the world, but not consciousness of the consciousness. There is information being processed, but these beings are not aware of themselves having the information. In other words, they don’t have a sense of self. Some of those beings (human babies, and maybe some animals) will later develop a sense of self. They will be aware of themselves as having the information. So Ignorance was defined as a state in which there is no sense of a personal self.
It should be noted that having a sense of self does not make one automatically aware of all the information at work in the mind-body unit the self represents. Hence, more misery may happen, because we often do things without being aware of the motivations behind them. Illusion: Following Sri Aurobindo, I stated that, by becoming aware of itself, the personal self escapes from the state of Ignorance, but by doing so falls into a state of Illusion. By being aware of itself, the self cuts itself from the All and Everything, the Absolute of which it is but a limited and finite expression. Again following Sri Aurobindo, I added to the definition of the state of Illusion the concept of the illusion of the ego. As individual selves aware of ourselves and unaware of the Absolute, we are all living in the illusion of the ego. Each of us forms his own little individual absolute, a vantage point from which we look at the world and at other selves. The concept of the illusion of the ego is not found in Spinoza. But let’s consider that Spinoza gives what he thinks is a thorough explanation of the individual human mind without once mentioning the individual self, the foundation of Western philosophical thinking after Descartes. So Spinoza put his finger on something akin to the concept of the illusion of the ego, but without using the word or developing the concept.
So the work came to the conclusion that following Descartes, as well as the almost universally accepted view that we are individual centers of consciousness, of decision, and of action, is an illusion. I knew that Spinoza was right in denying the existence of a free faculty of the will. I also had a strong sense that the Buddha was right when he said that we are nothing but a concatenation of feelings, thoughts, etc., without the entity of a self. But I could not explain why, and I still did not know what is a self, and why there is a self, except for the fact that it brings about, or is a manifestation of, the illusion of the ego. I felt that there was a definite need for an explanation of personal subjectivity, but I was at a loss to provide a solution. I had a clear concept of the illusion, but I did not know what it feels like to be free from the illusion. I could read what had been said by some of the “enlightened”, but reading about food is not like seeing or smelling the food, and even less like tasting it in our own mouth.
In the early 1980s, I met by chance a man named U.G. Krishnamurti. He is not to be confused with J. Krishnamurti, of whom I knew in the 1960s, and whom I had met several times. But J. Krishnamurti was like the concept of the illusion of the ego: I knew there was something there, but I could not say exactly what it was.
U.G. Krishnamurti not only said that the individual sense of self is an illusion, he claimed that he was functioning without a sense of self (following an event in the summer of 1967 which he calls his “calamity”). Suddenly there was for me, so to speak, the experimental confirmation of what had been for me only a concept, a theory. Right in front of me there was a live human being who was free from the illusion of the ego. A live breathing talking human being! Not a book. For some unfathomable reason I never doubted the authenticity of the manifestation under my eyes. A word of caution to the reader: I am not a U.G. devotee. But meeting U.G. triggered in me the philosophical solution I had been searching for. I could now put together the synthesis that had eluded me before. U.G. himself did not give it to me: he is not a philosopher as such. As for enlightenment, I am still at square one: I still feel myself to be a self. No calamity, or so-called liberation, of any kind, has happened.
Unresolved questions found a solution, things started falling in place. In 1997 I published The Useless Self, which, as the title makes clear, was a frontal attack on the imposture of the self as it is commonly understood and as it is apprehended in each individual human being. The book was short, pugnacious, and certainly reflects the influence and tremendous energy of U.G. Krishnamurti.
After meeting U.G., the confirmation of what the self is and is not was reinforced by the testimony of Suzanne Segal (Collision With the Infinite 1998) who also said that she was functioning without a self. More testimonies can be found, of course, once we know what we are looking for. Can we accept those claims as true, and why? I know that in science, a theory is proved right only when confirmed by other experiments. Unfortunately, losing one’s self is not something that each one of us can experience at will. The following pages will explain not only why I think that these testimonies can be taken at face value, and accepted as true, but also why the experimentation cannot be reproduced at will. The following pages are of course not science in the usual sense. But, like Spinoza (who, when challenged to prove that his philosophy was the best philosophy, answered, “I don’t know if my philosophy is the best philosophy, but I know it is the true philosophy.”). I can say, This may not be science, but nevertheless it is true.
It is Woody Allen, I think, who said, “I thought I had to take God’s existence on faith, and then I realized that I had to take my own existence on faith.” All joking aside, this statement goes to the heart of the matter: before thinking about God, let’s have a look at who is looking at God, that is, me. Sure, I take my own existence for granted. But what is “me?" And why do I take my own existence so much for granted?
I clearly remember an event in my early youth, something that seemed mysterious at the time, or at the very least intriguing. I was living with my parents in Saint-Eugène, a suburb west of Algiers, on the Mediterranean coast. I have this image of myself, a little boy of three or four–maybe less, I don’t know—sitting on the tile floor, playing with a little red fire truck. At eye level, there was the brown square leg of the dining table; on my left, the couch that was also my bed. It was pushed against the wall, and above it there was a window opening on a vast sunny yard, where our neighbors were raising a number of noisy and agitated hens and roosters. I was aware of these things, but without the clear knowledge that I was aware of them. Sensations were in me, but they were sensations of things, not an awareness of myself having those sensations. The table, the red truck, the tiles on the floor, the window, the sun, the hens, were recognized every day by the little boy, but not recognized by me. They were simply recognized. I suppose that young animals, as they become aware of the world around them, also recognize their den, their mother, their surroundings, without having a clear awareness of their own individual existence. So, rather than saying “they recognize,” or “I recognize,” we should say, “there is recognition.”
Sitting on the floor and playing with my truck, there was the realization of something new, a new presence. The feeling was that for some time now (a few days? a few weeks?) something was there which had not been there before. There was curiosity, and even wonder, about the “new thing.” What was it? It was not something added to my surroundings. My mother, my father, the apartment, the kitchen, the crumbling orange cheese that I liked, all that remained unchanged. There were no new emotions, sensations, no knowledge of something new on the outside. Yet, the taste of the perception of all those things had changed. Now, whenever I was aware of something (strictly speaking: whenever there was awareness of something), there was also something else going on, something, which had not been there before. I was very perplexed. More precisely, there was perplexity in the little boy, because at that moment there was still no clear sense of “me” in the little boy.
In any case, the “thing” could not be named. It was totally new, and not new like a new object presented to the little boy). It was something more than the mere perception of things or of feelings. Whenever the little boy was looking at something, there was at the same time an awareness of the awareness. Whereas previously there had been only the perception being perceived or the feeling being felt by nobody in particular, there was now a ray of consciousness that projected itself onto the objects being perceived or felt. And it seemed that, like a ray of light which penetrates darkness, and without which nothing could be seen, likewise nothing could have been perceived or felt anymore in the absence of this ray of consciousness. Using the vocabulary that I have acquired since, I would now say that I had become aware of myself, and of myself as a center of consciousness. But I could not say it then, I could only witness the new process: the feeling of being myself looking at something that was not me. And being myself through the process of looking at something. The little boy had become an individual consciousness, a consciousness at once of the world and of itself; and this “consciousness of itself” became…myself, me. It was even a little bit exciting, because I could reinforce the feeling—of “being myself”—at any time, just by looking steadily at something in the apartment.
It was a mystery, but not an overwhelming mystery, because the cultural environment had conveniently prepared a structure into which the new “thing” had a ready-made niche: “I,” first person singular. And also a name, Jean-Michel in my case. From the point of view of the others around me (mother, father, uncles, etc.) it all seemed very natural, a matter of course. The cultural environment is very welcoming to the appearance of a new self. But we will see that the reverse is not true: If, for some reason, the sense of self disappears in a living person, the cultural environment—at least in the West; India has a different tradition—has no conceptual structure to accommodate the event. Worse, it resists it fiercely, and pathologizes it.
In any case, it was still all very new and perplexing for the little boy, regardless of how much it seemed natural and normal to everybody else. He kept wondering what exactly was this new feeling of consciousness (without, of course, using the word consciousness), which was now added to the usual perceptions and sensations, which had been there all along and had not changed at all. Up until then, perceptions and sensations had been perceived and sensed, but by nobody in particular, no specific person, no individual perceiver. They were felt, that was all. But now there was me, aware of myself as I was perceiving and sensing them. Till then they had been there, without me; and now I was there too, with them. And I was so much there with them that it seemed that, without me, perceptions and sensations could no longer be there. They were mine. They were so much mine that it seemed that without me (i.e., without this new feeling of being there myself), they could not have been at all. My being aware of myself made the very existence of my perceptions dependent on me. I was the ray of consciousness. Without me, nothing could be perceived. I was perplexed, in a very confused way, because up till then everything had been perceived and sensed without this new sense of me. Needless to say, the little boy did not ask his parents about the whole thing. He was simply observing that something new was happening. He had neither the concepts nor the vocabulary that I am using now to describe what was happening. Nevertheless this present description is an exact rendition of what was going on in my mind at the time.
The little boy had become an I, although under the conditioning influence of his environment he had already been using the first person singular, before discovering his own sense of self. So I continued saying “I” as before the “new thing,” but still could not make sense of this new bizarre feeling that the world around me existed only because a “ray of consciousness”–which had not been there previously—was aimed at it. Without that ray, that is to say, without me, everything would remain unknown, invisible, un-perceived, non-existent. There were things in front of me, and they were known because this ray of consciousness was coming out of me. The self had come into being. I felt that I was a center of consciousness. I did not perceive any more colors, shapes, or things than before. Nothing had changed in that respect, but at the same time everything was totally transformed, since every time something was perceived, I was there also. I felt that I was a high beam of consciousness, and I played at aiming it at this or that thing, just to bring it to life, lift it temporarily out of its dark non-existence. I did not realize that by so doing it was not the thing I was bringing to life, but the sense of myself.
I was perfectly aware–that is, fully convinced—that this high beam was not of the surroundings, was different from them. It was not the rich and salty taste of the orange cheese that I liked, it was not the door of the toilet, or the hallway leading to it. Even though these things had hitherto been perceived without the high beam, it now seemed that they could not have been perceived at all without it. I even tried to go back to the previous situation, where things had been perceived just by themselves. In vain. Now, most of the time, when I looked at something, I was also conscious of myself looking, conscious of myself as a ray of consciousness bringing things to light.
I kept wondering about this new state of affairs. Looking back at it now, I see that a radical transfer of consciousness had taken place. Before, things had been perceived without me. There had been awareness of them in me but not by me. Things did not need me to recognize themselves, even though they did it in me. But recognize themselves they did, since the little boy would routinely go to the kitchen, or to his toys, according to need or whim, without knowing that he was doing it, since he had yet no awareness of himself. By “things,” I mean the whole scene, the surroundings and the little boy reacting to each other and acting on each other. The little boy was still a “thing” since, like the rest of the décor, he was not aware of himself.
But when I became aware of myself as a beam of consciousness aimed at things, that very process attributed consciousness to me, and not to the things perceived. When there is no self to be aware of itself and of the world, things do their thing and mind their own business, without anybody claiming exclusive ownership or authorship of anything. Thus, the little boy would go to the kitchen, eat some of the crumbling orange cheese when his mother was not looking, and go back to his toys, all the while blissfully unaware that he was doing anything. There was awareness of things being done, but not of anybody doing them. One day, all that changed. One day, the little boy saw it in a totally different way: he was the one perceiving and acting, he was the source of consciousness, the beam lighting up things which by themselves were inert, passive, unconscious. A Copernican revolution had taken place (but in a reverse way: I, like the pre-Copernican earth, became the center of the world). This is how we take our own existence on faith (the existence of an I aware of the world and of itself), even though we are not really aware of the fact that it is nothing but faith, as noted by Woody Allen.
As mentioned before, I could not go back to the previous state of affairs, where there had been no me and no ray of consciousness. But it was much easier to go in the other direction. It was like a new toy. To entertain myself I would play at “triggering” the new thing, by looking steadily at the leg of the table, or at the little red truck, and pouf! there it was! The “thing” was there, along with the perception of the table or of the truck. There was the truck, just like before, but there was also me looking at the truck. In a sense, it was exciting. As time passed, I got used to the new state of affairs. I got used to being me, to having a sense of my own existence, in addition to the awareness of things. And I stopped wondering. I forgot the previous state of affairs. How ironic! How convenient! As we shall see, the sense of self exists by remembering itself every morning when we wake up. It is memory, but selective memory. It remembers itself, but forgets the original condition, the awareness of things only, by themselves, with nothing else. How easy it is to deny that which we do not remember. Thus it comes that the self sees consciousness in itself but nowhere else in the world. It becomes the absolute illusion of the ego.
The sense of being an I appears in early childhood, in the form of a beam of consciousness aimed at an inert and unconscious world. A personal self, aware of its own existence, appears to be wielding this beam of consciousness. As a result, it is unlike anything else in nature.
Once the sense of a knowing and acting self appears, we take it for granted. As a little boy, I got used to being a self, and forgot the previous state of affairs. I never asked myself what role, if any, did the self play in my life, besides being there, and taking itself for granted. I did not question myself, I did not question the self. Those questions never came to me, and neither do they to most of us. If they do, the condition is considered pathological. The person needs therapy, to re-establish and reinforce a sense of self. Nevertheless, having established beyond any reasonable doubt that I do have a sense of self, I can now pose the question: would I (I, that is, the mind-body unit which is me) be the same person if my sense of self had never appeared? Would I know and do the same things I am now knowing and doing? The sense of self certainly transforms the subjective feel of our existence, but does it change anything to the objective reality? If a river had a clear sense of self, would it act differently and follow a different course? Or a worm? Or a bird? Conversely, if a human being did not have a sense of self, would he act differently?
Before trying to answer these questions, it is important to look at the way the self is perceived by most of us. The question of the individual thinking subject—what am I, what is me, what is self — is certainly one of the most important in philosophy. At least, that was what the great Descartes thought. In “I think, therefore I am,” he posed the direct intuition of the thinking subject by itself as the cornerstone of his philosophy. Because I think, and I know that I am thinking, I am a thinking entity. That is the ultimate truth about what I am, more basic even than the sensation of my own body, which could be an illusion of the senses. But one can question the validity of his answer, and of his approach as a whole. Certainly, the thinking subject can, just by thinking, be proof to itself of its own existence. But simply being convinced that I exist as a self does not tell me what exactly is a self, nor where does it come from, nor what is the cause of me, i.e., of my sense of self.
Once the self has started thinking itself, it cannot stop thinking itself. I discovered that truth myself, as a little boy, when I tried (for fun, as a game) to go back to the previous state of affairs, where there was no sense of me. But I could not. Like the rest of us, I was burdened with myself for the rest of my life. Or, as Woody Allen remarked, we have to take our own existence on faith, because what is the alternative? If I don't take my own existence on faith, what then? It seems awful just to think about it. Can I contemplate my non-existence? While alive? For one thing, I need first to have faith in my own existence before any faith in God is possible. I have to believe that I exist before any other belief in anything else is possible. Believing in God implies that there is first a thinking entity, which can hold that belief.
Following Descartes, it is true that we have a certitude, and maybe a truth, but what does that mean? What is true of the I is true also of any other thought: once we have had a thought, we cannot stop thinking it. We cannot not think it. It is there, in the background, ready to pop up when the circumstances warrant. True, we can forget a thought. But there is no chance of the I forgetting itself, since it is always there, at least potentially, every time we think or perceive or sense or feel something. I don’t think of myself continuously, but I know that I am always there, the ray of consciousness shining on anything brought to my consciousness, brought to me. How could I forget myself, forget that I exist?
So we have some kind of truth, some kind of certainty, but can we make it an absolute, the whole foundation of everything else (God, the world, the body) as Descartes has done? Or is it just a trap that the I sets for itself by thinking itself? Self-awareness entails self-certainty of the I to itself: “I cannot doubt that right now I am doubting about everything; if I am doubting, I am thinking, and if I am thinking, I am, I exist as a thinking entity.” This self-certainty is a powerful lure, yet it may be only a mirage, for this self-certainty has a subjective basis. It cannot be verified objectively, from the outside, so to speak. Looking from the outside, the subjective self-certainty of the thinking entity goes up in smoke. For the wind blows, and a river flows, but we do not conclude that there is a blowing entity or a flowing entity, because of course we look at the wind and at the river objectively.
Descartes’ mistake has not been to state the subjective self-certainty of the I to itself, but to use that subjective certainty to look objectively at the rest of the world, at the rest that is not the self. By looking at his own subjectivity, he did not have to look at what comes before it, because there is no point in looking for an objective cause (in the outside world) to a subjective state of affairs. That is the fatal flaw. Descartes set out to doubt everything that he was thinking about the objective world—a very worthy enterprise. In the unceasing and uncertain flow of his thinking, Descartes discovered the solid island of the self, a subjective certainty.
He then proceeded to look downstream of the self, but he never looked upstream. Like most of us, although more articulate about it, he was fascinated by the evidence of the self-awareness and the self-certainty of the I, and thought that he had an absolute foundation to everything else (God, his own body, no evil genius, etc.) But the fact that the I is proof to itself of its own existence does not mean that it is self-caused, that it is creating itself –which would truly be a miracle in the normal order of things. One must get out of the subjectivity of the self-certain I, and look objectively at what comes before the I, and figure out what it is that brings about this self-awareness and this self-certainty, what makes them possible. Yet this is rarely done, for reasons that I am now going to examine.
For most of us the thinking subject is such a certainty that it seems ludicrous to question it. In fact, it is such a certainty that it seems to be one with consciousness, it seems that the two are one and the same thing. And yet everybody seems to have forgotten, as I did myself when a little boy, that there was a time in early childhood when there was in me awareness of things without a clear sense of any I or personal entity. But that was then, and this is now. Now, consciousness and thinking subject go together. What could consciousness be, or mean, if there is no personal and individual consciousness? The I itself is nothing if it is not conscious of itself. Likewise, knowledge in the normal sense of the word cannot exist if there is no self that knows something. I could not be conscious of anything if I were not at the same time conscious of myself. When I know, I know that I know. “I know,” means knowledge of something and the awareness (at least implicitly or potentially) of myself knowing the thing. When I know something, there is the knowledge of the thing and the sense that I am the self that knows, the sense that I am the center and the source of a beam of consciousness aimed at the thing known.
This certainty is at the core of each and every one of us as individual human beings. Without this foundation, without this inner point of reference, we would be constantly staring nothingness in the face; more, we would be nothingness, for our entire subjectivity would be nothing but the intuition of nothingness.
But this “certainty” is neither a proof nor an explanation. Has Descartes been really thorough in his methodical doubt? Yes, as far as objective knowledge of the world is concerned, and no, as far as the subjective personal self is concerned. But why is this Cartesian “certainty” so appealing? Because Descartes has said, loudly and clearly, what everybody feels, or thinks, in a more or less confused manner. But we should not be misled by the universality of the confusion. Of course, clearly conceived and posited, à la Descartes, the individual thinking subject, aware of itself and proof to itself of its own existence, seems to be an incontrovertible truth. Once we have heard Descartes, we think, of course, it goes without saying, I should have thought of it myself.
Yet this “thinking entity” is a very strange thing indeed. The self is a very strange thing. It has a place apart in the normal order of things, since one cannot find its origin or its cause anywhere in nature, certainly not in the material world. What about God? (as Woody Allen would say). What if the thinking subject is the secular version of each immortal soul created by God? Maybe, but Descartes has posited the individual entity before positing God! The incontrovertible evidence is not God, but the I aware of itself! In the order of revelation, the self comes before God! The preachers urge us to find God, to accept God, even to become one with God, because of course the self is always already accepted, never put in question. They seem to put God above everything else, and yet by those very urgings they make the personal individual self a more indubitable certainty, a more rock-solid foundation than God himself.
The I has a place apart in nature because we grant it, among other things, the monopoly of consciousness, and of free will, two “faculties” that we routinely deny to the rest of nature: rivers do not flow freely, rain does not fall of its own free will, and animals move and act “by instinct,” something which is a given and over which they have no control. Or they act according to their conditioning, shaped by the interaction between their senses and the environment, in a mechanistic fashion. And why is that so? Because things and beasts have no “self,” no consciousness. Only man freely “decides,” because he is an autonomous thinking subject, because he has a self, or is a self. Man apprehends his own individual self, and sees nothing of the kind in the rest of nature, be it animal, vegetal, or mineral. Good opportunity for some self-congratulation, and sometimes even some self-exaltation. Instead of seeing the truly bizarre nature of the self, we blindly accept it as the most natural thing in the world, if not the most wonderful.
We should be more cautious, and more humble. The individual thinking self is, by its very nature, aware of its consciousness (of itself and of the world;) by its very nature, it is also ignorant of its ignorance: it knows that it is, but not what it is. Thus, the potential for self-delusion is infinite. The ability of the self to be automatically aware of itself, to automatically posit its own existence, is the biggest trap of all. It is defined as the “state of illusion,” which is our condition when in our early childhood we become aware of ourselves.
What is exactly the individual self? Where does it come from? What happens to it after death? If it is something while we are alive, can it become nothing after death, which would mean that it is also nothing while alive? David Hume, while alive himself, said that he looked for it everywhere, but in vain. He stated that he could find in himself only a diversity of mental events, with nothing like a “self,” a mental entity existing in itself and different from those mental events. The Buddha had said the same thing: one human individual is nothing but a concatenation of thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, with no entity beyond that, no ontological unity. They denied (in advance, in the case of the Buddha) the Cartesian entity, the very thing which Descartes thought was the only certainty that could not be doubted.
It’s interesting to note that modern research, in neuro-biology for instance, has stopped mentioning “the Self.” Nowhere is the Cartesian entity used to explain anything in the mental or physical functioning of a human individual. The thinking entity is gone, discarded, like the “spirit” or the “nobility” of gold. I am talking of course of what’s happening in science, as it is the object of study by the scientist. The scientist himself (and herself, too) who does the objective research continues more than ever, subjectively, to apprehend himself (and herself, too) as the subject, the agent doing the research. More than ever, in his own subjectivity, the scientist is the thinking subject, the Cartesian entity, even though objectively he can find this entity nowhere in his research.
So we are faced with the fundamental question: is the individual self the true foundation of all consciousness and existence, or a total, an absolute illusion? What is this enigma, which is me? It is time to go back to the discovery, the revelation of myself to myself, that I experienced in my early childhood. It was at the time an intriguing mystery, but there is more to it than solving a childhood riddle, like whether Santa Claus is for real. For if Santa Claus becomes an amusing and jolly fellow, the I is for keeps. It stands at the center of individual consciousness forever (that is, for the rest of our sentient life). It is inseparable from the functioning of knowledge (when there is knowledge, any knowledge, it is I who have this knowledge) and from the meaning of things. In and of themselves, things have no meaning and no value; they do so only in relation to me. Thought, knowledge, meanings, values, decision, action, everything that is human has the self at its center.
But the mystery can be solved only if we take the opposite of Descartes’ approach. We also have to ignore the everyday/everyman common sense intuition that I exist, I am a self, and that’s all there is to it. Rather than starting from the self, and looking at what comes after, we have to look before the I, and find what brings it about. The I is proof to itself of its own existence. Why is that so? Why should this absolute certainty of the I to itself be taken for granted? Descartes should have applied his methodical doubt not only to the contents of his knowledge, but also to this very individual self, which has this knowledge.
Consciousness is centered on the individual self. But are they the same thing or not? Is consciousness just a quality or power of the self, or is the self just a part or expression of something else called consciousness?
Problems of consciousness and the self hinge on what seem two indubitable facts:
a. That consciousness is manifested and apprehended subjectively, at least as far as human beings are concerned; and
b. That consciousness is inseparable from the sense of an individual conscious entity, a self, sometimes called in philosophy a “unified conscious field.”
Consciousness and self in man are both subjective and inseparable. Should we assume that they are that, and only that? Or should we look at other possibilities:
a. That consciousness and self can exist independently of one another, that is, there could be consciousness without an individual self, or a self without consciousness; and
b. That consciousness, or self, or either one, can also exist and be manifested (rather than just apprehended) objectively rather than just subjectively.
First, let’s look at the self. It is obvious that the individual self cannot exist without consciousness. Its very nature is to be conscious of itself. An unconscious self is no self at all if it is not conscious of itself. So self is dependent on, and presupposes consciousness.
Can the self exist, or be manifested, objectively? No. I can observe the manifestations of a self in others, and others in me. From these manifestations, I infer that others have a self, and others make the same inference about me. But I cannot objectively apprehend the self of others (in which case I would be them, or would somehow be “wired” to their brain). To exist at all the self has to be apprehended subjectively, by itself, from within. Even though we don’t know exactly what the self is, we know that it cannot exist independently of consciousness, and that it has to be apprehended subjectively.
Can consciousness exist independently of a self? The answer is not easy because, first of all, we don’t know exactly what consciousness is. We don’t know exactly what is a self either, but its characteristics are more easily defined. The self has to be conscious in order to be. Can there be consciousness outside of a unified conscious field, that is, an individual subjective self? It all depends on whether the unified field is as big as the entire domain of consciousness, or is only a part of it. Is consciousness limited to the individual subjective self, or is it bigger? I have already inferred in other human beings a self, comparable to mine. If they have a self, consciousness is there, too. I cannot access the subjectivity of their self, but I can objectively, by observing their behavior, their reactions and responses, note that there is consciousness at work in them. But I don’t know if their consciousness is the same as mine, i.e., the same as my subjective manifestation of consciousness.
I don’t know if their consciousness is the same as mine because, even if I can see objectively by their behavior that they are processing information the same way as I do myself, I literally have no way of knowing if they know what they are doing, i.e., if they have reflected consciousness. I can only assume that their subjectivity is the same as mine. Consciousness in a self is apprehended as reflected consciousness. When I know (or feel, or sense, etc.) I know that I know. So it seems that reflected consciousness has to be connected to a self. But what about consciousness that is not reflected? When the baby is aware of the presence of its mother, but is not conscious of itself, is it totally unconscious, or unconscious only of itself? In that case, we could say that consciousness is manifested either as reflected consciousness with a self, or as consciousness as yet un-reflected, and with no self.
Can we give the name “consciousness” to consciousness that is un-reflected? Or should we give the process a different name? The usual meaning of consciousness is in the sense of “reflected consciousness,” meaning that not only is there knowledge in me about something, but I also know that I am aware of it. There is knowledge about something, and at the same time there is an I that knows itself to be a sentient entity (or at least that’s what it assumes itself to be). This usual meaning seems to preclude the use of “consciousness” as “non-reflected consciousness” (or “un-reflected consciousness”). Yet, it seems that restricting the meaning of consciousness to “reflected consciousness” is an abusive restriction of the meaning of the word.
Let us take the example of an experiment with a patient who has brain damage. The link between the two brain hemispheres is no longer there. A red object, say, is presented to one side of the patient, so that the information that there is a red object will reach one eye and one side of the brain, but will not be transmitted to the other side. Asked if he sees the object, the patient answers “no.” He may or may not see it, but he is not aware that he sees it. So there is no reflected consciousness of the red object. But is there un-reflected consciousness? If asked to hold the object, the patient will move his hand and grab the object, which he just said he did not see. So the object was not part of the reflected consciousness, and yet it was part of un-reflected consciousness, since it was grabbed. The information that the object was there was transmitted to the eye, and to a part of the brain, but was not reflected, so that the patient was not aware of it. To say “the patient does not see the red object” does not mean that there is no vision of the red object. Not only is there vision (at the level of the eye as a camera, forming an image of an object) but there is also perception of that image. The information has been processed beyond the eye, and stored somewhere, so that when he is asked to grab the red object, the patient does so: he knows (there is in him the knowledge) that there is a red object in front of him, yet he does not know that he knows. There is consciousness, but not at the reflected level. Since reflected consciousness and self go together, to say “the patient does not see the red object” means—in this case—that “there is in the patient both vision and perception of the red object at the level of un-reflected consciousness” and that “this consciousness is not reflected, and there is no self to see anything” (when using the damaged part of the brain).
The patient heard the request to hold the object, was aware of the request, and went on to do what was asked. Could the verbal request be addressed to the non-reflected part of the brain, so that the patient would hear it, but would not be aware of hearing it, just as he saw the red object, but was not aware of seeing it? I am not a neuro-biologist or a doctor, and I have not conducted any experiment of the kind. But it seems logical and likely that the patient would indeed grab the object upon request, even if he were not aware of the request. What if the request had been expressed in a foreign language that the patient did not understand? Whether aware of it or not, he would not grab the object. But not because of a lack of reflected consciousness. Rather, the patient processes the request in English, whether he is aware or conscious of it or not, but will not act on a request in a foreign language. Again, the reason has nothing to do with reflected consciousness.
It has to do with the conditioning of the brain. If my brain is conditioned to process information in English, I will react to the request, and if it is not, I will not, whether I, as a self, am aware of it or not. Likewise, if part of my conditioning or motivation is to resist the request (because I feel mistreated or used, or because I want to be more clever than the doctor testing me) I will not accede to the request, again whether I am aware of it or not.
We can even imagine a situation where the patient knew a foreign language, but lost awareness of that language knowledge after a brain accident. That is, the knowledge is there, but is not reflected at the level of the self-aware self. If asked in that language, the patient will respond to the request, even though he is not aware that he has been asked at all, because the information has not been reflected to the level of the self. The point is, information is being processed at all times, according to the conditioning of the given brain, and some of it may, or may not, reach the level of reflected consciousness. But reaching the level of reflected consciousness, or not, does not affect the processing of information at the basic un-reflected level, and does not affect the functioning of the organism in general.
Going back to our patient, the fact is not that there was no consciousness at all. Rather, the information did not reach the I, the self-aware self, because it had not been reflected. There was consciousness, but it was un-reflected. There was un-reflected consciousness, but there was no I. The self and reflected consciousness go together. We cannot limit consciousness to reflected consciousness, but we can limit reflected consciousness to the I, and the I to reflected consciousness. Someone might object, and recommend using consciousness in its usual sense, and use “information,” say, rather than “un-reflected consciousness.” That usage would imply that “information” and “un-reflected consciousness” are not the same thing. But then we would have to explain how information, when it is reflected, becomes consciousness. Denying that there is consciousness (un-reflected) at the level of information makes consciousness (reflected) a mystery—and an unnecessary mystery. The mystery comes from the fallacious belief that, because the self cannot exist without consciousness, consciousness cannot exist without a self, and that consciousness can exist only if it is reflected. If that were the case, consciousness would not be the reflection of itself, and what would it be the reflection of?
If we accept that consciousness (or information) can be manifested without being reflected, and without a self, then its domain suddenly expands tremendously. There is consciousness in the baby, who is sensitive to and recognizes his mother, his milk, and countless other things. The same can be said of animals. They are aware of, know, and recognize countless things in their environment, but with varying degrees of reflected consciousness, and therefore with varying degrees of sense of self, which can be inferred more easily by us (human beings) in an ape than in, say, a worm. But the worm, in its way, is as sensitive to its environment as I am to mine. The self needs reflected consciousness, but consciousness itself can be variously reflected. Consciousness covers the whole range from fully reflected consciousness to less and less reflected consciousness, but still with full sensitivity to the outside world. By “full sensitivity” I mean full sensitivity for a given organism. The sensitivity of the worm may not be mine, but mine is not his (or its) either. They are just different forms of sensitivity.
And the same (manifestations of consciousness without reflected consciousness) can be said not only of animals (with a gradual loss of reflected consciousness from the “higher” to the “lower” animals), but also of plants, which are fully sensitive (in their own way, which is not mine) to their environment to feed themselves and to survive. AND OF COURSE the same can be said of inert mineral matter, which is sensitive to itself in the form of chemical or even simple physical reactions to itself. When placed in a specific situation, the atoms exchange electrons, and the molecules exchange atoms. At the most simple level, even without any exchange, matter reacts to itself and “feels” the pull of gravity.
One may be reluctant to attribute “consciousness” to babies, animals, plants, and inert matter. Again, one might be tempted to limit the meaning of consciousness to reflected consciousness, awareness of the awareness. But where would the cut-off point be? When does consciousness stop being consciousness when it is less reflected? We can call it sensitivity instead of consciousness, but that would be another word for the same thing. For if reflected consciousness is the reflection of itself (i.e., of consciousness as yet un-reflected), consciousness has to be there in the first place. It has to be before being reflected. The awareness of the awareness needs awareness first. In the baby there is awareness of things (sensitivity to things), and then there is awareness of this awareness. Consciousness directed at itself rather than at things becomes reflected consciousness, but it has to be consciousness in the first place to be able to direct itself to itself. It should be called non-reflected consciousness, but it is consciousness all the same.
One reason that we are so reluctant to extend the meaning of consciousness beyond the range of “reflected consciousness with a self as the agent of awareness” is that there is the added problem of meaning. Not only do we believe that there can be no consciousness without a self, we also believe that the information conveyed must have meaning. Knowledge, for man, goes hand in hand with meaning. Even when we hear meaningless gibberish, we re-establish meaning by isolating the given string of sounds and categorizing it as meaningless. Even when we see something that is totally strange to us and a baffling mystery, we re-establish meaning (order in our subjective view of the world) by categorizing it as, precisely, a “baffling mystery.” For us, the meaning of what we’ve seen is that it has no recognized meaning, it is a baffling mystery. It’s impossible to conceive a knowing self as perceiving absolutely no meaning in the world. We will later see not only that meaning and self go together, but also that the only use for meaning (so to speak) is to prop up the sense of self. Meaning, self, and reflected consciousness go together, and that’s one more reason why so many deny (following Descartes) that un-reflected consciousness (information without connection to a personal self and therefore without meaning) is still consciousness.
We have established that the self is consciousness, but that consciousness is more than the self. We have also established that the self can be apprehended, and can exist, only subjectively, whereas consciousness, as non-reflected consciousness, can be apprehended and can exist objectively, and without a self. We still don’t know exactly what self and consciousness are. Let’s look at the self first.
Descartes has built his philosophy on the foundation of the individual self, which knows itself to exist beyond any possible doubt. Yet, he has not really clarified the mystery of the self, this most bizarre thing in nature. He has looked at what happens after one has posited the I, but not before.
Once the self knows itself to be, it can never be free from itself. Cioran, a tormented XXth-century self, asks with good reason: "How can one escape from the absolute of oneself?"
The Cartesian affirmation of the self and Cioran’s rhetorical question have one common thread: the sense of self is at the core of each individual human life. Once the self knows itself to be it stays at the very center, it is the very essence of our individual existence. AND IT IS PRECISELY BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH AT THE CENTER OF OUR BEING THAT THE SELF IS NEVER SERIOUSLY QUESTIONED. IT IS ALWAYS TACITLY TAKEN AS THE ABSOLUTE STARTING POINT FROM WHICH THINGS FOLLOW, BUT WHICH ITSELF, IN ITS ESSENCE, FOLLOWS FROM NOTHING. IT IS NEVER REALLY QUESTIONED BECAUSE TO DO SO WOULD UNCOVER THE ABSOLUTE NOTHINGNESS AT THE CORE OF EACH INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE.
No doubt the reader will respond (heatedly and indignantly, if not condescendingly): I don’t know about you, but as far as I am concerned, I know that I exist. Moreover, when I know something, I know that I know it (which is, among others, one of the ways by which I know myself to exist). I am not an animal, and even less, God forbid, a mineral, an insensitive rock. And this is not an obscure and primitive gut feeling. Sophisticated philosophical speculation goes the same way. Descartes has confirmed that I am not in error when I feel or know myself to exist. How could I doubt my own existence? I can doubt the truth of the knowledge I have of things, but not the truth of my own individual existence. I EXIST, HOW COULD I BE NOTHING? I am my body, I am my thoughts and feelings and emotions, I am ME. What is this nonsense all about anyway?
It is not nonsense. What does exist, objectively, is the mind-body unit: a biological machine coupled with a mental (carbon-based) information-processing unit. What is in question is the subjective sense that this unit has of itself.
It is true that contemplating the possibility of one’s own nothingness is a very frightening thing. Admitting to the possibility of a void at the core of our being while alive can drive one to lose one’s mind. Physical death is already frightening enough for most of us. Why add the possibility of mental or psychological death in our lifetime, before death? Let death do what it wants with me after I die, BUT NOT NOW! Not when I am alive! It does not matter what I am exactly, as long as I am. What I am exactly is a mystery, and let’s leave the mystery alone, it’s better for all of us.
In other words, we want to have it both ways. We want to reap the benefits of knowledge, but only about the world (knowledge is power), not about our selves. We want knowledge, but not the curse of knowledge. We think we are smarter than poor Eve who, having innocently (more or less) discovered that she did exist, had to face the music, the knowledge of good and evil. We want to eat the apple, but ignore the consequences. It won’t work.
Even though it is almost universally accepted as a given, the self remains a generally unexamined mystery, because it is at the very core of our personal existence. To question it runs the risk of unveiling a void at the center of our individual being. Even the most strong-hearted recoil at that prospect. The Bible, in its way, has already warned us of the curse of knowledge of good and evil. But this curse has no meaning unless one knows oneself to exist. The sense of self is the necessary first curse, before all other curses, biblical or otherwise.
If, contrary to Descartes and to our own unexamined faith, we don’t take the self for granted, then we have to explain it. Also, self and consciousness can no longer be taken on faith to be the same. They are different, but we still have to explain them. If the self is not the whole of consciousness, then it is only a particular manifestation of consciousness, more precisely of reflected consciousness. By refusing to identify consciousness solely with self, we expand the scope of consciousness far beyond its limited manifestation in an individual human self.
I want to go back to my own story as a little boy—a story which is everybody’s, whether we remember it or not. After I became aware of myself as a center of consciousness, I could not go back to the previous state of affairs, where things had been perceived without me being aware of them, without me being aware of me. Before, there was the perception of things, but no me. After, there was me perceiving things, and existing by not being them. I was the perceiver, they were the perceived. I “had” consciousness. I was the ray of consciousness shining on things and bringing them to awareness. I was consciousness, they were not, and they were inert.
Thus, there had been a transfer of consciousness. Before, things had been perceived, but with no personal I, no center, no sense of self. The perception had been taking place, but it had been a perception of things, not of perception. There had been consciousness, but not reflected consciousness, that is to say, consciousness of consciousness. The transfer of consciousness from the things to me had also caused a change in the consciousness itself. From impersonal it had become personal, centered on the I. Thus, we can notice the way things go: the perception of things (the sensitivity to things) is impersonal, with no center, but the perception of the perception is personal, and it has a center. The sensitivity to things, when it is sensitive to itself rather than to things, can function only when it is related to self, an individual I, a person who is supposed to “have” this sensitivity, and those perceptions. And by “person” I mean an event in consciousness that apprehends itself as a person.
As noted before, the sense of self came after the sensations and perceptions already existing in the little boy, and did not change them or add anything to them by its presence. Without a self, those perceptions were nothing but impressions of matter on itself, which means that matter, by being sensitive to itself, is somehow consciousness, or has some characteristics of consciousness. Those perceptions are caused by pressure on the body of a baby either from the outside (perceptions of light, movement, etc.) or from inside (sensations of cold, hunger, etc.) Thus, the body without a self is nothing but a grouping of sensors, as if camera, microphone, thermometer and other sensitive devices were linked and put together in a package. The package senses many things, inside as well as outside itself, and can react to the information thus gathered, but it has no sense of itself, of its own “unity.” It also has no sense of the meaning of those sensations. The baby feels something and cries, but does not know that the feeling is hunger. It’s only when the little boy has a sense of self that the sensation acquires meaning: the little boy now knows what the sensation is.
This package, the baby, is living biological matter, and very sensitive. Repeated sense-impressions on its nervous system are going to leave a trace, rather than disappearing as the ripples in a pond cease if no new stone is thrown. Repeated impressions leave a trace, and a new impression of the same kind will “find” the trace left by earlier ones. The new impression will “recognize” itself in the trace. It will recognize, not in the sense of a self, which knows and recognizes what is brought to its senses, but recognize in the way the waters falling on a mountain slope “recognize” the groove left by preceding waters, and follow it. They don’t “know” that it’s a groove, but they follow it all the same. Likewise, the impression does not know that it stands for hunger (or whatever else), but it “recognizes” itself. It does not know what it is, or even that it is, yet goes to the familiar ground somewhere in the nervous matter of the baby.
I am not a neuro-scientist, and I cannot explain the exact process by which the impressions recognize themselves, that is, recognize their familiar groove in my nervous system. But I do know this: my nervous system is very sensitive, and matter also is routinely sensitive to itself, be it organic and biological or “only” mineral matter. My nervous system is, after all, nothing but biological matter. Be it in nature (all physical, chemical or biological events) or in man (who is of course part of nature and a natural “event” among others), matter is sensitive to itself. I call this sensitivity primary consciousness, or non-reflected consciousness: Non-reflected, because this sensitivity does not know that it is, and yet consciousness, because without it reflected consciousness (the reflection of what already is) could not exist. Without it matter would not react to itself, everything would be inert, at the absolute zero. But unlike the Cartesian subject, who exists by knowing itself to be, this sensitivity exists without knowing itself to be. It is the sensitivity of matter to matter, not the sensitivity of sensitivity to itself. It is manifested every time there is change in matter, that is to say, all the time.
This sensitivity is the same in the little boy (or in living matter in general) and in the rest in nature, including the mineral world. Biological matter is made up of mineral matter. Living matter reacts to itself and to the rest of nature according to the same physical and chemical laws that govern changes in nature. In both cases (mineral or biological matter) there is some transfer at the level of atoms, molecules, or living cells. When mineral matter is organized in a more complex or specialized manner, it becomes biological matter. I am unable to explain the transition from mineral to biological. The fact remains: living matter is mineral matter, and all the laws of physics and chemistry apply to it, with no exception that I know of. Nervous matter, where the event of reflected consciousness takes place, is part of living matter, and thus is mineral matter (even if specifically organized mineral matter), and the laws of physics and chemistry apply to it also.
Some may think that this “organized complexity” of matter, which brings about not only life but also reflected consciousness must have a “guiding hand,” divine or otherwise. This hypothesis may have some appeal at the emotional level, but it is not necessary. Everything can be explained by the capacity of matter to be conditioned. At a simple level, the waters rushing down the mountain “condition” the side of the mountain (they leave a groove on the ground), and are themselves “conditioned” by the new lay of the land (they follow the groove). The only necessary guiding hands are gravity and the plasticity of water. The same process, more complex but essentially the same, takes place for the manifestation of life and of reflected consciousness: matter is conditioned to react in a certain way, rather than randomly. The apparition in a human being, first of reflected consciousness, then of an individual sense of self, is nothing but a conditioning of nervous matter. The only necessary guiding hand is the capacity of nervous matter to retain impacts that are much more complex than rivulets of water down a slope.
So impressions on the organism leave a trace, and new impressions will follow the same “groove” (this groove in nervous matter is a pattern of neurons, or a pattern of chemical or electrical paths—otherwise known as conditioning). We have no choice but to recognize that at that level of unreflected consciousness—sensitivity of matter to itself —these impressions have no need of a self either to be or to recognize themselves. They recognize themselves, just like water running down the side of a mountain will “recognize” an existing groove, made by previous running waters, and will follow it. No self is needed; the force of gravity, the plasticity of water, and the fact that the mountainside retains a previous impression are enough. There is no river entity that “recognizes” the bed of the river and “decides” to follow it.
The same process, only more complex or specialized, is at work in the case of the human baby who “recognizes” the smell of milk and “decides” that he wants it. The baby does not have a self yet, any more than the waters rushing down a mountain do. But whereas the soil could register and retain in a groove only the mechanical erosion of the water, the baby’s nervous system is more sensitive, and the process will go further. The nervous system will retain a trace of the electro-magnetic impressions coming from the outside. New impressions of the same kind will “find” that trace, and follow that groove. They find themselves, so to speak, on familiar ground. Each time an impression follows a pre-existing groove, less and less of its energy will be absorbed by the “digging” of the groove, and more and more will be available for something else. The neurons will fire along a specific path or pattern more and more easily. This energy will resound in the groove, bounce on itself: the impression recognizes itself, echoes on itself, because the groove where it finds itself “fits.” It is familiar ground, because the groove has been dug in the shape of similar previous impressions.
Thus there was in me, when a little boy, the recognizing, the “knowledge” of orange cheese, of warmth and of mother before there was a self who could recognize these impressions or itself, and before they could have meaning for anybody. Not only do the impressions recognize themselves without the help of any self, we will see that, in fact, the self recognizes itself, and thus exists, only because discrete impressions are already there, recognizing themselves.
Every time there is a specific impression that can fit in the corresponding groove, the process of recognition is reinforced. The groove already formed by similar prior impressions becomes more and more specific and detailed, and thus more easily “recognized” by an incoming impression. The new impression falls easily into the groove, finds itself at home, so to speak, and will echo on itself effortlessly, because less of is energy will have been dissipated in the digging of the groove. Repeated impacts of the same kind will create in a nervous system (or any other system capable of keeping traces of what hits it) a network of specific grooves; those grooves represent the “theoretical presence” of those impacts. I say “theoretical” because the actual impact (the sense-impression) does not have to be there for the groove to persevere. Yet, there is nothing theoretical about these grooves: they are neuronal networks, patterns of chemical or electrical impulses in the brain. I call those networks, patterns, and grooves a MENTAL EVENT. They are mental because they now exist in the brain, independently of external physical stimuli. Thus, a mental event is nothing but a particular disposition of matter. But the specific disposition is called mental because it continues to exist, and to function, with energy that comes from the nervous system and not from some outside impact. It is no longer caused or sustained by the energy of impressions coming from the outside. Again, let us note that mental events exist and take place before any manifestation of a conscious self.
This theoretical and lingering presence of similar impressions in a nervous system can be called a “general idea.” This is not an idea known or conceived by a thinking self. Nobody “has” this idea. Yet, it deserves the label of “idea” because it is a mental event, not a particular sense-impression. It is there, an element of information embodied in the nervous system as a "groove" (pattern of neurons) dug by repeated similar impressions. Thanks to the lingering presence, in my nervous system, of such groove-general ideas, each specific corresponding impression of orange cheese, or mother, can bounce upon itself, and thus trigger in me the recognition of those impressions. There is no self here, yet. At first, most of the vibration or energy of those impressions was absorbed by the “digging”of the groove. When the groove is dug, the impressions fall into it or follow it, and their energy is available. It will bounce and resound in the groove, echoing on itself, and “recognizing” itself. It is also possible that the nervous system will generously provide some more energy to help in the echoing. Whatever the details, the impression goes to the groove that fits best, feels at home in it, and has enough energy left to echo on itself.
Knowledge, in man, is nothing but a specific impression that recognizes itself; it recognizes its own shape or characteristics in the existing groove, and settles into it. (Thus knowledge, in its most basic form, is recognition. It is only when there is recognition of the recognition that the self can enter stage.) Knowledge (in the sense of a mental event distinct from an impression coming through the senses) is possible because each impact on the nervous system can fit into a corresponding groove, can recognize itself in the “theoretical presence,” the general idea that will have the same characteristics (because it has been dug by previous similar impacts). In other words, the system has been conditioned. Without that general idea, each impact would always be a new impact, an un-recognized impact. The process would forever start from scratch, would never build up on itself. Without the general idea, no re-cognition of an impact on the nervous system is possible. Knowledge, as it manifests itself in man, is entirely based on and made possible by general ideas. (In the case of animals, it seems that they have more pre-formed general ideas, which manifest themselves as instinct). Without the theoretical presence, the specific impression of orange cheese or of mother could not recognize itself, could not fit anywhere. Its energy would be lost somewhere, and the impression would never become a mental event. It would remain just that, an impression, possibly a vivid one, possibly vividly felt, but always a new one, always new and always unknown because un-recognized and un-recognizable.
The impression on the senses is specific, the idea is general. Knowledge happens when a specific impression coming from the senses finds a connection to a general idea –itself a “groove” or pattern in the nervous system— and attaches itself to it. If the impression remains specific and does not connect to any general idea, then it may be felt but it is not known. (By being felt it can of course have an effect, and become a link in the chain of causes. But it will not be known.) Without a general idea of its mother the baby will look at her a million times, never recognizing her.
A mental event has been defined as a “groove” or pattern in the nervous system, which does not need an impression or energy from the outside to linger in the nervous system. It is also called a “general idea,” and it is there that similar impressions will rebound on themselves and recognize themselves. They are then recognized, or “known,” but not known by any particular self, which has not yet appeared. The knowledge is there, as information stored in the system, but it is not personalized. Without these “general ideas” no recognition, no “knowledge” of any impression is possible. It has been noted that matter is sensitive to itself, and that what is called a “mental event” is nothing but a particular disposition of matter.
Up till now, everything has been going on without any sense of self, personal or otherwise. Let’s see how the process of “mentalization” of impressions continues. Mentalization refers to states of nervous matter, or changes in it, that are not maintained, or triggered, by outside impulses or energy. Specific impressions of orange cheese, door, mother, etc., are of course different from each other. So are the “grooves” or “patterns”—the general ideas—where these impressions will “land” in order for the recognition of a specific impression to take place. We will have a groove, or pattern, for orange cheese, another and different one for milk, etc.
These general ideas have different information contents. They are all different in that respect. But they also have something in common, which is not derived from the specific impressions, but is derived from their nature as general ideas, as mental events, which, once they exist, do not need the impact of an outside impression to be and to persist. They also have in common the fact that they enable particular impressions to bounce upon themselves, once they have found their way into the groove, and thus to echo upon themselves, to recognize themselves.
Thus, there is in the general idea an element of information that did not exist at the level of the specific impressions. This information is not the echo of the specific contents of each impression. This element of information is that general ideas exist as mental events independent from outside impressions, and that they are the place where there is an echo as such, regardless of what the echo is of. Just as each general idea is the representation of multiple impressions of a similar kind, those general ideas in turn are going to generate another element of information, i.e., another abstraction or “mental event,” namely the fact that they persist as mental events, without any supply of energy from outside impressions; they also have the characteristics of a place where impressions can land effortlessly in familiar terrain, echo and vibrate on themselves, and recognize themselves.
This new mental event, this new general idea, is no longer connected to any specific impression; it represents no information about any specific impression. Nevertheless, it is information present in nervous matter. It represents information about the grooves themselves, the fact that they are the place —already existing in the nervous system— where the echo or reflection of an incoming impression will take place. This new general idea is not about any specific information, but about information itself. Once this mental event has happened enough times, it will have its own "groove," be its own specific pattern; this pattern will stand for “information about information.”
A specific impression is an outside stimulus that impacts the nervous system. It becomes a mental event of the first degree. The general idea of information (not of anything specific, but of the capacity that general ideas have of generating an echo when the right impression comes along) is a mental event of the second degree. It is not once but twice removed from outside impulses. Yet it will function exactly as other mental events: Every time the process is activated by a specific impression that recognizes itself, this common characteristic of general ideas will, in turn, vibrate on itself and recognize itself. The neurons will start firing according to this specific pattern. But now it is not about any specific impression with a specific content. It is about recognition itself; it is the vibration of awareness echoing on itself. When recognition recognizes itself, consciousness is no longer information about something (door, cheeses, mother), it is information about itself, about the fact that there is information. Consciousness is nothing but the recognition of the fact that there is information. Consciousness feels its own echo, its own reflection, and learns that it exists. A mental event recognizes itself.
This vibration of information that recognizes itself, that becomes aware of itself, is the process that took place in me as a little boy. This general idea of reflexivity apprehending itself became me becoming aware of myself. The information about information becomes personalized by looking at itself. As information about matter it is impersonal, and as information about itself it becomes personalized. The elusive-but-elusive-but-oh-so-present self has entered center stage. The I has discovered that it exists, and it exists by being a concept of information that knows itself to be. It is a concept of reflexivity (reflexivity already there in the other concepts) that knows itself to be. It knows itself to be, but that’s all. It does not know that it is a mental event of the second degree. It has no inkling that, like the mental events of the first degree, it is nothing but a certain disposition of matter (in this case, pattern or organization of neurons, or pattern of electrical or chemicals exchanges between neurons). We have now traveled a long way from Descartes.
When the two-step process takes place, the primary consciousness-information inherent in matter becomes information about itself, instead of information about matter. By so doing it recognizes itself, becomes aware of itself, knows that it exists. The process takes place within a specific environment, an individual human being. It takes the form of the personal I, the individual self. The consciousness-information, which exists with matter, becomes information about itself in the guise of a personal self aware of itself.
The grasping by the self of its own existence seems to be exhilarating. Once the self becomes aware of itself, it tries to reinforce itself by any means possible. But when the self knows itself to exist beyond doubt, it knows precious little else. Knowing itself to be does not tell it where it comes from, or what it is exactly. The other impressions, when they recognize themselves, have characteristics, specific contents, such as mother, cheese, door; they have shape, color, savor. They have a rich information content. The self has nothing of the kind. It is a general idea not of specific impressions, but of recognition. In itself, it has no specific content.
Besides the information that it exists, the information-content of the self is zero. It only knows that it is, and that it can know of its own existence by itself, without outside intervention, as Descartes established. It does not know that it is a specific disposition of matter, twice removed from outside impressions, a material burst of energy. By grasping itself, the self does not even know that it is nothing but a general idea, a concept, a mental event. But precisely because it knows so little about itself, the self does not know of the processes that cause it, and can fantasize that it is self-caused.
The sense of self is the result, not the cause, of the process that started with the environment impacting the nervous system. Consciousness is first non-reflected (not looking at itself) and it has been defined as being the sensitivity of matter to itself. Yet, by being sensitive to itself, this sensitivity becomes a mental event, something that is not directly material, even though it is matter-based. As a result, reality splits itself into two different things, matter and consciousness.
The personal self is not an entity coming from nobody knows where; and it is not unlike anything else in nature. Just like anything else in nature, it has to, and can be, explained according to observation, the laws of nature and the rules of logic. The self is nothing but the general idea of reflexivity bouncing on itself. But this idea is centered on itself, unlike the other ideas, which focus on the specific information they represent. It comes after other general ideas of specific impressions have appeared, and as a result and manifestation of their common characteristics. As a little boy the consciousness-information of things had preceded, in me, the consciousness of myself as a separate entity in the world. Sensations and perceptions precede the self, which is supposed to “have” them, which is supposed in some way to cause them, or to make them possible. The reality is exactly the opposite: they make possible the sense of being a self.
When the sense of self manifested itself in me, nothing changed in what had already been perceived without any kind of self or sense of self. The orange cheese, the apartment, the hallway, my father, my mother, the table, the couch, the window, the sun—nothing was changed by the appearance of the I. All those things had been apprehended and perceived, but not by me, since there was no me yet. They were known, but because there was no awareness of a self, nobody knew that they were known. And yet the information was actively there, because the little boy could without fail go to the kitchen for the cheese, or to his mother for comfort. The little boy was functioning, like the rest of everything in nature (animals as well as mineral things, each according to its organized complexity) without a self. Yet, when the sense of me appeared, when I felt myself to be a self, I also felt that I was the one having the perceptions, and that without me there would be neither perceptions nor consciousness at all. This is how escaping from a state of ignorance leads directly to a state of illusion. (See definitions of these terms in Appendix I.)
By becoming aware of myself I discovered myself, but nothing else. Everything else remained the same, the information was the same, and the contents of consciousness remained the same, although its “savor” was altered. Suddenly, because I (my sense of self) was there, things acquired meaning. From then on, the quality of consciousness, which before had been part of the things, was transferred to me, and things were left stranded, “inert”—inert not in the physical sense (there is energy in matter, which is constantly changing),— but inert from the point of view of my own subjectivity. The self sees that it is consciousness (true), and also it believes that it is self-caused (false). Looking at things, it sees that they are not self-caused (true), and concludes that there is no consciousness in them (false), that by themselves they are inert (false).
The self, the newcomer on the block, decides that it is in charge, and that from now on nothing can happen without it, at least at the level of consciousness. This is breathtaking in scope and audacity, because the appearance of the self changes nothing, except for the self. The fact that perceptions were already there, without an I, means that, fundamentally, the I perceives only itself, even though it believes that it perceives the world, or believes that without itself there is no perception whatsoever.
Objectively, consciousness is manifested in man by perceptions accompanied by a self. But subjectively, in normal language and for the I itself, things are totally different: the world, and the perception thereof, is “perceived” and “known” by a self. It is as if the self caused or created the perceptions, or the consciousness that they express. This mechanism is the absolute illusion of the ego at work. No only does the thinking self not create the perceptions or ideas “it has,” it is in fact the perceptions, the mental processes at work, which bring about the sense of self. It comes after them, as a by-product of those mental processes, and it could not exist without them. The perceptions are not affected by the appearance of the self, precisely because it comes after them. The only noticeable change is just that, the appearance of the self, the same appearance that so perplexed and intrigued me when I was a little boy.
At this point, some might object and insist that a grown man or woman, with a self, knows infinitely more than a little baby without a sense of self, and that the same is true for animals. Is that superiority not proof that a willing and aware self-entity is the necessary motor and agent for the search and acquisition of knowledge? The answer is simple. First, animals sometimes know a lot more than we do. It is just a different kind of knowledge, and they act on it without necessarily being aware of it. As a matter of fact, the cells in my body know a lot more than I do about their business, which is often a lot more sophisticated than I am able to know. Second, and more important, the passage from babyhood to adulthood is marked by a progressively more complex conditioning of the nervous system, by an ever increasing storing and treatment of information in the nervous system, by an ever increasing mentalization of impacts (external or internal) on the nervous system. It is this ever increasing complexity in the organization of nervous matter that brings about at the same time more complex mental processes, more reflected knowledge, AND a firmer and firmer sense of self. So let’s not make the latter the cause of the others, even though they all grow in parallel. As the spring season progresses, the cries of the young rooster grow stronger and stronger, and so does the sun. Let the young rooster thinks what he wants.
To say “I know” does not mean primarily that I know (there is knowledge), but rather that I know, there is an I that knows. “I know,” means in the first place I know that I know, and consequently that I exist. “I know” does not posit the information already there, the perceptions and mental events that have already echoed on themselves without the presence of a personal self. “I know,” posits only the I, not the information that the I believes it gathers and brings to consciousness. It is the information itself, the processing of information, that brings about the I.
We are so enamored, or at least so complacent, about our sense of self, that it is worth repeating: BEYOND KNOWING ITSELF, THE I ADDS NOTHING TO EITHER THE INFORMATION CONTENTS ALREADY THERE OR THE CONSCIOUSNESS CONTENTS ALREADY THERE. The I exists because there is a pre-existing non-reflected consciousness. That’s why the self is not a miracle in nature, but just an event in nature, something that happens in nature, like everything else. The non-reflected consciousness co-existing with matter echoes on itself and becomes its own information –i.e. knows itself to be—under the form of an individual self aware of itself. THERE IS A “MYSTERY” OF CONSCIOUSNESS (how is it possible for the material brain to “create” consciousness) ONLY BECAUSE OF THE ARBITRARY DENIAL OF THE QUALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO MATTER FROM THE START.
I am deliberately focusing on the knowledge aspect of the self, leaving aside its emotional role. Is the self an element of protection in the struggle for survival? Maybe, but try to smash a fly or a mosquito: it is not easy. Do they have a self?
Impressions, when they echo on themselves become mental events. But a mental event does not mean that the material substratum is no longer there. It has simply changed. From an electro-magnetic wave, say, it has become a neuronal structure or pattern, based on chemical and electrical transfers. The main difference between an impression from the outside and a mental event is that the mental event is based on energy provided by its own environment, a biological nervous system, whereas the impression got its energy from the external environment. This difference is therefore the mark of what is objective and material on the one hand, and of what is mental and subjective on the other.
It’s only in appearance that, with the mental event, consciousness “separates” itself from matter. They are still essentially one, but in a different way. From now on, after information becomes information on itself, reality is perceived in two different ways: either as matter, inert, opaque, solidly objective, or as consciousness, ethereal, intangible, subjective. This is only a ruse that reality plays to know itself. Man falls into a trap when he looks at the whole process only after the self has appeared, and ignores what comes before. He believes that matter and consciousness are fundamentally different, and falls into the illusion of the ego (and so does woman). He believes that the thinking self is something unique in nature, even something beyond the natural order of things. He attributes to himself the monopoly of consciousness, which he denies to the rest. He believes that individual human self-consciousness is “higher” consciousness, the ultimate end of evolution, the crowning jewel that transcends nature, the manifestation of man’s superiority over the rest of nature, and other conceited nonsense. Let one at this point quote one of our witnesses, U.G. Krishnamurti, who has no patience for the conceited nonsense and mercilessly reduces the self to size. He brutally states, “From the point of view of nature, you are no more important than the female mosquito who sucks your blood” [so that the cycle of mosquito reproduction can be completed.] “Your whole purpose here [on this earth] is to feed the worms.”
Let’s summarize what we have uncovered so far. There is a primary non-reflected consciousness, which exists universally with matter, as information inherent in matter. This information does not know itself, it pertains only to matter. All chemical, mechanical, physical as well as biological events—all changes in matter—are manifestations of this sensitivity of matter to itself. Actually, matter is also more than this information-consciousness. It is also energy. Despite appearances, matter is anything but inert, even though is appears as such to us. From the erosion of rock by wind and water to the movement of tectonic plates to the whirling of electrons around the nucleus to the nuclear reactions in stars, matter is nothing but unceasing movement and change. Any change within matter sees also a change at the information level of this primary consciousness. And, as Spinoza justly remarked, neither is the cause of the other. The change in matter does not cause the change in consciousness-information, or vice versa. They are actually the same thing, but the human mind perceives them as two different things, consciousness and matter. I will explain later how the self exists by making this illusory differentiation.
In certain environments (animal or human nervous systems) the information can echo on itself. A specific item of information can then recognize itself, and this recognition will become in turn a link in the chain of causes. As a result, an animal has the capacity to react to its environment in a more diversified way than mineral matter or plants. Not all the impressions, though, echo on themselves. Why not all? I don’t know. But one can speculate that the nervous system would be overwhelmed if all impacts on a nervous system were to be reflected in it.
The self is a general idea, an abstraction of the recognition of impressions by themselves, when they echo on themselves in a nervous system. The self does not represent any added knowledge to the information already at work—save for the fact of knowing of its own existence. Contrary to what the self, bloated with self-importance, thinks, personal self-consciousness is an extraordinary impoverishment of the basic all-pervading consciousness, a pale and lifeless shadow of an extraordinary profusion and complexity of unceasing activity and limitless energy in nature, always accompanied with the corresponding information.
Why do some manifestations of the sensitivity of matter to itself within a living body resonate on themselves, when others don’t? For instance, the functioning of the cells or of most of the organs has no echo in the nervous system, so that there is no awareness of the process. No doubt new research in neuro-biology will provide some explanation. Certainly, with natural selection, sense impressions from the environment are more important for survival of the organism than reflected awareness of its internal functioning. Differentiating between this and that enzyme in my digestive system is not crucial to survival: they do their work well enough without me knowing anything about it. Differentiating between a tiger and a lamb is crucial. The enzymes react directly to this or that food; the information for action is directly accessible. The muscles used for fight or flight need the information from the senses that the animal one is facing is a tiger.
The sense of self appears only after particular sensations and perceptions have been manifested. Consciousness in its non-reflected form has been defined as sensitivity of matter to itself. By knowing itself to be, the self does not add anything to the knowledge of things; neither does it create or cause consciousness, which must already be there, in a non-reflected form, for the I to appear. Thus, the self is nothing but a general idea of reflected consciousness-information, which becomes information about itself. The concept of consciousness knows itself in the form of an individual self. The so-called “mystery of consciousness” is a false problem; we fall into the trap of believing that the separation between matter and consciousness is real, whereas it is only the way by which the consciousness aspect of reality knows itself. Consciousness separates itself from matter to know itself to be.
Self in man is not a mystery, and even less a miracle. It is a by-product of mental processes at work in a human nervous system. But does it have a role or a function?
When the sense of self appears no new information about the world is added. The change is purely subjective; the objective world remains exactly the same. The savor of the consciousness of the world changes, not the world itself, which remains exactly the same as before the I. Things could have remained unchanged—as may be the case for animals—and yet one day the I started resonating on itself, and consciousness of “the self” appeared. Besides saying that it is the idea of consciousness in its reflected form that knows itself, what else can be said about the individual self?
Besides causing the absolute illusion of the ego through a misunderstanding of what it really is, does the self play a role, any role?
Why is reflected consciousness manifested in the form of a personal self aware of the world and of itself as the first person singular? Why the sense of the I rather than an impersonal consciousness? In the mineral world matter knows how to react to itself, and does so in the same way without fail, but it does not react to itself knowingly. There is no self aware of what’s happening. Matter has memory—the grooves dug by the waters on the side of the mountain—but no awareness of that memory. The memory remains physical, and does not reach the second degree of storage, the mental storage (which is still organization of matter, but now removed from its direct cause, the waters rushing down, or the impact of the world on the senses). Matter always knows how to react to itself, but does not know that it is doing it.
Human beings are more complex than the waters rushing down the mountain: unlike the waters, they know that they are doing something but, like the waters, they don’t know why they are doing it. Under the illusion of the ego (the self as an individual center of consciousness, decision and action) they think that they are doing something because they have decided to do it. This is a gross misunderstanding of the way we function. We are confusing awareness of the decision with the decision itself. The decision is the result of a tug-of-war between internally competing factors, emotional or rational. It does not matter that some of them reach the level of reflected knowledge (that is, we are aware of them) while others may not. The result is the same: one motivation wins the contest, and the self, which by its very nature comes at the end of the mental process—but does not know that—sees itself as the cause of the decision and the agent of any ensuing action.
People used to believe that the sea, or some other natural entity, would become angry, presumably because of something that someone had done or not done, and would punish them. Then, man discovered that the sea, or the sky, or the mountain, or the river, has no self, and started explaining the storm, or the drought, by the interplay of atmospheric pressures, levels of moisture in the air, etc. But man has a sense of self, and instead of trying to understand it, he has continued to apply to himself the mythical explanation long abandoned with the scientific explanation of natural events. Man thinks and believes that he is not a natural event among others, and tries to explain (or tries to guide) his own behavior as if he were something outside the natural order of things.
To go back to the little boy: By feeling myself to be a beam of consciousness aimed at the world I, as a little boy, appropriated to myself the consciousness that was already there (and of which I myself—as an I—was an indirect consequence). That is, I not only stole consciousness away from the world, but by doing so I denied it to the rest of the world. I denied not only that it was there, but I denied the possibility that it could be there at all. This is what Descartes did by positing the two substances of extended matter and of thought—two substances, rather than two qualities of one substance, which is what Spinoza did.
The little boy did not know about Spinoza and Descartes, but he fell into the illusion of the ego all the same, like everybody else. Why should things happen this way? Why the illusion at all? There is no need to invoke the Devil, or cosmic Karma, or the divine Maya, or any other metaphysical or religious explanation. The self is a general idea of reflexivity, and as such is no different from any other general idea. But when a specific impression (cheese, etc.) recognizes itself in the general idea of cheese, no ambiguity is possible. The mental event of cheese recognition is directly related to the “objective” cheese, the specific impression caused by the outside object, cheese. But unlike the other general ideas, the general idea of reflexivity cannot be directly connected to any specific impression from within or without the body. The mental event of seeing cheese, or red, or feeling a pain in my big toe cannot claim any superior or special status, because it is obviously connected to a specific cause. But when the general idea of reflexivity recognizes itself, it cannot relate to any specific impression, even though it is ultimately triggered by any of them. Because it is a mental event at the second degree, the link is no longer obvious. Alone among the other general ideas, alone among the other concepts, it has no direct reference to anything specific. Unlike the concept of circle, or of honesty, it cannot be abstracted from a number of circles, or of honest deeds. It is the generalized echo of specific echoes, but unlike them it has no specific reference. It easily finds a cause, or at least, an origin, for all the concepts it has, but not for itself. As a result, it feels itself to be self-caused, a miracle in the order of things.
Like the rooster who thinks (maybe) that his crowing brings the sun up every morning, the general idea of reflexivity, which is there (explicitly or implicitly) every time some other mental event takes place, is going to believe that the reflexivity comes from itself, not from the other mental events. The specific contents (cheese, odor of milk, mother, etc) belong to them, the reflexivity belongs to it. The rest is inert matter; I am the beam of consciousness that brings things not to life or to existence, but to consciousness. The mental event of seeing cheese is connected to and triggered by the lump of cheese out there, but the mental event of my being aware of myself is not triggered by anything specific. As a result, I believe that I am self-caused. I also believe that I am the cause of the reflexivity, that it is mine.
The self does not create consciousness. The information inherent in matter (called non-reflected consciousness, because it is information about matter, not about itself) can echo on itself in the nervous system, and thus can become informed about its own contents: the level at which many animals and human babies function. This reflection of information in turn can echo on itself and thus becomes information on itself (information about the fact of information, not information about something with a specific content). An idea of reflexivity knows itself to be, under the form of a personal self aware of its own existence. Knowledge of one’s existence does not entail true self-knowledge (exact specific knowledge of the self). The self becomes the illusion of the ego. Illusion because it takes itself to be the source of a consciousness of which it is only a reflection. Illusion because it denies to the rest of the world this quality of non-reflected consciousness.
We have reached an explanation of the self: it is a general idea of reflexivity, which knows that it exists. A few comments are in order:
1. I am not saying that the self is only this definition, and nothing else. I am only saying that here is a possible explanation, which does not make of the self a mystery, an unexplained miracle in nature. It explains the self as we explain everything else in nature: by looking at what causes it. I want first to explain the self, which many take for granted without explaining what it is exactly or what causes it. Second, I want to explain it as a natural event, something in nature and of nature, like everything else that exists and that man can be aware of.
In the field of human knowledge, there is no such thing as absolute truth. To know means only to have a concept of something. A concept is nothing but a tool to organize a confusing reality and try to make it meaningful. Thus, any concept is just a hypothesis, a theory enabling human understanding to function. There is nothing sacred about a concept. It is always possible to use another concept, and still arrive at some valid results. Witness the concept of space, absolute with Newton or relative with Einstein. Space can be conceived as having three dimensions, or four, or five, or any, according to need. Causality reigns supreme in classical physics, or is nothing but a statistical approximation in quantum physics.
2. Because the self is just an idea, we understand why it sees itself as so permanent, so lasting and enduring. A concept is nothing but a frozen snapshot of an ever fluid and changing reality. Just as a photograph that we take to preserve a moment in time which is no more, but to which we can go back at will, a concept is simply a reference point that we use to “know” or to “understand” a reality that we could not grasp otherwise. The reference point has to be unchanged, fixed, forever frozen, in a sea of eternal change and fluidity. Without fixed concepts, knowing would be impossible, for sense impressions would have nothing to anchor themselves to, nothing to relate to, and thus could not be known. The mineral world (in spite of appearances) and the biological world are in unceasing change. What are not changing are the concepts that we have of things. Knowledge is possible only when the instant is frozen and known in the guise of a specific impression framed and labeled under a concept. Knowledge can evolve, of course, and change with time. But it is the contents of knowledge that change, not its nature. Simply, one fixed concept replaces another. Concepts don’t change, and the self, which is a concept that knows itself to be, does not change either. But this constancy of the concept is mistaken for the everlastingness of the substance. Hence, the belief in an everlasting individual soul.
3. The permanency of the self comes from being a concept. Besides permanency, there is another reason, as mistaken as the first, to think of the self as an entity or even (in Cartesian terms) as a substance: its simplicity. The concept of self as such is a simple idea, even though the person who “has” the self may have different characteristics, that is, a complex personality. The self is conceived as a simple idea, not as a complex structure of different concepts. Yet this simplicity is misleading. It comes not from the fact that the self is a simple substance, but from the fact that it is a general idea (of reflexivity). A general idea is in fact not a simple but a composite idea (an idea composed of or derived from many roughly similar sense impressions), which has been simplified by the power of abstraction of the mind; its simplicity hides a multiplicity. A concept is nothing but an extreme impoverishment of reality, but this is the price to pay for knowledge to be possible at all.
4. Finally, the I has been presented as being a general idea of reflexivity, not as a general idea of anything in particular (cheese, mother, toy). This reflexivity is already there, in the general ideas of specific things. It is after those general ideas have been formed that the sense of the I appears in a human individual. The self is only a by-product of mental activity. Mental activity is the storing and processing of sense-impressions, just as digestive activity is the processing of food, or respiratory activity the processing of air. They all pre-exist the self. The ideas that the self “has” come before it —at least logically, even though self and ideas exist simultaneously once the self has been formed. I believe that I am, and then that I have an idea, but the truth of the matter is that I could not exist as a self, without the ideas that “I have.”
5. The self is a general idea of reflexivity, derived from the reflexivity inherent in some particular ideas. Reflexivity adds nothing to the contents of any idea, just as the image of an object in a mirror adds nothing to the object. Everything is already there when the self appears. The self adds nothing outside of the awareness of itself, and yet it sees itself as indispensable, as the center from which consciousness comes to shed light on an inert world. And the meaning that the sense of self brings with itself is necessary to itself and to nothing else.
The self is empty, that is, it’s an empty concept, without any specific contents. (Let’s not confuse self and personality. We will see later that some people lose their sense of self, but that their personality traits remain.) This individualized reflection of consciousness, which believes itself—wrongly—to be a simple idea which will “think” and “generate” other ideas, this reflection which we believe to be the beginning and the end of consciousness, has no specific content whatsoever. It represents no specific information about anything, except the fact of reflexivity, and then it misinterprets it. The specific contents of consciousness are always there already at the basic unreflected level of consciousness-information. At that level consciousness is the information consubstantial to matter. It is there, but it is related to matter, not to itself. Not being related to itself, it does not know itself to be. To know itself to be, it has to become information about itself, it has to turn to itself, to become an image or echo of itself. This echo, which knows itself to be, has no specific contents, as such. And this reflection can know itself only by abstracting itself from specific contents, by voiding itself of any specific content. That’s why Descartes could doubt the truth of his perceptions or thoughts (the contents) but could not doubt the fact of being consciousness that knows itself to be. It is an irrefutable certitude, but one that contains only the void. It is on this certitude with no contents that Descartes has based his philosophy. It is this certitude with no contents that is at the center of our individual existence.
So when the self apprehends itself, it grasps nothing but its own subjectivity. That’s why it can see itself as a center of consciousness, different from the specific contents it “knows.” Being different from them, it can doubt them, but not itself. The self is intimately part of consciousness, but only as consciousness echoing on itself. This faulty reduction of consciousness to only its own echo, at the cost of ignoring the thing being reflected—the basic consciousness-information inherent in matter—as well as the faulty reduction of all consciousness to the to the personal self, are both characteristics and manifestations of the illusion of the ego.
An idea of reflexivity knows itself to be, under the form of a personal self aware of its own existence. This reflexivity is not self-caused. It is derived from the reflexivity of some impressions on nervous matter, which were already there. It is because they were already there that the sense of self is possible. Knowledge of one’s existence does not entail true self-knowledge (exact specific knowledge of the self). Hence, the self aware of its existence becomes the illusion of the ego. Illusion because it takes itself to be the source of a consciousness of which it is only a reflection. Illusion because it denies to the rest of the world this quality of consciousness. Illusion because the self fancies itself as an autonomous maker of decision and an agent of action, two events which actually take place in nature, and as part of the chain of causes in nature. Because of the illusion of the ego, the awareness of what’s happening (decision and action) is confused with the cause of what’s happening.
The self, as a concept, has no specific information. Its information content is only the quality of reflexivity, already at work in other ideas. When stimulated, the self is only reflexivity knowing itself to be. Before that, there is knowledge, i.e., recognition of a specific item of information (the baby recognizes its mother, the animal recognizes danger or food), without recognition of the recognition. With a sense of self, the child not only recognizes his mother, he also knows that he is recognizing her. Before self, the recognition is impersonal. With a sense of self, the recognition is personal. The little boy knows that he is a person recognizing his mother, and thereby the recognition acquires meaning. The little boy now knows that this recognition has to do with his mother, and not his uncle, or a stranger, or a table, or a wall. All the things that previously were impersonally recognized have now acquired meaning, because they can now relate to the self, which is the witness of the recognition. They are part of the universe of the newly self-discovered self.
If there were no self, what would happen? At the level of non-reflected consciousness, of information-consciousness, nothing would be changed. Everything would go on in nature as it has always been, with exchanges of information in parallel with changes in matter. In a human being with no general idea of reflexivity, other general ideas would still be present, and would be activated by specific sense-impressions (or by other ideas, i.e., mental events) impacting them, so that they (the impacting agents) would be recognized and sorted out. In short, objectively, nothing would be changed. But subjectively, at the level of the personal awareness of things and of the self, everything would be changed. There would be no self-awareness, no personal consciousness, no recognition of the recognition, and no meaning to things. Without the self, the contents of consciousness would remain unchanged, but the savor of consciousness would be totally different.
Without the self that thinks itself a beam of consciousness shining on the world, there is nobody to know the world as an object of knowledge, and nobody telling himself that he is a subject who knows the world. If I am not here (namely, here as a self, not here as a mind-body unit), if I am not telling myself that I exist and that I know the world in front of me, the specific contents of knowledge are still there (they pre-exist the self), but there is no knowledge of the knowledge. In that case, there is no knowledge at all, in the customary sense of reflected and personal knowledge, in the sense that Descartes meant when he said, “I think therefore I am.” If he does not think, he may still exist, but there is nobody to know that. And what exists, of course, is not the self, only the objective mind-body unit.
Without the individual self, there would still be the sensitivity of matter to itself. There would still be specific impressions associating with general ideas already formed and stored, and thus recognizing themselves. But they would not know that they recognize themselves, because there would be no personalization of knowledge. Since all those elements are not only stored information but also stored energy, they are part of the chain of causes. They are information as well as action. Information is active in us (as it is in the rest of nature), whether we know it or not. The sight of his truck moves the little toddler to start playing (unless there is something stronger that takes precedence), even though the toddler has no idea of what’s going on, because he has as yet no idea of himself.
The meaning of things can exist only for a self, which has awareness both of itself and of things. There is a fundamental difference between meaning and consciousness. “Consciousness” (sensitivity of matter to itself, the information side of the material world) is everywhere in nature—in human beings, animals, and things (mineral matter). It is at first (logically, chronologically, and functionally) non-personal and non-reflected.
Consciousness is at first non-personal, because there is knowledge (active contents of information) without a person who knows. One characteristics of the illusion of the ego is to believe that knowledge can be only personalized, that there is no knowledge or consciousness if there is nobody who knows or is aware. We have seen that in fact the opposite is true: the person, the self, the individual who knows, can appear only if the consciousness-information is already at work, in the form of non-reflected consciousness.
Consciousness is at first non-reflected, because consciousness is information about everything under the sun, but not information about itself. It becomes information about itself by echoing on itself, resounding on itself, thanks to the complexity (the abstracting and storing power) of the human nervous system, which itself is matter. By becoming information about itself, it establishes to itself the fact of its own existence. This coming to consciousness of consciousness itself has been described in the first chapter. It is the appearance of this strange thing called me. Reflected consciousness becomes personalized in the form of the personal self. It is then, and only then, that the meaning of things becomes possible. There is a person, a self, for whom things can now have a meaning. A meaning at its most basic and essential level, as in: this is a red toy truck and not a cat or a wall.
The confusion between meaning and consciousness is another aspect of the illusion of the ego. We have seen that the self reduces consciousness to reflected consciousness, and thinks that when there is no reflected consciousness then there is no consciousness at all. Wrong. It’s the other way around. It’s when there is no consciousness that no reflected consciousness is possible. By confusing consciousness and meaning, the self this time reduces consciousness to meaning, and believes that when there is no meaning there is no consciousness. Wrong again. When there is no meaning, there can still be consciousness, and there can still be reflected consciousness, but without the sense of self there is no meaning to all of that. That’s why the self is so desperate to attach meaning to things, or find the meaning of things: self and meaning go together, and the self can reinforce itself, and escape its own basic lack of contents, only by putting meaning into things.
Things are like words: they don’t need me to exist, but their meaning exists only in relation to me, i.e., a self that knows that it exists and has awareness of things. The meaning is not in the words, or in things in general, it is in me, and for me. If I am not here, and no other self is here, words, things, and the entire world, have no meaning whatsoever—and no need for it. Yet, their information content is always and fully there. But, once again, consciousness and meaning are two different things altogether. The computer program recognizes the word “chair” if asked to find it in a text. “Chair” of course has no meaning for the machine, which has no self and does not apprehend itself as a self. There is no meaning, but the information content, and the sensitivity of matter to itself, are fully there, and fully active. The machine will find the word. And if it is programmed to “act” on it, it will act, and there will be consequences.
[The objection that the computer “acts” because it has been programmed by a programmer, i.e., an “acting” and “thinking” personal self, and that therefore we need a self to initiate action, is groundless. The “actions” of the human self (including the programming of the computer) are themselves the result of the programming and conditioning of a mind-body unit, and of its place in the chain of causes. And now we are faced with two equally unfounded options: either the personal self is self-programmed (free will, etc.) a miracle in nature; or there is a divine programmer; both options are unfounded. They are unproved and require a leap of faith. The first is based on unexamined assumption about the self, the second on un-provable belief. Above all, they are not needed (except by the self, always desperate for meaning). It is easy to see that the environment as well as the internal disposition of the mind-body unit condition it to “act”—more exactly react to external or internal stimuli—in a given way. This “action” is nothing but changes in matter. But in a biological mind-body unit, these changes are reflected, which gives rise to the illusion of “free” and “willful” action.]
The sense of self and the sense of things, that is, the meaning of things, go together, and develop together. Things, till then totally impersonal (even though they had an impact on the baby, and the baby on them), become personal toys when the child develops self-awareness. As the sense of the I develops, anything can become my toy, something that has value and meaning for me. The thing has meaning for me, and becomes precious to me because I feel that I exist now, and that thing which has sense to me confirms and reinforces my newly discovered personal existence, my sense of being myself. The more I perceive it, the more I perceive myself, i.e., and the more I exist. The more the thing has meaning to me, the more I exist. The meaning the thing has for me is the meaning of my own existence. Things, of course, have neither meaning nor value in themselves. Value and meaning derive their strength and power entirely from the fact that they reinforce the sense of self. The sense of self, the meaning of things and their value (positive or negative) go together and are actually the same thing. Take away values, take away the meaning of things (if that’s possible, for us) and the self collapses. Or vice-versa: take away the self (if that’s possible), and values lose their meaning altogether, they mean nothing. This is what will happen to the witnesses in the second part of this book.
It is easy to experience the disconnect between a word and its meaning. Repeat a word endlessly and mindlessly, and after a while it loses its meaning, and becomes just a sound. However, we cannot empty all the words that we know of their meaning; nor can we empty of meaning all the things that surround us. If we could, the sense of self would dissipate like a mirage, and there would be no I left. To be precise, the word has not lost its meaning: it never had it, it was always just sound, a vibration in the air, or a black smear on paper. Everything else also, the whole universe, is simply electro-magnetic vibration. It is me who give meaning to words, to things, to the world. The meaning of things and the personal self are intertwined; they exist together or not at all.
It is important to understand that, in giving meaning to things, the self has no “ulterior motive,” no grand scheme, but itself (even though it may delude itself in believing that it is serving a worthwhile cause, something greater than itself). The self exists by giving meaning to things. But giving meaning to things has no meaning other than giving substance and contents to the self. Any attempt to explain meaning and give it significance beyond its connection to the self, is nothing but an expression of the illusion of the ego, even if we call these attempts metaphysics, theology, or whatever (humanistic values, the sanctity of life, progress, the pristine environment, ideology, you name it).
Another basic confusion stems from the fact that individual objects have meaning to me (this is a fork, a table, the floor, the wall) and value (I like this, I don’t like that); from there, I go on to search for the meaning of things in general: Why the world? Why existence? What’s the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of my own life? (I serve God, I am famous, I make money, etc.) What’s the good? (Which, of course, means two things: let’s define as “good” what I like or want, or what makes me feel good, and even more important, how can I be good, because the important thing is, once again, me, the self. It is important for me to be good, and being good makes me important, and because I am important anyway I must be good, and everything that is related to me or has meaning for me is also good.) Take away the self, and everything else loses all meaning and value.
All our feverish activity (including the writing as well as the reading of this book) comes from the need of the self to confirm that it indeed has substance, and is not an empty shell. But actually, of course, the feverish activity is caused by animal energy (itself an expression of the energy inherent in matter) that has to be expended, together with the information active in each mind-body unit, or in the total universe as a one mind-body unit. In the case of man, the information component is multiplied by the greater capacity to store and manipulate information. So the feverish activity as such is an expression of the powers of nature, and is not caused by the self. It is the meaning of the feverish activity that comes from the self.
It’s one thing to question the self intellectually, as this book is doing. It’s quite another to experience the void of the self when the meaning of things is gone. The idea that one can be biologically alive and at the same time experience psychological and emotional death is terrifying. One intuitively shies away from it, and refuses to face the void inside, at the center. Everyone tries to fill the void with values projected onto the world, or attached to concepts, with the self as their servant; or one tries to fill the void with self-exaltation at the expense of the rest; anything will serve as long as it allows us to escape nothingness. The priority of priorities: to reinforce by any means whatever one’s image of oneself, because without it the self collapses, and the only thing left is I, not the I as self but I as first person singular: a simple grammatical entity, with nothing behind.
Is it possible (although terrifying) to try to empty the self and face the void? Such a motivation is not unknown. It is the desire for “liberation,” for “enlightenment.” It is the mystical and spiritual aspiration. But what would be behind this motivation, this desire to try to put an end to the sense of being a personal self? Ironically, nothing but the sense of self. The only possible motivation is the sense of self trying to better itself by going beyond its own petty self. Otherwise, if there is no self, why bother? If there is no self, there is no “who” to bother about anything. There is nothing to liberate.
We live in the illusion of the ego, and we want to stay that way at any cost, because subjectively we are the illusion of the ego. The world and the things in it, including the objective existence of individual human beings as mind-body units, function without meaning and without ends, without those final causes denounced by Spinoza and others. We, as individual selves, attribute to, or try to find in the world a meaning, which in fact exists only in our individual subjectivity, and for it. We want to force onto the world this meaning, and the values that attach to it. It is the illusion of intention and the illusion of action, which, like meaning and values, are expressions of the illusion of the ego.
As a focal point of consciousness, the self is necessary for individual knowledge, in the form of reflected consciousness. To know that I know I must be an I, that is, I must apprehend myself as a person, an individual. Without the individual self, there is knowledge, but there is nobody to know that there is knowledge. For knowledge to be knowledge of itself, rather than of things, for consciousness to be reflected on itself, a focal point is needed. Then, by being knowledge of itself, consciousness knows itself to be. But consciousness is consciousness before knowing itself to be. If it were not there already, there would be nothing to know. The illusion of the ego has at least three manifestations:
—First the self believes that it is the only source of consciousness, denying it to the rest of “inert” matter (we confuse “having consciousness” with being consciousness; we don’t understand that “not being conscious of” (as is the case of non-biological matter) does not entail “not being consciousness.”
—Second, that consciousness starts with the self. It cannot start with it, because then the self would truly be a source of consciousness, and a miraculous source at that, outside the natural order of things. What starts with the self (actually, before the self, which is an expression of it) is only a specific aspect of consciousness, namely reflected consciousness.
—Third, and most important, even though it is extremely subtle and very difficult to grasp, individual consciousness in the illusion of the ego displaces a greater consciousness. We know that the body is made up of mineral matter, and we don’t limit material existence to the limits of our own individual bodies. Not so with consciousness: the self limits consciousness to itself (and to other similar selves). By apprehending itself as consciousness, the individual self cuts itself off from a greater consciousness. There is tremendous irony in the illusion of the ego, which really has the status of a cosmic trick, a stupendous joke that man puts on himself: by being consciousness, the individual self is necessarily ignorant of the real consciousness of which it is but a limited manifestation. It is as if, by being embodied in a real flesh and blood body, we were thereby rendered incapable of grasping matter, of having any sense of it. That’s not the case, of course: we do have a sense of matter. Not so with consciousness: by being conscious of itself, the self obsesses on itself, it grasps itself but not the consciousness it is made of. The more it grasps itself (the more we are actively conscious and cogitating), the more consciousness becomes an unfathomable mystery, the more the world and the whole of creation become opaque to us. The more we know of consciousness (through the self-aware self), the less we understand it. The personalization of consciousness precludes the grasping of consciousness as such, before personalization. Intuitively, man understands this predicament. Hence the emotional strength of the religious and spiritual aspirations, which the rational mind tries to contain and channel, and which always come back stronger than ever. But the quest is hopeless, the search is doomed to failure, because it originates from the self, and thus reinforces the illusion of the ego. The self trying to escape itself, trying to go beyond itself, is necessarily trapped by itself, like an animal thrashing around to escape quicksands of its own making.
The belief in free will is one expression of the illusion of the ego. We are so totally enmeshed in the illusion of the ego (a self which is a center of consciousness and an agent of action in the world) that it is hard to conceive, and even less to accept, that the self is useless, as far as action is concerned. As we are confusing awareness of a decision with the actual making of a decision, we are also confusing action with awareness of the action.
Careful observation of the way we function at every moment in a day shows easily that we function in a totally automatic manner, even when we ponder forever what to do or not to do. I speak (or write these lines) and I become aware of what I am saying as I say it or write it. The speech production —as well as anything else we do— is the result of a certain conditioning coupled with the impulse, or need (practical or emotional or otherwise) or energy, to say or do something. The conditioning, as well as the impulse, the need, etc., is a pattern of neurons. The energy, too, is a path in neurons that is more or less easily activated. All those factors are given, the self has no influence whatsoever on them, since it comes as a result of all this mental activity.
Some of those patterns are reflected, which means that I am aware of what I “will to do.” If the conditioning is there (a certain pattern of neurons) and if the impulse has enough energy (at that instant, more energy than a competing impulse) action will take place. We think that the action is a result of a decision by the self, but this decision itself is only an awareness of the given balance of factors at a given time. The awareness itself is nothing but an exact image of the pattern of neurons that stand for said balance. This exact image in turn feeds the sense of self. The self comes at the end, is aware of the balance, and believes that it has made the decision. With enough energy at work, the action takes place, and the self now believes that it is the agent of the action.
We may believe that, say, in a desperate situation, the self, in a “supreme effort of the will,” has “gathered its energies” to do something heroic. But the impulse does not come from the self, which represents only the awareness of what’s happening. The impulse comes from the idea (itself a pattern of neurons, like the self) of the desperateness of the situation. If this idea has enough energy that goes with it, action will take place. If the idea is reflected at the level of the self, there will be awareness in the self of the force of the impulse, and the self will take credit for the action. If the idea is not reflected, there will be no awareness, but the action will take place all the same.
Whether or not there is a self aware of what’s happening does not change a thing to what’s happening, because the sense of self is not in control of, or the cause of, either the conditioning or the impulse. It is a by-product of all this mental activity, of the processing of information along neuronal paths. Considered from that aspect (putting aside for a moment the self as a focal point of reflected consciousness) one can speak of The Useless Self.
This book is the development of a theory about the self (at least, the parts written by me, not the testimonies cited in the second part). It stands or falls at that level. Experimental confirmation is not needed (on the contrary, theory is needed for any experiment to be interpreted, to have meaning, to add to our knowledge). But some experiments have been made. For instance, in one experiment sensors were attached on the subjects, who were asked to move their arm or grab an object whenever they wanted to (that is, as an expression of the so-called freedom to will and to act). The sensors regularly detected the beginning of the action (impulses to the muscles to start contracting) half a second before detecting the firing of the neurons representing the “conscious decision to act,” which of course is nothing but the awareness of a state of affairs that has already been “decided,” not by an invisible self or an homunculus somewhere in the brain, but by matter acting and reacting to itself. The action takes place when the idea of moving the arm gathers more energy than the idea of doing nothing, with the subject thinking all the while (maybe) of something else. The new state of affairs gets reflected, and that’s what the self interprets as “I decide to move my arm.” If rain were conscious of itself, it would also think that it is free to start or stop raining, at will. My stomach, of course, can produce acid without asking for my decision, even less for my authorization. The cells in my body function on their own. We give these events a different name (involuntary action, of the limbic system, or whatever), thus preserving the fiction of a self deciding freely for at least certain actions (conveniently, those that we are aware of). Because, as we all know, the stomach has neither free will nor consciousness when it “decides” to produce acid. The same is true when the rain falls, and with everything else in nature. But, as we all know, I am a self endowed with self-consciousness and free will. So when I move my arm, or open my mouth, or do anything that people do, I think am doing it because I decide to do it. I do decide, indeed, but only in the sense that I am aware of “my decision.” The action has been triggered by something else than my decision. Nevertheless, I am convinced that I am the master of my actions. Such is the power of the illusion of the ego.
A study of the individual thinking self cannot be complete without this ultimate question: is it possible for the sense of self to disappear in someone who is neither sick nor dying nor dead? And if so, how does that person function? This leads us to the second part of this book: the testimony of the “enlightened,” of the “mystics,” to whom “something has happened.” We will start with Suzanne Segal, whose testimony is direct and simplified to the extreme: one day, her sense of being a self disappeared.
In an earlier work ("Erreur, Ignorance et Illusion d'apres Spinoze it Sri Aurobindo," written as a doctoral dissertation in 1969, and published in Paris in 1994) I proposed a definition of the limitations of the human mind and of personal consciousness, expressed by the three concepts of error, ignorance and illusion. Here is a summary of those definitions:
ERROR, "We say that there is error when the human mind, at the level of reflected personal consciousness, has an idea of something based on sense-data, imagination, memory, mental activity in general, without at the same time having another idea setting exact limits to the first one. The lack of exact limits means that the knowledge of the object is incomplete, and incorporates elements, which are not part of the object of knowledge. Error is possible only at the level of reflected knowledge (idea of the idea)."
IGNORANCE: "There is ignorance when there is impact on the senses without anybody (a subject) having any awareness of that impact, or of itself as a subject. This is because the impact on the senses is an "idea" in Thought (the name Spinoza gives to consciousness), but there is no idea of this idea (consciousness is not reflected on itself).
In the first years of life, the human individual escapes from the state of ignorance by becoming self-aware. When there is a sensation, there is also awareness of the sensation by the "conscious self." For Sri Aurobindo, the state of ignorance comes to an end when the mental element can separate itself from the physical and the vital elements. It thus acquires the autonomy, which is the mark of individualized consciousness. The sense of self appears. This autonomy is illusory, because by the very fact of being aware of itself the self ignores universal consciousness.
Thus, the end of the state of ignorance brings about the state of illusion: another ignorance not of the individual self but of the whole consciousness of which it is a limited expression. An artificial center of consciousness is created, useful for practical purposes but totally illusory in the way it apprehends itself. Individual reflected consciousness (the sense of self) is nothing but the ignorance of an immeasurably vaster consciousness."
ILLUSION: "Man is in a state of illusion when he sees himself as a free and autonomous center of consciousness. He is then in the ignorance of a vaster consciousness of which he is a limited expression. Self-consciousness is marked by self-affirmation, where the individual sees himself as an absolute, in place of the Absolute. This is also called the Illusion of the Ego, and goes together with the belief in free will and in purpose. It is a product of mental activity, which by its nature divides and splits the unity of reality, and cannot grasp the essential unity of being.
The state of illusion implies that, in the case of Spinoza, one has not reached the third kind of knowledge, the intuitive knowledge of things in their essence (at the level of the second kind, man knows the idea of things, rather than things themselves). For Sri Aurobindo the state of illusion means that one is functioning at the level of knowledge by separation (between subject and object), and not at the level of knowledge by identity, where that separation disappears.
The end of the state of illusion cannot be the result of a steady and progressive improvement of the functioning of the mind, as was the case with error and ignorance.
The first part of the present book explains how, when I was a toddler, I was in a state of ignorance, since I was not aware of myself, even though there was awareness of things in the toddler. There was knowledge, but not of myself. I knew, but did not know that I knew. Knowledge without an I. When the sense of the I arose in me, I escaped from a state of ignorance, only to fall into a state of illusion. The individual self is nothing but the way reflected consciousness knows itself to exist. Yet it sees itself as the source and the center not only of consciousness, but also of action: the Illusion of the Ego.
Coming after Descartes, Spinoza is certainly aware of the problem of the thinking subject. But rather than either adopting the Cartesian Cogito or explicitly refuting it, he simply ignores it. Still, his approach to the problem is exactly Descartes' opposite. He starts from Nature as a totality to arrive at the individual, whereas Descartes starts from the subjective self-awareness of the individual to arrive at God, the physical world, and the rest of nature.
Let's look at the Ethics, Part II, "Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind".
Propositions 1 and 2 state that consciousness and extended matter are two aspects of the same thing. "Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing" (Prop. 1) and "Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing" (Prop. 2). "Thought" is the term that Spinoza uses to express what we call now "consciousness," rather than thought as such, which is reserved for man. Later in the Ethics, Spinoza explicitly states that man thinks, and that God does not think. ("God is a thinking thing" does not mean "God thinks." It means simply that Thought (consciousness) is part of God (is part of nature, is a natural phenomenon). "Extension" also stands for "extended matter."
"The idea of God, from which infinite number of things follow in infinite ways, can be one only" (Prop. 4). That is, reality as such is at the same time consciousness and extended matter. Matter and consciousness are the same thing, but human understanding cannot conceive them as being the same thing. The thinking process in man functions by separating consciousness and matter, by breaking the unity of reality, by making what is One multiple. As a result, man conceives, or knows, reality either as consciousness or as matter; he makes a duality out of oneness.
Prop. 7: "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." Idea here does not mean a concept apprehended by a human mind, but only a limited aspect of the consciousness side of things. Since reality as such is one, it follows that the consciousness aspects of reality and the extended matter aspects of the said reality will follow the same order and organization, since they are in fact the same thing.
Prop. 10: "The being of substance does not pertain to the essence of man, or, in other words, substance does not constitute the form of man." Man an individual human being, is not a "substance," something which exists "in itself and by itself." Man exists in something else, and by something else. This notion is absolute opposite of Descartes, who saw man as a thinking entity that exists in itself and by itself, as if it were a substance. If we don't follow Descartes (the subjective self-apprehension of the thinking individual subject), then what is man, insofar as man is a thinking unit?
Prop. 11: "The first thing which forms the actual being of the human mind is nothing else than the idea of an individual thing actually existing." That is, a human body is a fragment (Spinoza calls it a 'mode') of extended matter, and a human mind is the consciousness counterpart of that material thing (the human body). The human mind cannot be conceived without the human body, which again is exactly the opposite of the Cartesian Cogito. Let's note that Spinoza tells us that the human mind is consciousness (it is an idea in God, a fragment of the universal consciousness), but not that it has consciousness (of itself or of the world). That will come only with Prop. 20.
Prop. 12 "Whatever happens in the object of the idea constituting the human mind [this object being of course the human body] must be perceived by the human mind... That is to say... nothing can happen in that body which is not perceived by the mind." This can be misleading if we don't pay attention. Spinoza does not tell us that the mind is aware of all the changes taking place in the body (at this point, the mind is aware neither of itself nor of the world). Spinoza tells us that the human mind, as a fragment in consciousness and a fragment of consciousness (not a fragment having consciousness) will necessarily undergo (in its internal organization) changes that parallel whatever changes are taking place in the human body.
Prop. 13, Note: "...Those things which we have proved hitherto are altogether general, nor do they refer more to man than to other individuals...For of everything there necessarily exists in God and idea of which He is the cause, in the same way as the idea of the human body exists in Him; and therefore everything that we have said of the idea of the human body is necessarily true of any other thing." In simple terms: everything that exists in Nature is both a material object and a fragment of consciousness. Anything that exists is a limited expression of an infinite nature that is always matter and consciousness. And man is in no way, shape, or form, an exception to that rule. Man is not different from anything else in nature, and if we find a difference, it will be a difference in degree, not in kind: "We cannot, however, deny that idea, like objects themselves, differ from one another, and that one is more excellent and contains more reality than another, just as the object of one idea is more excellent and contains more reality than another. Therefore, in order to determine the difference between the human mind and other things...we must first know...the nature of its object, that is to say, the nature of the human body. I am not able to explain it here, nor is such an explanation necessary for what I wish to demonstrate." [Modern neuro-biology is of course attempting to do what Spinoza acknowledged he was not able to do, namely, to study the human body at the cellular and neuronal level and, by the same token explain the functioning of the human mind, since they are the same thing.]
Once again, when Spinoza says "an idea", he does not mean something that exists because I (or anybody else) think it; he means a limited fragment of nature as it is consciousness (rather than extended matter).
Since in order to know the human mind we have to study it object, Spinoza now turns to the human body. These Postulates follow Lemma VII.
Postulate 1. "The human body is composed of a number of individual parts of diverse nature, each of which is composite to a high degree."
Postulate 2. "Of the individual parts of which the human body is composed, some are fluid, some soft, and some hard."
Postulate 3. "The individual parts composing the human body, and consequently the human body itself, are affected by external bodies in many ways."
Postulate 4. "The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies by which it is, as it were, continually regenerated."
Postulate 5. "When a fluid part of the human body is determined by an external body, so that it often strikes upon another which is soft, the fluid part changes the plane of the soft part and leaves upon it, as it were, some traces of the impelling external body".
These postulates establish that:
1. the body is made up of many parts, and is not simple. Consequently, the mind too is composed of many parts, and cannot be the same substance "in itself" that Descartes posited.
2. impressions from outside bodies can leave traces on the soft parts of the body. In normal parlance they are called "sense-impressions," but they are not yet reflected, or known by a thinking sentient subject. In the first part of this book I called these traces 'grooves."
Prop. 14: "The human mind is adapted to the perception of many things, and its aptitude increases in proportion to the number of ways in which its body can be disposed." That means that the "consciousness potential" in man, as well as mental activity, is directly related to the organization and complexity of the body, in relation to the impacts of outside bodies, and to the traces left in the body from those impacts.
The following propositions (15 to 19) relate to the functioning of the mind, as the counterpart of the body. Whatever changes take place in the body because of outside pressures will also take place in the mind, which Spinoza expresses as "the human mind perceives." Again, there is yet no subject, which perceives these changes. They simply take place in the mind, and modify it. Also, for from being a center or a source of consciousness, the mind functions only insofar as the body itself is subjected to outside pressures: (Prop. 19): "The human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that the body exists except through ideas of modifications by which the body is affected."
We now come to a capital proposition, where Spinoza finally gets to the heart of the matter, namely, consciousness, as we usually understand it.
Prop. 20: "There exists in God the idea or Knowledge of the human mind, which follows in Him and is related to Him in the same way as the idea or knowledge of the human body." Spinoza introduces a second degree of the human mind. The first degree is the idea or knowledge of the body; it exists, but is not known by a knowing subject (to say that something exists, Spinoza says "There exists in God"). The second degree is when this knowledge, instead of being knowledge of the body (or knowledge about the body, information about the body), becomes information about itself. Instead of being perception of the body (of changes in the body), the perception becomes perception of itself. The human mind, which at the first degree represents the sum of the informations about the body, now becomes information about itself (Spinoza calls that: the idea of the idea). The human mind, which is information about the body, knows itself to exist. This second degree does not in any way create a new reality, or some kind of phenomenon unique in nature or outside of nature. Spinoza stresses the fact in the Note to Prop. 21: "The mind and the body are one and the same individual which as one time is considered under the attribute of thought, and at another under that of extension: the idea of the mind [second degree], therefore, and the mind itself [first degree] are one and the same thing, which is considered under one and the same attribute, that of thought." Reflected consciousness is simply an echo, an exact duplicate (although a very limited one) of the basic consciousness: "For indeed, the idea of the mind, that is to say, the idea of the idea, is nothing but the form of the idea in so far as this is considered as a mode of thought and without relation to the object, just as a person who knows anything by that very fact knows that he knows, and knows that he knows that he knows, and so on ad infinitum." That is, consciousness (reflected consciousness, consciousness of the self, the Cartesian Cogito) takes place when the mind ignores the body and looks only at itself.
In one stroke, Spinoza has replaced the second degree of consciousness back in the natural order of things. There is no "mystery" of consciousness. This mystery comes about only when the I looks at itself subjectively (Spinoza studies the human mind objectively) and marvels at itself, not knowing where it comes from. What about, precisely, the self, the Cartesian individual thinking entity? Spinoza ignores it superbly. He will never mention it. He will look at the human mind through its components, the modified "parts," and through their interactions, just as in physics we look at different forces applied to a body. Is this a weakness in Spinoza's philosophy? Yes, in the sense that he leaves in the dark something so central to the human reality: the sense of being a personal self. No, because as we have said in the previous chapters, the self comes at the end of the mental processes: they explain the self; it does not explain them. Also, this absence is a tremendous plus rather than a minus; because be ignoring the self in his explanation of human reality, Spinoza unwittingly (because he does not have the concept) places his entire philosophy outside the illusion of the ego, whereas Descartes' approach not only leads to the illusion of the ego, it starts from it.
In Prop. 23 Spinoza shows that the mind at the second degree is neither free nor autonomous. It is only a very limited echo of the consciousness that exists at the first degree.
Prop. 23: "The mind does not know itself except in so far as it perceives the idea of the modifications of the body." This is another capital proposition. Far from being a disembodied source of consciousness, the mind is aware of its own existence only in so far as the body is affected and impacted by the outside world. In other words, the echo of information, which becomes consciousness, as we know it at the individual level of awareness, is not self-triggered or self-caused. It is entirely dependent on outside physical forces.
Prop. 24: "The human mind does not involve an adequate knowledge of the parts composing the human body."
Prop. 25: "The idea of each modification of the human body does not involve an adequate knowledge of an external body."
Prop. 26: "The human mind perceives no external body as actually existing unless through the ides of the modifications of its body."
Prop. 27: "The idea of and modification of the human body does not involve an adequate knowledge of the human body itself."
Prop. 28: "The ideas of the modifications of the human body, in so far as they are related only to the human mind, are not clear and distinct but confused."
This description of the functioning of the human mind presents several decisive advantages over Descartes approach, that is, the "orthodox" approach of taking the self for granted.
This description puts the individual, as a thinking unit, back in the chain of causes, rather than springing out of nowhere already formed, as in Descartes.
It keeps the mind-body unity, whereas Descartes, by making the mental entity something radically different from the physical body, had to explain the mind-body connection through the pineal gland, "a hypothesis more occult than any occult quality." (Spinoza)
It shows that the way the mind apprehends itself is not in any way true knowledge, and therefore that there is nothing to squeeze out of the fact that there is a reflection of the mind on itself, other than that very fact. Once we know that the mind echoes on itself we can be sure of that, and of nothing else. No other information can be deduced from this certainty. To know more, we will have to look somewhere else, and find other causes and other explanations.
We have defined the self as the reflexivity of consciousness on itself. It is only a mental event, but it perceives itself as a personal entity. The self comes at the end of the mental processes, as a by-product of mental activity; but it sees itself as coming first, as being the source of consciousness, as being in control of those processes, as a decision maker and an agent of action. Because the self is only a general idea of echo or reflexivity, it does not have any specific contents. When the self knows that it exists, it knows that, and nothing else.
We know all that, but we know it only intellectually, in theory. The self is like a mirage: we know that there is no water there on the road on a hot sunny day, yet we see the water. I know in theory what the self is and what it is not, but I still perceive myself as a source of consciousness looking at an inert material world. Subjectively and existentially I still perceive myself as a source of consciousness looking at an inert material world. Subjectively and existentially I still perceive myself as an entity, a person endowed with free will, capable of self-motivation, capable of autonomous decision and action.
We also know that a concept corresponds to a network of neurons in the nervous system. If this network is not stimulated by repeated impressions on the senses, or by association with other concepts, it will fade away. But the I is constantly stimulated. It is the echo of reflexivity that is triggered when an impression echoes on itself in the nervous system. Thus, the self should be the last concept to fade away in a live human being. As a matter of fact, it is. It is always there, till almost the last gasping moments. Now the question (or the hope, for those who are aspiring to "liberation" or "enlightenment") is: I know that there is illusion, but can I actually free myself of the illusion? Can I actually not see the mirage anymore? Can I rid myself of myself? And if I did, what would be me?
For most of us, this question cannot be answered, because the self cannot get rid of itself. The very attempt, the motivation to "get rid of the self," is of course nothing but mental activity, and we know that the self is nothing but the result of mental activity. So any speculation or attempt to get rid of the self simply reinforces the sense of the self. At this point, it would seem that this enquiry about the self has reached its natural conclusion. But some people claim that they no longer have a sense of self.
Any pattern of neurons, even the strongest, can be undone, through some physiological accident (a minor stroke, for instance) or maybe (some claim) through "divine intervention," a grace that God bestows on a chosen individual. I do not know what causes the disappearance of the self, and it does not really matter. What matters is that there are credible witnesses who can testify to the actual experience of the loss of the personal self. Can we believe them? Is it possible for the sense of being a personal self to disappear while the mind-body unit is still biologically alive? And if so, what would be the consequences? How would one individual human being function without a sense of self?
To start with, let's notice that we spend a good part of our daily life without the sense of self in the forefront. We do many things without thinking at the same time "I am doing this" or "I want to do that." Of course, the sense of being a self is always there, in the background. If need be, the self can consciously come to the fore and decide and do whatever is necessary to keep things in order and under control. That's what we feel. But we have seen in the first part of this book that this feeling is an illusion. We have seen that, objectively, the sense of the I does not change anything to the functioning of anything in nature, including human beings. But subjectively? What happens to the "interior life" if there is no sense of self? I (me, the author, Jean-Michel Terdjman) cannot answer this question on the basis of experience. Existentially, I feel myself to be a person, a self. Fortunately, there is abundant testimony, since the beginning of human history, of people who claim they have "experienced" the loss of a sense of self.
The disappearance of the personal self is the hallmark of the testimony of the "enlightened" about their "experience," their condition, the state they live in. The sense of being a personalized self is no more. The person (mind-body unit) where these events are taking place not only does not feel like a separate individual anymore, he (and she, as well) does not feel like an individual at all. It's as if the self, this wonderful (for most of us) necessary ingredient for individual consciousness, is no longer necessary or even useful, for consciousness or for action.
We should be very careful when looking at the testimony of the "awakened." Their interpretations vary considerably. Some are totally overwhelmed, and end up in silence, or at the asylum. For the rest, the only commonality is their absolute certitude that the personal self is gone. They continue to use the Pronoun "I," but only as a practical way to prevent confusion with other mind-body units. Just like the rest of us, they have only words, concepts, normal knowledge organized in categories, to communicate with us objectively. They are now in a state beyond the illusion, without having fallen back in a state of ignorance. Even though they do not have any longer the sense of a personal self, there is in them the awareness of the knowledge acting in the mind-body unit—what we have called reflected consciousness. In "normal" consciousness, this reflection brings about the sense of a personal self, as a by-product of this mental activity. And in the case of the "awakened," there is the same reflected consciousness at work, but the by-product is no longer there.
So, just like us, the awakened are no longer in a state of ignorance. Unlike us, they are not in a state of illusion. And just like us they are subject to error. To be free from illusion does not mean to be free from error, which is a pitfall of mental activity. Escaping from the state of ignorance, as happens to all of us in our early childhood, does not make us error-proof. Likewise, escaping from the illusion of a personal self does not make one error-proof. The "awakened" is not omniscient. Mental activity, the processing of information, continues to function as before, but it is neither better nor worse than before.
At this point, a question comes to mind: unless one has directly experienced the state of no-self, how is one going to decide on the validity of the testimonies presented? Is the "experience" a legitimate one, or simply the mark of conditioning, spiritual or otherwise? Is it the expression of a delusion? Or maybe the symptom of a mental disturbance? Or even fraud, pure and simple? I don't know of any objective criteria to decide who is an authentic "enlightened" one and who is not. I have to rely on my intuition. Some testimonies feel to be the real thing to me, and others don't. One has to decide for oneself. [Or don't decide, stupid. Don't believe; be not a believer.]
There is something called "the mystical tradition." It is the testimony of people who have had an "experience," and have undergone some kind of change in their consciousness and in the way they apprehend the world and themselves. Their experience is the experimental confirmation of the theory of the self, proposed in the first part of this book: the self is indeed an illusion, and as such it can in theory be dissipated. Their testimony may be useful if we keep three points in mind.
First, Western thought has not integrated the "mystical experience" in the way the Indian tradition has. The concept of "the illusion of the ego" is nowhere to be found in Western philosophy, from the Greeks on. Organized religion also has refused to really look at the mystical experience, and make it a part of its conceptual framework. In fact, it has mostly persecuted the mystics, as being too close to witchcraft. Now that we, in the West, have learned from India about this concept, we can look at the mystical experience in this new light, and try to integrate it in a comprehensive explanation of the workings of consciousness in man.
Second, we must separate the direct testimony of the mystics, the bare raw facts that they give of their experience, and the explanations that they try to give. Their interpretation of what has happened to them cannot but be an expression of their mental outlook, of the culture within which they think and express themselves; it is an expression of their own individual conditioning, without which they could not express themselves at all. The enlightenment does not produce somebody extraordinary, even if the condition itself is rather extraordinary for us. Only our projections on them may make them extraordinary. Generally, their personality traits remain. Emotions too may continue as before. Likewise with their opinions which, when expressed, reflect the conditioning of the "enlightened" when he thinks, because nobody can think without conditioning.
Third, I am not trying to explain what the "enlightened" themselves cannot explain: what is beyond the self, beyond thought, beyond the categories, beyond words, beyond knowledge. Meaning is gone, as well as the subjective, interior life. Is there bliss, or beatitude, or anything of the kind? I don't know, because these are concepts and interpretations. I just take their word that there is nobody there, that there is only emptiness, the end of self-consciousness. So their testimony about the disappearance of the sense of self is useful to us only because it throws light on what has come to an end.
The sense of being a thinking, deciding and acting self is finished. The so-called "experts" (psychiatrists, doctors, philosophers, psychologists, etc.) cannot help us understand what's happening, for the very simple reason that, consciously or not, they all take for granted that the individual self is the beginning and the end of everything. They never stop for a moment to question this core belief, this assumption of all assumptions. It is possible, of course that the "accident of enlightenment" be the result of something close to a stroke (Suzanne Segal died of a brain tumor 14 years after her "Collision with the Infinite, 1998.") A pattern or many patterns of neurons are disturbed or altogether eliminated. It's like a mutation: it happens randomly, for no apparent or clearly established "cause." But it really does not matter. Whether by a stroke or by the "grace of God," something happens to some people; they state that the sense of a personal self is gone forever, and that no doubt is possible on the subject.
Our witnesses are neither master nor guru nor saint nor messiah nor prophet —we just make them such, for our own purposes. It is we who are projecting onto them images of sainthood, deep wisdom, love, higher consciousness, divine manifestation—concepts that the mind needs to explain reality, to try to make sense of it, and to feel more comfortable and reassured in it. Let's be on guard against blind devotion, boundless credulity. We have to strive not to project onto the "enlightened" what we would like them to be, to satisfy our own emotional needs and aspirations. As with ideologies and various -isms, the force of the attraction lies not in the concept itself, but in our overwhelming desire to hook into the "true faith," so that the self is comforted and reassured once and for all.
All we know from those testimonies is that the individual sense of self is no more, but that, for the practical necessities of surviving in the world, the treatment of information (thinking) continues as before. The enlightened communicates normally. Thus, objectively, the enlightened functions like everybody else. But subjectively the difference is radical. There is no self there. The concepts are still there, and being processed, but there is nobody to know them. What U.G. Krishnamurti calls "the coordinator" is there for interacting with the environment, as the circumstances warrant, one moment at a time, but not for self-consciousness. As we will see, there is no more subjective or interior life of any kind for the enlightened.
If, for some reason, the sense of self is weakened or disappears altogether, the system is thrown out of whack and feels like it is falling apart. The person cannot make sense of what is happening, especially in a Western cultural context, firmly grounded on the sense of self, and where the concept of the illusion of the ego is not part of the mental structure. Some, like Suzanne Segal, are gripped by overwhelming and lasting anguish. Others are sustained by their religious faith throughout the trials of the "passage." Some, personally more intrepid like U.G. Krishnamurti, accept wholeheartedly whatever fate throws at them. In the Indian tradition, the loss of the sense of self is accepted, and even desired, even if not always clearly understood. In the West, there is the fear of falling into dementia. Suzanne Segal and others mention their relief when reading Buddhist texts. In the case of Suzanne, all the learned authorities, the current witch doctors of her culture (medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, all mighty thinkers completely conditioned by their culture and unable to question the postulate of the self) had assured her that her state was a pathological condition that had to be remedied at any cost.
—The constant and unmistakable mark of the so-called "awakening" or "enlightenment" is the disappearance of the sense of an individual self, that which is precisely at the core of our normal consciousness. This disappearance goes with the absolutely unshakable conviction that the sense of self is gone forever, never to return.
—Extraordinary courage, even if fear grips the heart. The disappearance of the sense of self is a terrifying event, because total identification with the self is the foundation of our personal being. Thus, losing the self is akin to witnessing one's own annihilation, while alive. The ego-less must have the courage to directly face his own end as an individual human being. No escape is possible.
—No manifestation of any subjective life is possible. The ego-less continues to have emotions, which are bursts of energy, but real personal feelings and affectations are no longer there, because there is nobody to feel them. Emotions are a form of physical energy, which has to be spent, and which can be felt. But at the center of the ego-less there is only absolute stillness, and the center itself is nothing but total emptiness. affectivity, subjectivity, normal interior life, it's all gone.
—A total washout of the mental and intellectual legacy that each human being inherits from the culture in which he grew up and in which he functions. The ego-less, insofar as he continues to think, continues to have all kinds of concepts—some of them prejudices—as before. At the same time these have really no impact or importance, because there is nobody on whom they could have an impact. The thoughts are there, but they lead nowhere, they are a dead-end. The ego-less is free or, more precisely empty, of our normal mental, cultural, moral, aesthetic universe.
What follows is the testimony of two persons, who are our contemporaries, Suzanne Segal gives a most direct and practical description of the "feel" of the state of no-self, while U.G. Krishnamurti is more radical in the description of his state.
Suzanne Segal died in 1996. U.G. Krishnamurti, weakened by age and depending on others for his daily activities, decided to stop feeding himself in the spring of 2007, at age 89. No doubt other testimonies could be used, either contemporaries or from the past, either from the West or from the East. But why go to the other side of the world or to a mysterious past, when the phenomenon can be found next door? The fact of ego-lessness is universal and ongoing. Our witnesses are right here, living the same daily life as you and me. They could be you and me, or we could be them.
In 1982 something happened to Suzanne Segal, a 28-year-old American woman living then in Paris. She was married to a French doctor, and three months pregnant. She describes the event:
pp.48-51. "...The month was May, and the sun felt warm on my head and face as I stood at the bus stop on the Avenue de la Grande Armee...Six or seven of us were waiting together at the stop, exchanging pleasantries...As I took my place in line, I suddenly felt my ears stop up like they do when the pressure changes inside an airplane as it makes its descent. I felt cut off from the scene before me, as if I were enclosed in a bubble, unable to act in any but the most mechanical manner. I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called "me" was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head. "I" was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body's eyes.
From a non-localized position somewhere behind and to the left, I could see my body in front and very far away. All the body's signals seemed to take a long time to be picked up in this non-localized place, as if they were light coming from a distant star....My mind had completely ground to a halt in the shock of the abrupt collision with whatever had dislodged my previous reality.
Although my voice continued speaking coherently, I felt completely disconnected from it...I could feel sweat rolling down my arms and beading up on my face. I was terrified.
The bus arrived at my stop on the rue Lecourbe, and I got off. As I walked the three blocks home, I attempted to pull myself back into one piece by focusing on my body and willing myself back into it where I thought I belonged in order to regain the previously normal sensation of seeing through the body's eyes, speaking through the body's mouth, and hearing through the body's ears. The force of will failed miserably. Instead of experiencing through the physical senses, I was now bobbing behind the body like a buoy on the sea...I moved down the street like a cloud of awareness following a body that seemed simultaneously familiar and foreign.
What happened to Suzanne Segal is the reverse of what happened to me when a little boy, and which happens, of course, to every one of us in a "normal" state. The sense of being a personal self conscious of itself and identified to the mind-body unit, appeared in me, and was added to the existing perceptions; and now, in Suzannne Segal, this sense is separated from the mind-body unit and will disappear completely in the coming months, although the perceptions continue as before. The center of reflected consciousness, which was interiorized and personalized, is now de-interiorized and de-personalized in Suzanne Segal. Why this event? She does not know, and neither do I. Until that very moment she, like all of us, had perceived herself subjectively as a person or entity separate from the rest of the world. And now, after the event, the perception loses its quality of subjectivity, and apprehends something in the world (her own body), a something that is no more special or intimate than all the other somethings in the world. The person Suzanne Segal is no more, because the self in her no longer apprehends itself. Self and subjectivity are gone in one brutal event.
The awareness of things is still there, it is now totally impersonal. It is no longer based on or identified with the body and the person, which, up till now, had been the personal entity "Suzanne Segal" to herself and to others. But if, as happened to me in my early youth (and to everybody else of course), the appearance of the sense of self is an interesting and even exciting event, the same cannot be said of its disappearance. Losing the self is just plain scary. Nothing in our culture prepares us for this accident, a kind of mental death more terrifying than physical death. We are so conditioned to function subjectively on the basis of the personal I, that it seems that everything will collapse if it is gone. And yet, for those who lose the self, biological as well as mental functioning continues as before. It is not that the functioning of the person is disturbed; it is that the person itself is no more. It is not the person, the self, who keeps the mental functioning; it is the functioning of the mental that brings about the sense of self. But the illusion of the ego prevents us from understanding, and even less from accepting, the dissolution of the personal self. Witness Suzanne Segal's reaction, and terror, to what's happening to her.
pp.51—53. "As I walked into my apartment, Claude [her husband] looked up from his book to greet me and ask how my day had been. The terror was not immediately apparent to him...There was no conceivable way to explain any of this to him, so I didn't even try. ...The whole thing was nightmarish beyond belief. The mind (I could no longer even call it "my" mind) was trying to come up with some explanation for this clearly inexplicable occurrence. ...Sleep came, but the witness continued, witnessing sleep from its position behind the body. This was the oddest experience. The mind was definitely asleep, but something was simultaneously awake.
The moment the eyes opened the next morning the mind exploded in worry. Is this insanity? Psychosis? Schizophrenia? Is this what people call a nervous breakdown? Depression? What had happened? And would it ever stop? I attempted to tell [Claude] what had happened the day before, but I was just too far away to speak. The witness appeared to be where "I" was located, which left the body, mind, and emotions empty of a person. It was amazing that all those functions continued to operate at all.
...There was the sense of being on an edge of sorts, a boundary between existing and not existing, and the mind believed that if it did not maintain the thought of existence, existence itself would cease...The mind was in agony as it tried valiantly to make sense of something it could never comprehend, and the body responded to the anguish of the mind by locking itself into survival mode, adrenaline pumping, senses fine-turned, finding and responding to the threat of annihilation in every moment..."
pp.54-55. "After months of this mystifying witness awareness, something changed yet again: The witness disappeared. This new state was far more baffling, and consequently more terrifying, than the experience of the preceding months...The disappearance of the witness meant the disappearance of the last vestiges of the experience of personal identity. The witness had at least held a location for a "me," albeit a distant one. In the dissolution of the witness, there was literally no more experience of a "me" at all. The experience of personal identity switched off and was never to appear again.
The personal self was gone, yet here was a body and a mind that still existed empty of anyone who occupied them. The experience of living without a personal identity, without an experience of being somebody, an "I" or a "me," is exceedingly difficult to describe, but it is absolutely unmistakable. It can't be confused with having a bad day or coming down with the flu or feeling upset or angry or spaced out. When the personal self disappears, there is no on inside who can be located as being you. The body is only an outline, empty of everything of which it had previously felt so full.
The mind, body, and emotions no longer referred to anyone—there was no one who thought, no one who felt, no one who perceived. Yet the mind, body, and emotions continued to function unimpaired; apparently they did not need an "I" to keep doing what they always did. Thinking, feeling, perceiving, speaking, all continued as before, functioning with a smoothness that gave no indication of the emptiness behind them. No one suspected that such a radical change had occurred. All conversations were carried on as before; language was employed in the same manner. Questions could be asked and answered, cars driven, meals cooked, books read, pones answered, and letters written. Everything appeared completely normal from the outside..."
Suzanne Segal's description of her condition confirms that the sense of self appears after the thoughts and other mental events that it is supposed to "have." The self is merely a by-product of mental processes, and it cannot be the initiator or agent of those processes, since they can and do occur without any sense of self whatsoever.
Even though Suzanne Segal is existentially free from the illusion of the ego, since there is no longer a self that perceives itself (literally, she no longer believes or feels that she exists, as the rest of us do at every instant of our life) mentally or intellectually she is still in the dark about the whole thing. Even though the illusion is gone, the mind is still in error when it tries to make sense of what has happened. Even though the personal self is no longer there in Suzanne, her mind believes that there should be a self as a precondition for anything else (thoughts, body, emotions, etc.) to exist. How can all those things be without an owner? This is how Suzanne Segal describes how the mind is at a loss:
pp. 55-56. "In an attempt to understand what had occurred, the mind began working overtime, generating endless questions, all unanswerable. Who thought? Who felt? Who was afraid? Who were people talking to when they spoke to me? Who were they looking at? Why was there a reflection in the mirror, since there was no one there? Why did this body continue? Who was living? The oddest moments occurred when any reference was made to my name...The name referred to no one. There was no Suzanne Segal anymore; perhaps there never had been...Without a personal self, the inside or internal simply did not exist. The inward-turning motion of the mind became the most bizarre of experiences when time and again it found total emptiness where it had previously found an object to perceive, a self-concept."
pp. 62-63. "In addition to the absence of self, the filters that had previously screened out the constant sensory input of the world had ceased to function. I could no longer venture into stores or other crowded places because the sensory stimulation seemed to overload the now delicate circuits of an already overtaxed brain. The mind was struggling to hold onto the thought of my existence, since, in the mind's view, my very existence depended on it. With too much stimulation, the mind was unable to hold that thought, and a horrifying fear of annihilation would ensue."
Suzanne Segal, having lost the sense of a personal self, is no longer in a state of illusion; nor has she lapsed back into a state of ignorance; and she is in error about the whole thing, because her concept of the self, her view of what the self is and is not, are erroneous. The reflected impressions and ideas that brought about a sense of self continue to be reflected, but now there is no by-product. Since the self saw itself as in charge of the process, now that the self is gone, no one is in charge of the precess! And yet, in the mind-body unit called Suzanne Segal, everything else continues as before! Suzanne is still a fully functioning human being, which is proof that the self is useless[3], at least as far as action is concerned. But what about consciousness? Reflected consciousness is still there, and knows itself in Suzanne Segal, even though the personal self is no longer aware of itself. But if the self is gone, then who knows when Suzanne Segal knows of the world around herself? Nobody knows. It is the impressions themselves, the ideas, the mental events, that know themselves The illusion is gone, without a fall back into ignorance (when there was knowledge, but not knowledge of the knowledge). Yet, the potential for error has not been affected: her mind is incapable of making sense of what has taken place, because it does not have the necessary information to understand the event. Hence, the feeling of panic.
After a few months, Suzanne tried to explain the situation to her husband, the doctor:
pp. 56-58. "Something has happened to me, Claude...I have no idea what it is but...I feel lie I don't exist anymore. There is no more 'me', no more personal identity. It started months ago when I was...getting on the bus and something just changed, and now—well, I just can't seem to find an experience of a person in me like I used to.
You know how you never have any doubt about who you are, like if someone says to you 'Who are you?' and you just know, 'I' am me, of course.' Well, I can't find a 'me' anymore. There's no one."
"What do you mean there's no more you?" he said. "Of course there's a you. Here you are right in front of me, talking to me."
"But I don't experience a 'me' anymore," I practically shouted. "It's the most horrible thing that has ever happened. When I look in the mirror, I'm shocked to see a reflection When I walk down the street and people look at me, I wonder who they are looking at. When I talk, I hear a voice speaking, but there's no one behind the voice. Oh, this is impossible to explain to you. It just can't be put into words, but it's awful! Maybe I've gone completely insane..."
"Suzanne, try to calm down, Let's make an appointment to take you to a psychiatrist, all right?"
They went to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed some medicine to prevent things from getting more "serious."
In her despair, Suzanne knocked at another door, "a well-known psychologist." He congratulated her, but she could not believe him: "This couldn't be a spiritual awakening. This feels horrible. I want it to go away. I'm terrified all the time, and I want to go back to being how I was before."
In spite of her confusion and fear, Suzanne gives an accurate analysis of the causes at the root of her fear and confusion: "It was impossible to believe him, because every idea I had ever acquired about spiritual development was based solely on notions of bliss and ecstasy. It seemed inconceivable that a genuine spiritual experience could be as horrifying as the state I found myself in."
pp. 64-65. "...Yet even such an extremity of physical and emotional fatique did not overshadow the experience of no-self, which was as omnipresent as ever. During childbirth it became utterly clear that all of life is accomplished by an unseen doer who can never be located. The previous sense of an "I" who was doing was totally illusory. The personal "I" had never been the doer—it had only masqueraded as the doer. Everything continued as before, only the person who used to think she was doing was absent."
pp. 66-69. "Since no one could tell from the outside that I was having this remarkably different experience [of no self], I was able to "fool" everyone into thinking that I was just as I used to be...No one noticed anything awry in my comportment as they merrily filed by to admire my daughter...There is no one here, and it's apparently unnecessary to be someone for mothering to take place. Mothering mothers, just as talking talks and thinking thinks. The mind was having a hard time getting used to this."
Susanne mentions something that other "no-self mind-body units" have noticed: the impossibility of having any personal relationship as before.
pp. 68-70. "Although a little over a year had elapsed since the "I" had shattered, the relentless of no-self was still far from adjusted to. My relationship to Claude [her husband] had changed dramatically as I struggled to understand an utterly inconceivable experience that Claude could certainly not be expected to grasp. Over time our relationship had virtually dissolved. The person he had married was no longer there. I was no longer able to have "personal"L relationships, and never would be again."
Suzanne went back to America, but things did not improve. Her mother, alarmed, wanted her to see a psychiatrist. She was able to "avoid the psychiatrist [but] it was harder to avoid the look of hopelessness and sadness in my mother's eyes each time we met." (p.73). Suzanne's mind was not doing any better. Like her mother, her mind was functioning according to the conditioning of a culture where being a person is all and everything; where the belief in, and sense of, a personal self are the ultimate foundations of everything in life, at the individual or collective levels. (That is, everything that is conceived. The objective reality of each individual mind-boy unit as well as the totality of mankind is something else altogether.)
(pp74-75). "The mind was clearly having a hard time with the experience of no-self. It appeared to be on a campaign to prove that something was seriously wrong, and it employed any available evidence to substantiate this belief. The most compelling piece of evidence was the presence of terror. Every description I'd ever heard of spiritual development had included some mention of bliss, ecstasy, or joy. But there was no bliss in this experience of no-self. When the mind turned inward again and again to locate an experiencer, a self-concept, it repeatedly generated terror as it found emptiness.
Relationships to other people had been radically altered. Without a personal "I," there was nowhere for the reverberations of experience to be received. Te feeling of being connected to others was gone because there was no longer a person to whom they could be connected. I must reiterate, however, that all feelings continued to arise appropriately. What had vanished was the reference point of a personal self that felt the feeling personally. Emptiness was consistently co-present with all emotional and mental states, and this co-presence precluded any personal quality from existing. No thoughts, feelings, or actions arose for any personal purpose anymore."
The end of the personal self also means the end of the state of illusion, where the self is the entity doing the thinking, the deciding where the self is the center of consciousness as well as action. But if the illusion is gone with the sense of self errors are still there. Suzanne is existentially without self, but mentally she clings to the error that the self is the doer, the thinker, the decider and that nothing is possible without it. She cannot understand how she can still be functioning without a self. Such is the power of the world-view that conditions us as we grow uop. Her mind sides with her mother, who thinks that something is terribly wrong with her, even though she (Suzanne) can see that in fact nothing is wrong with her.
(p. 90). "Although I realized the experience had been pathologized when he had labeled it depersonalization disorder, it didn't seem to matter since he thought the prognosis was so good. At least he had a name for the problem."
After five months of therapy Suzanne discovered that naming the problem had not helped.
(p. 92). "Carl, this so-called depersonalization disorder has never come and gone. Don't you get that? Five years ago it started, in a moment, and it's never changed or gone away, even when I'm asleep!"
"I don't know what else it could be but symptoms of depersonalization" he replied. "Maybe you're just getting overly dramatic about the whole thing. I mean, you've been saying for a long time that you don't exist as an individual person, but here you are right in front of me talking to me. You're here, you know. You just think you're not." [Another therapist who cannot even imagine what no-self can be. He thinks that Suzanne is a self; she has to be a self; how could she not be a self? We are all a self.] So Suzanne is a self that has lost its connection with its body, and he reassures her that her body is really there. He thinks that she is a self in search of a body, whereas she is a mind-body unit in search of a self, because she has not been able to question the cultural view that the self is all and everything in a human being. Suzanne continues:
"Why does everyone say the same thing? Do you think I'm just making the whole thing up? The fact that you see a body in front of you and hear a mouth speaking words doesn't mean a thing. The fact is, in my experience there is no person. It isn't something you can see from the outside. I've been telling you this for almost a year now!"
Once more, Suzanne was back to square one. The idea of the personal self is such an unquestionable point of reference in our mental universe that nobody thought of accepting as normal the symptom that Suzanne described (absence of the sense of self) and go from there. Nobody thought of asking (even as a "thought-game", a game that theoretical physicists play all the time) OK, let's assume there is no self, what then? What is the self anyway? Instead, everybody takes the self for granted and tries to figure out what's wrong with it, or to bring it back, without knowing what it is exactly.
(p. 93). "I spent extra time reading up on the "dissociative disorders," including depersonaliztion, derealization, and dissociation. Clearly, certain characteristics of those disorders were or had been present in my experience, although none of them described the most prominent feature—the absolute absence of personal "I-ness" accompanied by unimpaired (and even improved) functioning in the world." (emphasis added).
It is taken so much for granted that the self is at the core of our being and of our functioning that, when something "goes wrong" (i.e., something unusual happens) no one thinks that, maybe, some kind of illusion about the phantasmagoric self has been dissipated, that maybe the whole idea of the self is just an error of the mind. Instead names are being invented (depersonalization, etc) as if they represented real things, or the whole thing is denied: if Suzanne is functioning well (which she does) then her "self" is intact, since how could one function without a self? The absence of self is always misunderstood; it is either denied or pathologized; it is never taken for what it is: the dissipation of an illusion.
In desperation, and after having yelled at her therapist "I think what's happening is that you don't have a clue about what's really going on here, and you don't know what else to try. Maybe you should just be honest and admit you don't know..." (p. 96), Suzanne decided to become a therapist herself, to figure out by herself what the "problem" was.
(p. 104). "As I neared the end of my training, it became clear that I was looking in the wrong place to understand the experience of no-self, since, psychologically speaking, this experience was something of which I needed to be cured. The notion of "cure" involves trying to eliminate, stop, or change something that you, or more importantly your therapist, cannot accept as appropriate. But there was obviously no way the experience of individual identity was going to return, and it was now appallingly clear that the field of psychology hadn't the slightest clue about what was going on."
Ten years after her "accident", Suzanne Segal's attempts to explain or correct her situation by appealing to the conventional wisdom of her age had failed:
pp. 107-108). "A decade had passed since the personal reference point had disappeared, a decade spent searching for understanding while tormented by fear. No matter how much fear was experienced, however, the emptiness never fluctuated for a moment. I had looked to those who were considered the wise of our culture, those educated souls whose intellects had been developed thorough the rigors of academic training. Those "teachers of the postmodern age," known as psychotherapists, had tried their best to provide me with some understanding of the experience I had described to them. They had attempted to find words to explain something they did not understand.
Although well-meaning, all the therapists I spoke with were imprisoned by their ideas about how life should be interpreted and were unable to stay open to the possibility that reality could be experienced in many different ways. In the end, no one was willing to admit that they simply didn't know."
Suzanne had failed in her search because she had tried to find help in psychology, which does not question the personal self as an entity. Since her self was gone, psychology was bound to pathologize her condition. She had to look in another direction: (pp. 108-109). "I began to seek a spiritual perspective on the emptiness of personal self...These efforts paid handsomely when I discovered Buddhism. There were entire volumes written about anatta (no-self) and shunyata (emptiness), page after page devoted to describing, discussing and investigating the experience I had lived with for the past ten years...
It was amazing that I had never discovered any of this material before. I was particularly struck by the following passage by the Dalai Lama: 'Selflessness (no-self) is not a case of something that existed in the past becoming nonexistent. Rather, this sort of 'self' is something that never did exist'." There is only the illusion of the ego, the condition of all human beings, unless and until the sense of a personal self vanishes. Once the self is gone, the individual mind-body unit functions—objectively, not subjectively of course—as before:
"...Although individual identity had dropped away, all the personality functions remained completely intact. Now, however, those functions floated in a vastness that referred to no one. All the same experiences still happened, there just wasn't a 'me' to whom they were happening. And the appropriate responses just happened as well arising out of and subsiding into themselves...Now action and speech were seen to arise not out of any personal purpose, but out of what was needed in the moment for the situation at hand. There was no personal functioning, yet functioning in its entirely continued unimpaired—a co-presence of functioning and not-functioning, existing and not-existing...What remains in the state of no-self are empty functions )empty, that is of individual personhood) called skandhas, or 'aggregates.' What speaks, then, is the speaking function what thinks is the thinking function, what mothers is the mothering function, what feels is the feeling function... These functions do the job of living in the world, and they are empty of individual self.
There is no persisting self to be found over and above their functioning. These five 'aggregates' do not in any way constitute a self. Rather, their interaction creates the illusion of self."
In Part I we discovered that mental activity and thought processes bring about the sense of self, an idea of reflexivity that knows itself. It knows itself not in the sense of true knowledge of what it is, but simply in the sense of knowing that it exists. It then falls in the illusion of the ego, by thinking itself an entity that is the owner and the maker of the thoughts "it has," the decider and product of those very same thoughts and actions. By believing that he is a self that brings about consciousness and does things, man puts himself in an impossible situation: he cannot conceive of any possible consciousness or action—he cannot conceive of any reality whatsoever—without implicitly positing a sense of personal self in the first place. That is why, as long as she was functioning within the conventional mental structures, Suzanne had found that she could not answer the question brought about by her condition: "What happens when annihilation occurs and still something remains?" (p. 110).
Suzanne uncovered another error prevalent in our culture as to what constitutes enlightenment. Unable to conceive of the annihilation of the self, the spiritual tradition posits that:
(p. 110). "Fearlessness is regarded as one of the signs of a valid spiritual awakening Along with infinite love, bliss, joy, and ecstasy, fearlessness is considered one of the indisputable markers of an enlightened life. People have always looked for things they can navigate by, signs that point the way and tell them when they have arrived at their destination." Unable to conceive of its own annihilation, the self conceives liberation as precisely the opposite: all kinds of exalted emotions and feelings that will comfort and reinforce the self, when these emotions and feelings are nothing but projections of what we want it life.
Once Suzanne started accepting the loss of sense of self, rather than fighting or fearing it, she discovered that "enlightenment" is not marked by the "quality" of an emotion, a thought, a behavior (all things that are the normal reference points of the mind judging the "quality" of a certain person, a certain act, evaluating the "correctness" of a certain thought, Etc.) Rather, "enlightenment" is marked solely by the disappearance of the sense of a personal self. The mental and all the other functions continue, but the usual anchorage to the self is o longer possible.
Her understanding and acceptance of her condition were also helped by comments by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the role of the guru: "Without the guru, Mharishi claimed, the person could be lost indefinitely in confusion and fear. The guru did not actually give someone the experience of enlightenment, he said. Rather, the guru verified such an experience by saying, "Yes, that's it!" (p. 111). She was also helped by "a teacher named Jean Klein" (a Frenchman), who "taught in the tradition of Ramona Maharshi and other great advaita sages that the individual self is simply a fabrication of the mind, and that the real Self is a non-personal, all-inclusive awareness." (p. 113). Jean Klein also helped with practical advice when she described her conditions:
(pp. 113-114). "Ten years ago, quite abruptly, my sense of being an individual self dissolved, stopped, turned off," I began. "Ever since then I have never felt like there's an 'I' anymore. When I drive a car or speak these words or walk down the street, there is never an experience of a person who is doing these things. No person is there anymore."
"You mean there is no experience of a 'me'?" Jean asked.
"That's right," I answered, "there's no 'me.' There used to be one, but now there isn't anymore."
"Well, that perfect," Jean replied. "Perfect."
"But Jean, why is there so much anxiety? and why is there no joy?"
"You must stop the part of the mind that constantly keeps trying to look back at the experience," he responded."
Suzanne understood that "There was a part of the mind—perhaps what we call the self-reflective or introspective function—that kept turning to look and, finding emptiness, kept sending the message that something was wrong. It was a reflex that had developed during the years of living in the illusion of individuality, a reflex we consider necessary to know ourselves." This reflex is of course in vain and leads straight to a dead-end, because knowledge of the self by itself is empty knowledge, knowledge with no specific content whatsoever. The result is the profound inability of the self to question itself, to question its own belief about itself. Or, as Suzanne Segal puts it, "How can 'I' understand 'not I'"
Suzanne concludes that (p. 117). "It took close to eleven years to finally accept that the mind was simply incapable of grasping the vastness of the experience of no-self. This acceptance cleared the way for the mind to comprehend that an ungraspable experience is just that. It's neither wrong nor crazy—it's simply ungraspable."
(p. 125). "The mind must learn that it cannot grasp the experience of emptiness; in fact, it doesn't need to grasp it. But the mind doesn't take kindly to ungraspable experiences and tends to pathologize them simply because it can't understand them. Out of its own inability to understand, it sends the message that such experiences are wrong or crazy."
The self is not an entity but a concept, a general idea of reflexivity that knows itself to exist; by so doing it becomes a focal point for a vast but unfocused all-pervasive consciousness which then can concentrate its own rays on itself rather than being just information on matter, the counterpart of the material world; thus, this consciousness comes to "savor" itself through the personal I.
Can a concept disappear into nothingness? Yes, if we consider an ordinary concept, a bit of information reflected on itself in the personal consciousness of a mind-body unit. If the concept is not in use for a long time, it may disappear from the field of reflected consciousness: it is forgotten. But the I cannot be forgotten, it cannot stop being reflected on itself. Every impression on the senses, every bit of information that is reflected on itself becomes a reinforcement for the I once the precess of personal consciousness has been triggered—that is, the appearance of a general idea of reflexivity, derived from the reflexivity of all the specific bits of information reflected on themselves. Only some extraordinary event (extraordinary in the sense of out of ordinary "normal" routine, not in the sense of something miraculous or due to "divine intervention", and which this writer cannot explain), can stop the process dead in its tracks. The I then stops being at the center of personal consciousness, it can no longer perceive itself. Personal consciousness, the subjectivity that till then knew itself to be a self, comes to a stop.
The I-concept does not exactly disappear. It is reduced to the first person singular pronoun, a practical and useful way to distinguish one mind-body unit from another—just as, for instance, streets are named and houses numbered. What has disappeared is the illusion about the concept. The illusion that there is a person who projects a beam of consciousness on the world, simply because there is reflected consciousness; the illusion that there is a person who acts simply because there is action in the world. The fact that the action (change in the material world) knows itself to exist at the level of personal consciousness and can even anticipate its coming (what we call "the decision to act") does not change anything to the problem. Outside of the personal pronoun, which specifies a given mind-body unit, there is no continued or stable personal entity.
The sense of the I is nothing but a general idea abstracted from those events. Unfortunately, it does not perceive itself as such. Once this idea knows itself to be, it is not limited to a specific content of information, as is the case with other concepts. There is no limit to its spread, it invades the whole field of consciousness and sees itself as the center and the "creator" of this consciousness; it becomes a personal entity, a self conscious of itself and of the world, and nothing can make it see itself for what it is: am abstraction, empty of any specific content.
Following a brutal and total upheaval of her subjective consciousness, Suzanne Segal lost forever the sense of being a personal self. That made her realize that "all of life is accomplished by an unseen doer who can never be located. The previous sense of an 'I' who was doing was totally illusory. The personal 'I' had never been the doer—it had only masqueraded as the doer. Everything continued as before, only the person who used to think she was doing was absent."
This is how U.G. Krishnamurti puts it: "I discovered for myself and by myself that there is no self to realize—that's the realization I am talking about. It comes as a shattering blow. It hits you like a thunderbolt. You have invested everything in one basket, self-realization, and, in the end, suddenly you discover that there is no self to discover, no self to realize—and you say to yourself—'What the hell have I been doing all my life?!' That blasts you." (The Mystique of Enlightenment, p. 2).
In a small Swiss town in the summer of 1967 something happened to U.G. Krishnamurti, a 47-year-old man originally from Southern India.
He had started drifting the previous years, less and less able to function in society and support his family. He had sent his wife and children back to India, and by chance found shelter with a Swiss woman of French origin, Valentine de Kervelen. He calls what happened to him that summer his "calamity." In his case, the disappearance of the sense of self was accompanied by extreme physiological changes, which he has described in various books published under his name.
Both U.G. and Suzanne Segal clearly describe what happened to them: the loss of the self, the end of the sense of being a person. Yet, beyond the lost person, the personality remains, and these two witnesses could not be more different. Suzanne is a serious young woman, who wants to do well, who asks for help and advice (in vain, it turns out). She is overwhelmed by what happens to her, and it takes her years to accept it. U.G. is an iconoclast, sure of himself; he accepts nobody's authority, and does not know fear. He faces squarely whatever fate throws at him. Thus these two individuals have lived very differently what they describe in similar terms: the loss of the individual sense of self.
Both mention that in their state, the "filter of the self" is no longer there; the senses are overwhelmed by the impact of the outside. But U.G. describes a great change that Suzanne Segal never mentions: his way of knowing is different. He describes it as state of "unknowing," which does not mean that there is no knowledge; rather, it means that knowledge functions in a manner totally different from the usual way.
Nor is it a relapse into the state of ignorance (as defined in Part I) where the information specific to matter remains non-reflected. In this state of unknowing, knowledge (which is nothing but a conditioning of nervous matter, exposed to outside stimuli, and which can then process the results, store them, combine them, etc.) does not disappear with the disappearance of the sense of self. It is still there, but there is no I left to say, "I know." The only I left is the pronoun, first person singular, useful to differentiate this mind-body unit from the others.
In a public talk given in Bangalore at the Indian Institute of World Culture in 1972, U.G. describes his condition after his "calamity." He calls his state the "natural state." Excerpts from this talk follow.
I am going to say a few words about the state of not knowing. How can anybody say anything about the 'state of not knowing?' I have necessarily to use words...But, perhaps, a few words like this will enable you to understand [that] the methods of thought prevent you from understanding the limitations of thought as a means to directly experience life and its movements.
This 'state of not knowing' is not [just] my particular state. I call it a 'Natural State' of your being. This is as much your natural state as it is mine. It is not the state of a God-realized man; it is not the state of a Self-realized man. It is not the state of a holy man. It is the natural state of every one of you here. But since you are looking to somebody else and you are reaching out for some kind of a state of liberation, freedom, or moksha—I don't know what words you want to use—you are lost.
But, how can one understand the limitations of thought? Naturally, the only instrument we have is the instrument of thought. But what is thought? I can give you a lot of definitions, and you know a lot of definitions about thought. I can say that thought is just matter; thought is vibration; and we are all functioning in this sphere of thought. And we pick up these thoughts because this human organism is an electro-magnetic field. And this electro-magnetic field is the product of culture. It may sound very inappropriate on this occasion to say that in order to be in your natural state, all that man has thought and felt before you must be swept aside and must be brushed aside. And that means the culture in which you are brought up must go down the drain or out of the window. Is it possible? It is possible. But, at the same time, it is so difficult, because you are the product of that culture and you are that. You are not different from that. You cannot separate yourself from that culture. And yet, this culture is the stumbling block for us to be in our natural state.
Can this 'Natural State' be captured, contained and expressed through words? It cannot. It is not a conscious state of your existence. It can never become part of your conscious thinking. An then why do I talk of this state of not knowing? For all practical purposes it does not exist at all. It can never become part of your conscious thinking.
Here, I have to explain what I mean by the word 'consciousness'...When do you become conscious of a thing? Only when the thought comes in between what is there in front of you and what supposed to be there inside of you. That is consciousness. So, you have to necessarily use thought to become conscious of the things around you, or the persons around you. Otherwise, you are not conscious of the things at all. And, at the same time, you are not unconscious. But there is an area where you are neither conscious nor unconscious. But that 'consciousness'—if I may use that word—expresses itself in its own way; and what prevents that consciousness to express itself in its own way is the movement of thought...
But there is no such thing as a thoughtless state at all. Thoughts are there; they will be there all the time. Thoughts will disappear only when you become a dead corpse—let me sue these two words-'dead corpse'. Otherwise, thoughts are there and they are going to be there If all the religious teachers tell us that you are going into a 'thoughtless state,' they are taking us all for a ride. They can promise you that in that thoughtless state—in that state of silence, in that state of quietness, or in that state of a 'Quiet Mind,' or whatever phrase you want to use—there will be this real 'bliss,' 'beatitude,' 'love,' 'religious joy,' and 'ecstatc state of being'. All that is balderdash. Because, that state—if there is any state like the state of bliss—it can never become part of your consciousness. It can never become part of your conscious existence. So, you might as well throw the whole thing—the whole crap of these ideas, concepts and abstractions about the blissful states—into a cocked hat, if I may use that American slang.
So, what is one to do? Can anybody help you? No outside agency can help you. That means a complete and total rejection, as I said in the beginning, of all that man has thought and felt before you. As long as there is any trace of knowledge, in any shape, in any form, in your consciousness, you are living in a divided state of consciousness.
He [Mr. Kothari] referred to my coming into a state of 'not knowing' or 'the calamity,' as I myself refer to that. What happened? I don't know. Suddenly thought has fallen into its natural state. The continuity has come to an end. So, what I am saying is not the product of thinking. It is not manufactured by my thought structure inside. Nor is it a logically ascertained premise. But what is happening here is only the expression of that state of being were you do not know what is happening...As he [Mr. Kothari] himself referred to, this is a pure and simple physical and physiological state of being. It has no religious undertones or overtones. It has no mystical content whatsoever. And, at the same time, this extraordinary thing, the extraordinary intelligence that is there, which is a product of centuries of human evolution, is able to express itself and deal with any problem and any situation without creating problems for us.
Q: May I interrupt you? I was told by people who are around you that when his calamity befell you, you couldn't recognize even ordinary things. You were asking like a newborn child, "What is this?" Even if there was a flower in front of you, you did not know if that was a flower. Then you would ask, "What is this?" And the Swiss lady who was keeping house for you, who was looking after you, Valentine, [she is here with us] said, "This is a flower." Then you would ask again, "What is this?" You mean to say that at the time when the calamity took place, all recognition was gone?
U.G. Not only then, but even now, as I said, this is a state of 'not knowing'. Since the memory is there in the background, it begins to operate when there is a demand for it. That demand is created by an outside agency, because there is no entity here. There is no center here. There is no self here. There is no Atman here. There is no soul here at all. You may not agree. You may not accept it, but that unfortunately happens to be a fact. The totality of thoughts and feelings is not there. But [in you] there is an illusion that there is a totality of your feelings and thoughts. This human organism is responding to the challenges from outside. You are functioning in the sphere—so, thousands and thousands, perhaps millions and millions of sensations are bombarding this body. Since there is no center here, since there is no mind here, since there is nothing here, what is it that is happening? What is happening here [is that] this human organism is responding to the challenges, or to the stimuli, if I may put it that way. So, there is nobody here who is translating these sensations in terms of past experiences. But there is a living contact with the things around. That is all that is there. One sensation after another is hitting this organism. And at the same time there is no coordinator here. This state of not knowing is not in relationship to our Brahman, or your Nirguna Brahman or Saguna Brahman or any such thing. This state of not knowing is in its relationship to the things that are there around you. You may be looking at a flower. You may think that it is a crazy state. Perhaps it is—I don't know. You do not know what you are looking at. But when there is a demand for that—and that demand always comes from outside, [asking] what is that, and then the knowledge, the information that is there, locked up in this organism comes and says that it is a rose, that this is a microphone, that's a man, that's a woman, and so on and so forth. This is not because there is a drive from inside, but the outside challenge brings out this answer. So, I say that this action is always taking place outside of this organism, not inside.
How do I know that these sensations are bombarding or hitting this organism all the time? It is only because there is a consciousness which is conscious of itself and there is nobody who is conscious of the things that are happening. This is a living organism and that living state is functioning in its own way, in its natural way.
...If they have understood what there is, they they wouldn't be here. They wouldn't go to anybody. They wouldn't ask these questions at all. If they translate what I am saying, in terms of their particular fancy or their particular background, that's their tragedy; it would be their misery. It hasn't helped them. This is my question: Has it helped your?Why are you hung up on these phrases? They are after all phrases. When once you realize, when once this is understood—how this mechanism is operation, how automatic it is, how mechanical it is, you will realize that all these phrases have no meaning at all. You may very well ask me why I am using these phrases: [it is] because you and I have created this unfortunate situation where you have put me here on the dais and asked me to talk, and naturally, as I said in the beginning, I have to use words. So, the moment I stop talking, the whole thing has come to a stop inside. Is that so? It is so here [in my case], because there is no continuity of thought.
We go back to the thing he [Mr. Kothari] referred to, about the things around me. Here there is a table. I don't know what it is. And, at the same time, if you ask me, "What is that?" [pointing at a chair] I would immediately say, "It's a chair." It [the knowledge] is there in the background. It comes automatically, like an arrow. But otherwise, this [the impression I have] is just a reflection of this [the thing in front of me]. I don't translate this as "bimbavatu [like an image]" at all. But I have to use that word: this is reflecting the thing exactly the way it is. I don't want to use these metaphysical phrases because you will immediately translate them in terms of your particular parallel. There is no subject ere independent of the object at all. So, there is nothing here [inside me]. What is there is all that is there, and you do not know what it is. So, now you turn there, and this object has just disappeared, there is something else. This has completely and totally disappeared from here and then what is there is a thing that is there in front of me and it is just like this object, exactly the way it is. But you do not know what it is. That is why I say it is a state of not knowing. Probably your will find parallels to these things. What I am trying to point out is the absence of what you are all doing at this moment; [that] is the state that I am describing, and it is not [just] my state [but] that is the way you are [also] functioning.
I am throwing a lot of conclusions at you. But even a thing like this cannot be experienced by you at all. I don't know if you understand this. You have necessarily to abstract this in order to experience a thing. So, what I am trying to say is that you can never experience your own natural state. This can never become part of your experiencing structure. And what you are all trying to do all the time is to make that—whatever you want—to realize or discover—part of this experiencing structure. So your experiencing structure and your natural state cannot co-exist at the same time.
This I must stress: that the need for the operation of thought, or the movements of thought to come into being, is decided by factors outside of this organism. When and why and how this translation is to come into being is decided by an action outside. The actions are always taking place outside. When there is a demand, the movement of thought probably separates itself for a while to meet the demands of the situation and then it is back again in the movement of life. So, thought is only functional in value, and it has no other value at all.
What is more is that the continuity of thought is destroying the sensitivity of your senses. When the movement of thought is not continuous, the senses begin to function in an extraordinarily sensitive way. When I use the word sensitivity, I mean the sensitivity of the senses and not the sensitivity of the mind. The sensitivity of the mind is a trick of your mind, and you can create a state of mind where you feel sensitive to the feelings of everybody, to the things around you and wallow in that sickly state of mind and think you are getting somewhere. This is a thing that is there [you are doing this] all the time.
There is nothing to achieve, there is nothing to accomplish, nothing to attain, and no destination to arrive at. And what prevents what is there, this living state, from expressing itself in its own way is the movement of thought which is there only for the purposes of functioning in this world. When the movement of thought is not there—I have to use the clauses in terms of time—but time is thought. When thought is there, time is there. When thought is there, sex is there, when thought is there, God is there. When thought is not there, there is no God, there is no sex [?], nothing is there. It may sound objectionable to you to accept my statement...but the drug of virtues you practice, the practice of virtues is not a foundation for it at all. And the practice of abstinence, continence, and celibacy is not the path to it. But if you want to indulge in them and feel greatly superior, it's your own business. I am not here to reform you. I am not here to lead you anywhere.
But this is a fact. You have to understand a fact as a fact. It is not a logically ascertained thing, it is not a rational thing [so as] to understand it rationally. A fact is a movement. Truth is movement. Reality is a movement. But I don't want to use these words, because they are all loaded words. You know all about them. The unfortunate thing about the whole business is that you know a lot about these things, and that is the misery of you all. This is a thing which you do not know at all. I am not claiming that I know it. I myself don't know. That is why I say I don't know. It's a state of not knowing. Let alone God, let alone reality, ultimate or otherwise, I don't know what I am looking at—the very person who has been with me all the time, day and night. That is my situation. If I tell this to a psychiatrist, he will probably put me on a couch and say something is radically wrong with me. Probably, I am functioning like any other human being. He doesn't understand that. That's his problem, it is not my problem anymore. So, all your search—for truth, God, Reality—you use any phrase you like, is a false thing. You are all on a merry-go-round, and you want to go round and round and round.
How can you ask for a thing which you do not know? How can you search for a thing which you do not know? You all seem to know. You have an image of this state. From the description of this state probably you have already created [an image]. What state? Somebody asked me: "What is the state you are in?" "What State? Mysore State or Tamil Nadu State? What state are you talking about?" This is my response. What is the state you are talking about? This is your natural state. You don't want to understand that. You don't want to be in your natural state. It requires an extraordinary intelligence to be in your natural state, to be yourself.
You always want to be somebody else; you want to imitate the life of somebody else—you want to imitate the life of Jesus, you want to imitate the life of Buddha, you want to imitate the life of Shamkara. You can't do it, because you don't know what is there behind. You will end up changing your robes, from rose to saffron, saffron to yellow, or from yellow to rose, depending upon your particular fancy. How can you ask for a thing which you do not know? How can you search for a thing which you do not know? How can you search for a thing which you do not know? That is my question. So, search has no meaning at all. Only when the search comes to an end, what there is will express itself, in its own way. You cannot tamper with that. You cannot manipulate that. You cannot manipulate the action of the thing which is there, which has an extraordinary intelligence.
To be yourself is the easiest ting. And you don't want to be in your state. You'd rather be somebody else, imitate the life of somebody else. That's your problem. To be yourself doesn't need any time at all. But you talk of timelessness, which is a mockery. To be yourself, do you need time? To be a good man, to be a marvelously religious man, to be in a state of peace, to be in a state of bliss, naturally you need time. That will always be tomorrow. When tomorrow arrives, you say, "All right, day after tomorrow." That is time. [I am] not [talking about] this metaphysical or philosophical thing. I am not talking about metaphysical time and [the] timeless. There is no such thing as the timeless.
I am making assertions, statements and conclusions—you will object to them. Take it or leave it. I don't expect you to accept anything that I am saying. You are not in a position to accept or reject it. You can reject it because it does not fit into the particular framework of your philosophy—Shamkara, Gaudapada, Ramamuja, Madhvacharya, God knows what—we have too many of them here. So how can you understand this? The only thing to do is to throw in the towel. Turn your back on the whole business. That is why, it takes extraordinary courage, not the courage or the bravado of these people who climb Mount Everest or try to swim across the English Channel, or cross the Pacific or Atlantic—whatever their fancy—on a raft. That is not what I mean. What I mean is the courage...If you understand the way this mechanical structure is functioning inside of you, you see the absurdity of the whole business of discussing these matters everlastingly. Can you throw the whole business out of the window and walk out?
[Mr. Kothari]...I find there is a sort of fire in him which sometimes, I fear, would frighten a person who does not understand, quite grasp, even intellectually, what hie is trying to convey. As I understand it, he is not advocating anything. His whole approach is...He has no system. He says something about these states—that this is your natural state. But the whole thing, this achievement business, to get something, [the state being] like something, comparing something to some imaginary state which one has formulated, an image we got by reading about those things—that he says is all futile. It is strengthening the mental structure, it is strengthening the thought structure, and it is giving a life to it—which, he says, is all useless. It is the cause of your very misery, all the problems. It seems he has seen it himself. And the structure went phut, the whole thing broke inside, and, as he says, he even does not know [it himself]. That is the state of unknowing. When he says this, I am reminded of the words of Jnaneswar who says, "I don't know what I am or where I am." Even avidya has gone, and vidya has gone also. So, I see...only I want to remind some of my listeners here...that the newness of expression whatever he is trying to convey, is as old as the hills and as fresh as the vibrations from that thing now. It is as fresh or even fresher than the words I am speaking, the sounds that I am throwing at you. It is more fresh than that. It is sanatana [ancient] and puratana [old]. But, he says, it requires total courage.
Another thing that I have noticed in him is a kind of—I am talking personally about you, but, as there is no personality, it doesn't matter. [Laughter]—a tremendous, fearlessness, "abhayam tattva samsuptih." I would again quote the Gita, the daivika sampatti [the divine qualities], this is something that does not happen in the usual, normal men in whom the animal fear is functioning all the time, as he says. But he does not come out of that [state]. I don't know how he came to it. But [there is in him] a tremendous fearlessness and a sense of abandonment. He is not a perfect specimen of all the wonderful virtues. He gets annoyed, and he gets angry also. For a moment you see the cloud of anger on his face, and after a minute you see the full moon is again on his face, smiling. The clouds have disappeared all of a sudden...He say you don't have the courage to throw in the towel. You don't have the fearlessness..." He says, "You throw out the speaker also." I hope some of you certainly have got the hang of what he is trying to convey.
...Q: What is the way or method of getting into this state?
U.G.: What state? When the movement in the direction of wanting to be into your own natural state or in the state of God knows whom you want to be, your idol, or your hero or your master [is there]—it is there—this movement in any direction, is taking you away from yourself. That is all that I am pointing out. When the movement is not there, you are your natural state.
So, the sadhana, the method, or system, or the technique, is taking you away from yourself in the direction of the state you want to be in and that is the state of somebody else. As I pointed out, you have the knowledge about this state. Unfortunately, so many people have talked about it. I am already doing mischief, perhaps. Kick them all out, on their backs. [Mr. Kothari: "Not now!"—Laughter] Yes, throw stones at me and walk out...My interest is to send you packing, as the expression has it. If you can do that, you will never go to listen to anybody...
...I haven't said anything...You think it makes sense. How can it make sense? If you think that it makes sense, you haven't understood a thing. If you think that it doesn't make any sense, you haven't understood it either. It's just words—[you are] listening to this noise—words, words, words-mechanically coming out of this organism. I don't know how they are coming. I wish I knew. I wish I knew how I got intonation state? It always irritates me when people ask me "You tell us someting..." About what state? What state are you talking about? I know Mysore. I am in the Mysore State. How do I know that I am in the Mysore State? Because people tell me that I am i Mysore. So what state do you want to get into? That is your natural state, I am saying.
What takes you away from your state is this movement in the direction of wanting to be in some state other than yourself. To be yourself doesn't need time. If I am a village idiot, I remain a village idiot. Finish. I don't want to be an intelligent man. Even if my neighbor takes advantage of his extraordinary intelligence and exploits [me], good luck. What can I do? To accept the reality, this is the reality of the world. There is no other world. There is no other reality, ultimate reality. This is the only reality. You have to function in this world. You can't run away from this world. How can you run away from this world? Because you are that world. Where you can you go? Hide yourself in a cave? Yes, you are taking your thoughts wherever you go. You cannot run away from your shadow. It's there all the time. So, you can't do a thing about thought. That's all that I am saying. When you realize the absurdity of all your effort to do something about the thought—when you can't do anything, when you realize that you can't do a thing about it, [then] it's not there. [Then] You are not using it [thought] as a means to get something for you.
I want to say this again. You desire. If you do not want anything, there is no thought at all. You understand? Wanting is thinking, it doesn't matter what you want—want self-realization, want God-realization—you want anything, that means you have to use this instrument. These are not your thought, these are not your feelings. You may not like it. They belong to somebody else. You want to make them your own. You have unfortunately made them your own. That's why you ask all these questions. Why do you ask all these questions? These questions have been put before to so many people—all the sages, saints and saviors of mankind, the holy men dead and alive. They are all ready to answer. They have composed a lot of lullabies. You go and listen to them and go to sleep, if you want to. That's what you are interested in. You want somebody else to pat on your back and say, "Oh, fine, just fine, you are doing very well. Do more and more of the same and you will reach the destination you want to arrive at." What is the destination you want to arrive at? To be gentle, meek, to be soft, to talk and whisper. You know if you go to some of these monasteries in the West, the Trappists, they talk and whisper. They don't even understand what the other man is saying. That's the secret to the spiritual path.
Mr. Kotari: When a man is in love, he talks and whispers to his beloved. What objection do you have to anybody talking and whispering?
U.G.: I have no objection at all. I wonder if he is really in love. [Laughter] You don't even have to talk about it. You want to reassure your partner that you are in love with that person. It isn't worth a tinker's damn, that love. That's not love at all. You can call it love. I don't want to go into that. It's a forbidden subject. They ask me, "Do you have anything to say about...?" It's a four letter word. It's like any other word—"dog," "pig," "love." In love, can there be any relationship at all? Can you have any relationship? This is your problem. You are all the time trying to have relationship with people. You cannot have any relationship with people at all. "Love is relationship." "Life is relationship." All that guff. Trite. Crap. You memorize and repeat them [those phrases]. They all become fancy phrases these days. "Freedom," "first and last freedom," and "the freedoms that come in between." What is this nonsense? This is like any other trite [phrase], any other crap that these people are repeating. You have memorized a new set of phrases. That's all you are doing. You sit and discuss everlastingly all this awareness. What is that awareness you are talking about? How can you be aware of this? Can you at any tie be aware of it? If you are aware of this once in your lifetime, the whole structure has collapsed; it has fallen in its proper place. You don't have to do a thing about it. So, it doesn't mean a ting at all. You can talk of awareness—choiceless or otherwise—or conditioning. Conditioning—what can you do about it? Conditioning is intelligence. You can't do a damn thing about it. You can't free yourself [from it]. If you want to free yourself from your conditioning, or uncondition yourself and all that nonsense that is going on...How are you going to uncondition yourself? You create another conditioning—instead of repeating Upanishads you will repeat some other thing, the fancy books.
Q: What is the secret of total happiness?
U.G.: There is no happiness. I never ask myself the question. So many people ask me that question: "Are you happy?" What is that question? Funny question. I never ask [myself] that question, "Am I happy?" Total happiness is an invention. [Mr. Kothari: "Invention of the mind, you mean?"] There is no mind. Where is the mind? Is the mind separate from the body? These questions have no meaning at all. You have no way of separating yourself from what is going on. The moment you separate yourself means you have a knowledge about it—the knowledge given by either the biologists, the physiologists, the psychologists or the religious people. So through that you are looking at it. You cannot experience anything without knowledge. You cannot experience this at all, let alone Brahman or reality. You cannot experience this at all. Only through an abstraction. And what is that abstraction? The knowledge you have about it. This has been put there. Your mother told you, or your neighbor or friend told you that this is a table. What the hell is that, you don't know, apart from what you have been told. Every time you look at this you have to repeat to yourself that it is a table. What are you doing that for? this is my question. This is the continuity I am talking about. You want to reassure yourself that you are there. The "I" is nothing but this word. There is no "I" independent of this word. Maybe you find some parallel [to what I am saying] in Shamkara or God knows what.
[Mr. Kothari:] Plenty, plenty. Because this is the same thing that they have talked about.
U.G.: Yes, yes. They called it 'cit'. The consciousness I am talking about, is a state where is no division which says that you are asleep, that you are awake, that you are dreaming...There is no division at all. I don't even know if I am alive or dead This is my state. I have no way of knowing for myself. The doctor can come and say that I want to examine your lung, your lung is functioning all right—there is heartbeat, there is this, that and the other—you are alive. That's all right. I am delighted. You reassure me that I am a living being. But...
Q: How do you know at any time that you are in the Natural State?
U.G.: That, as I said, can never become part of your conscious existence. It begins to express itself. The Expression of that is energy; and that is action. It is acting all the time. This is not a mystical term. What I mean by action is [that] the action is taking place always outside. The senses are working at their peak capacity all the time. It's not because you want to look at a particular thing. There is no time even for the eyelids to blink for a second. They have to stay open all the time. And when they are tired, it [the body] has its own naturally built-in mechanism, which cuts off the sensation. And then it's back again.
Q: What is that mechanism?
U.G.: What is that mechanism? Supposing somebody gives you an answer. So where are you? Can you separate yourself from that mechanism? This is what I am saying. You can separate yourself from the mechanism and look at it only through the knowledge, whether the knowledge is provided by a physician or by a saint or by a sage. And that [knowledge] is worthless. Because you are projecting this knowledge on what you are looking at, and that knowledge is creating or producing these experiences. That can never become part of that experiencing structure. That's the trouble. You want to experience this. You can't experience this at all. Whether it is the consciousness that I am talking of, or the living state or the state of not knowing or the things that are there around [you]. How is it expressing itself? It is expressing itself as energy, it is expressing itself as action, in its own way. ...The brain physiologists, if I may quote somebody,—they are trying to understand the brain. And they have to find some means to define [it]. They have defined the brain as an instrument with which we think. They are not so sure. You cannot separate yourself from the brain and its activity and look at the brain. Can you look at your back and tell me something about your back. Somebody else must come and tell you. And he has his own ideas, fancy ideas. "You have a straight back." The doctor always observes people. And from his point of view, he world say that that man is sick, this man's back is not correct, and so forth. Or, if I see a painter, his description is something else. So, this is a thing which you cannot communicate to somebody else. Can you communicate your sex experience to somebody else?
Mr. Kothari: "Why sex experience, any experience." Or any experience, for that matter. That's what everybody is trying to do—a painter, a poet or a writer. He is trying to communicate through his medium—writing poetry, culture. He is like any other artisan.
Q: How do you reconcile your existence with the world?
U.G.: I don't bother. Do I exist in this world? Does the world exist for me? Where is the world? I am not trying to be clever with all these phrases I don't know a thing about it. Am I talking, am I saying anything? This is like the howling of a jackal, barking of a dog or the braying of an ass. If you can put this on that level and just listen to this vibration, you are out, you will walk out, and you will never listen to anybody in your lifetime. Finish. It doesn't have to be the talk of a self-realized man. You will realize that there is no self to realize. That's all. There is no center there. It is working in an extraordinary way.
Q: In the extinction of sense organs..., if the sense organs do not function at all, for instance, there is death; there is a state of not knowing and you still function.
U.G.: There is no death. You are never born. You are not born at all. [Laughter] I am not trying to mystify. Because life has no beginning, it has no end. Has it a beginning, has it an end? What creates the beginning is your thought. Why are you concerned about death? There is no such thing as death at all. Your birth and your death can never become part of that experiencing structure. If you want to experience death, you are not going to be there. [Laughter] Somebody else will be there. It will be somebody else's misery.
...There is nothing to get from me or from anybody. You want to be at peace with yourself. You will not get anything from anybody. All this is disturbing the peace that is already there...
Q: Now, it looks like...if we had no idea of peace at all...
U.G.: You have to live with your ideas and suffer. There is no way out for you. If somebody says there is a way out, go there. Stand on your head; stand on your shoulders; hang from the tree; meditate—do what you like—misery continues. That is [adding] another misery. What are you? You are miserable. You are a sitting misery, walking misery, talking misery, living misery. You want to get out of that misery. You are choked. What is it that is choking you, destroying the very thing that you want? [It is]o all those human values and all the good things. You want freedom, and that is killing you. It is very difficult to understand. To be free from the very demand to be free is all that you have to do. That is not easy.
Q: Because there is nothing left....
U.G.: How can you say that now? When you are there that question would not be there at all. That moment is a living moment. Life is not interested in any one of those things. If I put it that way, it becomes a carrot for you. If I talk of life—living moments—it becomes poetry. Romantic stuff. It is another carrot. Anything I say will be added to the stuff you already have. This will be another burden. It looks like another new thing, but it is the same thing. The newness of it is lost because you have captured it within your framework.
That is why I was telling him that "You have not moved away from your background. It doesn't matter where you go—J.K. [Juddu Krishnamurti], U.G., Baba Free John—the basic situation remains unchanged. No matter where you go, you are looking for a new Bible, new church and a new priest. That is all you can do. You can't do anything else."
Q: Sir! Do you have Samkalpa? I have no English word for that. So, I am using the Sanskrit word—a wish that something should happen.
U.G.: You see, there is no gap between my needs and my goals. I have no goal independent of my needs. The needs are the physical needs of the body. There are no other needs.
Q: There is nothing connected with what you see?
U.G.: No. I don't know what I am looking at. I really don't know. What I know is in the background; and that is brought into operation in response to the demands of the situation. It [the background] plays its part and then it is gone.
Q: So, there is no Samkalpa.
U.G..... Every action is independent. Life is action. Life is acting all the time. There is not one moment where there is no sensation of some kind or the other. You are responding to the sensations all the time. But, of course, there are some moments the nature of which you will never know. I don't know what you call samadhi or nirvikalpa samadhi. The body has to go through the process of death every now and then to renew itself. It is a renewal process. All the sensory activity has to come to an end for a 'kshana'—a fraction of a second; and it is impossible for you to visualize and capture that. But if the body is in a state of repose, it takes a longer time. Sometimes for forty nine minutes [maximum time for one period of deep sleep?] the body goes through a very elaborate process of dying. Somehow it has to snap out of it, because there are constant demands on the body. This can hit you all of a sudden while you are walking in the street. But the demands [of the body] are so great that they cannot allow this for long.
Q: After that process of death is there anything like a 'you'?
U.G.: You are talking of a 'you' after death. Is there anything like what you call 'you' now? Where is it now? Are you awake? Are you alive now?
Q: I feel I am awake. I have come here. I started from home and have come to see you.
U.G.: That is true. I also function as if the whole world is real. You have to accept the reality of the world up to a point. Otherwise, you can't function in this world. But I can't say that I am awake. I can't say that I am asleep either. I see and I don't know what I am looking at. My sensory perceptions are at their peak capacity; but there is nothing inside of me which says that is green, that is brown, and that you wear a white shirt, a dhoti and glasses etc. No anesthesia has been administered on me, but still I really don't know what I am looking at. The knowledge I have about things is in the background, but it is not operating. So am I awake or asleep? I have no way of knowing it for myself. That is why I say that in this consciousness there is no such division as jagratta, swapna and sushupti—aren't those the words for wakeful, dream and deep sleep states? A total absence of this division in your consciousness into wakeful, dream and sleep states may be called 'turiya'—not transcending these things but a total absence of this division. So you are always—to use your Sanskrit phrase—in the turiya state.
Q: Because we are involved in every perception we are not in the state you are describing?
U.G.: Because there is a constant demand on your part to experience everything that you look at, everything that you are feeling inside. If you don't do that, 'you' as you now yourself and as you experience yourself is coming to an end. That is a frightening thing. You don't want to come to an end; you want continuity. All the spiritual pursuits are in the direction of strengthening that continuity. So, all your experiences, all your meditations, all your sadhana—all that you do is strengthening the 'self'. They are self-centered activities. Whatever you do to be free from the 'self' is also a self-centered activity. The process you adopt to attain what you call 'being' is also a 'becoming' process. So, there is no such thing as 'being'. Anything you do—any movement, in any direction, on any level—is a becoming process.
Q: You say that if this thought barrier—the protective mechanism—is removed, then the body responds to or resonates with anything that happens?
U.G.: Then there is no mirror which is reflecting. All your actions from then on are reflex actions. Many of these things are handled by the spinal column. That is why so much importance has been given to the spiral column. [Then] sensations don't reach the sensorium at all. They are handled and disposed of before that [point]. The moment they reach the sensorium, thought has got to come into operation. Then there is an action necessary, which is for the protection of the body.
...There is nothing here independent of what is happening there.
That is why I call this a 'movement.' This [body] is totally attentive. Not that there is somebody who is attentive. Everything that is happening there is registered here as a movement. Where is the movement taking place? Is it there? Is it here? Or where? I can't say. I really don't know.
...What I am saying can't be experienced by you except through the help of thought. In other words, as long as the movement of thought is there, it is not possible for you to understand what I am talking about. When it is not there, then there is no need for you to understand anything. In that sense, there is nothing to understand.
...U.G.: You are all occupied. You are interested in listening to what I am saying. I am not interested in telling you anything at all. Do you hear the barking of the dog out there? You translate it and say that is the barking of a dog. But if you are just aware of that, it echoes here inside of you. There is no separation from you. There is no translation. You are barking, and not the dog out there.
But one thing I must say. What I am saying is not born out of thinking. This is not a logically ascertained premise that I am putting forth. These are just words springing forth from their natural source without any thought, without any thought structure. So, take it or leave it. You will be better off if you leave it.
Life is energy. It is all the time trying to convert itself into energy. In the final analysis there is neither matter nor energy. They [matter and energy] are interchangeable. But when thought takes its birth, then it is matter. In its very nature it [thought] splits itself into two. If through some luck or strange chance it remains without splitting itself into two. If through some luck or strange chance it remains without splitting itself into two, something has got to happen to that. And there it explodes. It is an atomic explosion. The human organism has trillions of atoms. It's an electro-magnetic field. When one atom explodes, it blasts everything that is there. It triggers a chain reaction. You can't make this kind of a thing happen at all. Yet the possibility of its happening in everybody is 100%. Not that I am placing a carrot before you. That is its nature. That is why it happens in one in a billion. "Why does it happen to one individual? Why not me?" If you question in that fashion, you have not got a chance.
Other comments by U.G., in a December 1998 talk in Palm Springs, California.
U.G.: The thinker can conceive action only in the context of a cause-and-effect relationship.
[Thought and knowledge are possible only within the structure of the Kantian categories, which we have widened in the first part of this book to cover our entire stock of general ideas].
There is here [speaking of himself] only an echo chamber. There is no interpreter here.
To know something means only to give it a name. [to file it under the label of a general idea that has already been filed and named.]
The unconditioned mind cannot exist. The likes and dislikes remain the same [as before the "calamity"] but they don't influence behavior. [in a mind-body unit in a state of no-self the person is gone but the personality, the personal traits, remain.]
U.G. [i.e., the "interpreter", the "coordinator", U.G. as an I, first person singular] is necessary to function in this world practically and intelligently. [otherwise, when the coordinator is not active, U.G. does not "function": e sees something, and does not know what it is. He just sits there, immobile as a stone.]
The separation [between the I as subject and the world as object] is necessary only to function in the world. [to communicate with other mind-body units and to function practically: at what time the next bus to Timbuctu?]
Here [speaking of himself] there is nothing but the barking of a dog.
U.G. Krishnamurti does not explain much, and he tries even less to prove logically or defend what he is saying. Still, the general picture he presents of the way he is functioning is clear. There is a direct connection between the sense of self and mental activity, which he calls "the continuity of thought." If this flow stops even for one moment, the self loses its source and dissipates into nothingness. As already mentioned, U.G. calls this event his "calamity," and he never fails to tell his audience, "If you knew what it is, you would not want it."
He also confirms that knowledge functions on the basis of general ideas, to which sense-impressions are related in order to be known. He calls that "to have the experience" of something. If a sense-impression is not identified and connected to a general idea there is no knowledge, in the sense of reflected knowledge known by an I. He calls that condition "the natural state." or the state of not-knowing. Still, the reflected knowledge can be summoned and communicated, according to the needs of the environment. That's why U.G. stresses that action, including thought-processes, is always initiated by the outside.
In the state of unknowing, there is no "coordinator" and the senses function separately. The sense-impressions are not interpreted and sorted out by the mental structures. For instance, U.G. sees a dog barking. Because there is no interpretation of the impression (no connection to the abstract idea of dog). he does not know that he is seeing a dog, and he does not call what he hears a "sound" (that would be a categorization, an active process of thinking) or even less "the barking of a dog." But if someone asks U.G. what is going on, the coordinator springs automatically into action (the action, U.G. says, is always initiated from the outside, by the demands of the environment), and U.G. will respond, "It's a dog barking." And if the dog starts growling menacingly, U.G. will run away (or engage in any other reflex action based on his conditioning).
Following a brutal and total upheaval of her subjective consciousness, Suzanne Segal lost forever the sense of being a personal self. That made her realize that "all of life is accomplished by an unseen doer who can never be located. The previous sense of an 'I' who was doing was totally illusory. The personal 'I' had never been the doer—it had only masqueraded as the doer. Everything continued as before, only the person who used to think she was doing was absent."
U.G. Krishnamurti confirms the disappearance of the sense of being an individual self: "Here, there is no acting entity inside. There is no center here. There is no self here...One sensation after the other bombards this organism...but there is no coordinator...Here the continuity of thought has come to an end...Here there is no subject independent of the object...When thought is not here, then there is nothing...The senses function at their maximum capacity, and yet I don't know what I am looking at, unless it somebody, from the outside, asks me what it is...Without an internal coordinator how can I be aware of these sensations which bombard the organism? There is a consciousness which is conscious of itself, but there is nobody who is conscious of what's happening."
U.G. says, "Thought is the enemy." Why? Because we are trying to use it to know the unknowable. Except for practical purposes, thought is a dead-end. "You have necessarily to abstract this in order to experience a thing. So, what I am trying to say is that you can never experience your own natural state. This can never become part of your experiencing structure. And what you are all trying to do all the time is to make "that"—whatever you want to realize or discover—part of this experiencing structure. So your experiencing structure and your natal state cannot co-exist at the same time."
For both Suzanne Segal and U.G., any interior life, any personal subjectivity, has been blown to pieces, annihilated. The sense of being a person is gone forever. Suzanne Segal says, "There was no Suzanne Segal anymore; perhaps there never had been...Without a personal self, the inside or internal simply did not exist." U.G. adds "The consciousness I am talking about is a state where there is no division which says that you are asleep, that you are awake, that you are dreaming....There is no division at all. I don't even know if I am alive or dead."
In a state of no-self, the "enormous" fact is that there is nothing personal left, nothing left inside. The consciousness, which is so personal and centered on the sense of self in our "normal" state, has now become totally impersonal. Because this consciousness is no longer identified with a specific person ( itself identified with a specific body)—there is no "I" beyond the personal pronoun—there is nothing to tell "him" (this personal pronoun) whether this specific body (U.G.'s) is alive or not. U.G. insists on the fact that his mental and physical activities (activities centered on the mind-body unit called U.G.) are all initiated from the outside, because there is nothing inside to initiate anything, there is no personal "free faculty of the will" left. The functioning is now automatic, like everything else in nature. We too, in our "normal consciousness," centered on the individual sense of self, function automatically. But the illusion of the ego makes us believe that we act and think out of our own free will; it makes us believe that there is a center that controls thought and action, thus giving meaning and purpose to our behavior.
The "normal" condition for most of us is what could be called the "egoist" state. In this state the I-self sees itself at the center of everything and relates everything (i.e., the knowledge it has of the world and itself) to itself. At the intellectual or philosophical level, this state is what Descartes has described in his I think therefore I am, making it the foundation of his philosophy. At the emotional level, U.G. defines crudely, but truthfully, this state as "what's in it for me?" Following Sri Aurobindo, I have myself described this condition as the absolute illusion of the ego. This state is the normal condition of mankind, even when one adheres to an ideology of altruism, of sharing, of religious or secular idealism, of spirituality, of renunciation, of forsaking crude selfishness and narrow self-interest. All these lofty ideals and aspirations have only one result, only one real (even if unconscious) purpose: to reinforce the I-self, to comfort it in the image it has of itself, to make it more "pure," more "refined," less "base," or in one word, "better".
For reasons that are not yet clear some people find themselves in a different state in their subjective life. This new state could be called the "unitive" state. In this state individual consciousness is freed from the constraints of the personal self, and feels itself in union with God. It's a state of exaltation, of love of God and of others, of overwhelming intuitions. Sri Aurobindo describes it as the stages of the "overmind" and the "supermind" in his description of the evolution of consciousness. U.G. Krishnamurti, radical and provocateur as is his wont, does not fall in the trap of tis exhilarating condition, and is merciless with his contempt and sarcasm. He maintains that the ingestion of all kinds of hallucinogenic drugs will produce the same effects, with less effort and less self-inflicted misery.
U.G. is right because the end of selfishness is not the end of self. In other words, being unselfish and being self-less (in a state of no-self0 are two radically different conditions. In the unitive state, one may be unselfish, but there is still a person, an individual, a self, even if it is an exalted self. The self sincerely believes in being one with God, or any other exalted principle, in loving God and experiencing the love of God. The truth is, the self continues to love itself through God (through the idea, or even the intuition, of God). The truth is, the self continues to be. This state is a state of experience, different indeed from our normal consciousness, but experience all the same. The fact, confirmed a thousand times by U.G., is that experience is possible only if somebody, something, some entity (even a virtual one) is there to have the experience. The self is still there, but in a different and more exalted form. U.G. maintains, correctly in my view, that the "real thing" is not the mystical experience, the union with God, but the disappearance forever of the sense of a personal self, whether individual or identified with God. The union with God is no longer possible, because there is nothing to unite with God. Bliss is not there, because there is nothing or nobody to experience bliss. The annihilation of the sense of self, not bliss or mystical union, are the real mark of the end of the change in consciousness; the end is nothingness, at least from the point of view of our normal consciousness, centered on the I-self. No wonder U.G. calls it a "calamity".
Functioning in a state of no-self. How can we understand more precisely the differences between normal consciousness, centered on the I-self, and the state of no-self? The basic difference is that in a state of no-self the senses can function by themselves, without consciousness (that is, self-consciousness). As extraordinary and improbable as that may seem to us, U.G. says that the functioning of the senses is enough (the senses and their extension, the conditioned brain;) enough for the survival of a human being, not only physically but also socially; the result is that consciousness is wholly superfluous. Consciousness being defined, of course, as self-consciousness. Consciousness as defined in the first part of this book: reflected consciousness and the I-sense it brings about. The continuation of the sense of self, which seems so intuitively essential to most of us, and certainly methodologically essential to Descartes, is not needed.
U.G. Krishnamurti presents a case where there is correct functioning, without consciousness of being a self conscious of what's happening.
U.G. says: "I am answering your questions, but I don't know what I am saying." How is this possible? What does that mean? U.G.'s statement does not mean that there is no knowledge (in which case U.G. would be talking gibberish, which he is not). It means that there is no I which has the knowledge. This is the reverse of Descartes, who posited the I (I think, therefore I am) when the only actual fact is that there is thinking going on. Now, U.G. says "I don't know," and that means only that there is no I to know, not that there is no knowledge.
U.G. is not delirious. Anyone can have a perfectly sane and sensible exchange with him in a normal conversation. But if there is no I-self there, who is communicating? Nobody. (There is nobody either on "our side" of the exchange, but under the illusion of the ego we think that there is a self doing the communicating, and that without said self there would be no exchange.) What happpens is that the senses record the data (the sounds heard, the images seen), these data are processed by the brain, just like a computer processes the input from the keyboard. The brain (of us "normal people" as well as of the "enlightened"), just like the computer, is conditioned, or programmed, to process the input, but in the case of U.G. et al., nobody (no self) is there to give meaning to what's happening, even though the response is "correct."
A conversation between a "normal" person and a person like U.G. (as well as a conversation between two "normal" people) is nothing but an exchange between two conditionings [complex sub-systems], two mental programs (carbon—rather than silicon-based). If the two conditionings correspond (computers "talk" to each other or not), then the exchange takes place, there is communication. Objectively, U.G. et al. function just like us, just like anybody else. But subjectively the sense of self is gone, and with it the meaning of things. The meaning of things, their savor for me, is gone. When the I is gone, what's left is senses and a brain that function automatically, like everything else in nature, including the senses and the brains of us "normal" people.
Let's be clear about that. In an exchange with U.G. there is coherence because his conditioning fits ours; the two mental machines can communicate, like two compatible softwares. But coherence and meaning are two different things. Coherence is a logical, objective quality. Meaning exists only subjectively, for an I-self. In a conversation between two "normal" persons, there is both objective coherence (assuming roughly similar conditionings and mental levels) and subjective apprehension of meaning by each person, or group of persons. But for U.G. only the objective coherence remains; for him, subjectively, nothing is there, since the subjective sense of self, to which meaning relates, is not present. There is no meaning, not because there is incoherence or some kind of dementia, but because meaning can no longer be attached or related to anything like a self.
U.G. gives music as an example of the disappearance of meaning. He remarks that for him music is now nothing but noise, one sound at a time, with no connection to the next, with no significance (emotional or otherwise). He says that melody, for us the meaning of music, is created by the listener, by us, and does not exist in the sound produced by the instrument. The I that listens to music and takes pleasure in it is really listening to itself, taking pleasure in itself listening (and in fact creating) the music. The same is true of the arts in general, both at the level of the creative artist and of the patron enjoying the creation. Likewise, the self that knows God and loves God and devotes itself to God in fact knows and loves and devotes to nothing but itself. The whole of our subjective life, the meaning that we give to the world, to things, and to ourselves in the first place, is only a play that the self performs to itself. The rest—our objective behavior in the world—is nothing but genetic and cultural conditioning as it is impacted by the environment.
So the elevation or fusion of the individual self with a "higher" level (together with many other "experiences" of whatever label, and even centered on God), is not a real state of no-self, precisely because it is centered on the concepts of God, a higher level, etc. The sense of being an individual experiencing something (i.e. having the concept of oneself intimately united with another concept) continues. U.G. would say that the movement of thought, together with the I that goes with it, has not stopped. The selfish or self-centered sense of being an individual may no longer be there, but it has been replaced by another more "cosmic" self. It is obvious that the illusion of the ego does not cease when one stops being selfish. The concept of the illusion of the ego has nothing to do with moral values, abnegation, sacrifice of one self for others, for values "bigger than oneself," whatever they are. To sacrifice oneself means nothing but a reinforcement of the sense of the entity sacrificing itself for a greater cause. Such a sacrifice is predicted on the concept of oneself and on the concept of a greater cause, both of which become meaningless in a no-self state, which is also a state of not knowing. In the state beyond the illusion of the ego, there is no entity (or concept thereof) to sacrifice, nor a God (or concept of God), to whom any sacrifice would be addressed.
What can be said about the condition beyond the self, when it is truly dissolved? There is nothing personal left, nothing left inside. U.G. Krishnamurti insists on the fact that his mental and physical activities (not exactly "his" activities; rather, activities centered on the mind-body unit called U.G.) and all initiated from the outside, because there is nothing inside to initiate anything. The functioning is now automatic, like everything else in nature. We too, in our "normal" state of consciousness centered on the individual self, function automatically. But the illusion of the ego makes us believe that there is a center that not only controls thought and action, but also gives them meaning and purpose.
U.G. Krishnamurti also says "I don't know what I am saying." That does not mean that he is an idiot. It means that there is no I to know what is being uttered (in a perfectly sane and coherent way) by the mind-body unit called U.G. He adds "Nothing here" (in him) "originates from the inside. All activity is caused by the outside."
U.G. stresses the importance of conditioning for the functioning of a human being, with or without a sense of self.
Only conditioning, whether genetic or acquired, enables us to function in daily life, and to survive. The only difference is that the ego-less does not have the interior life that gives meaning to things for us beings in a "normal" state.
The emptiness of the self. U.G. makes the comment: "All my life I had tried to realize the true self. The realization that there is no self to realize hit me like a bolt of lightning and triggered a nuclear reaction that affected every cell in my body. There is nothing to realize, nothing to accomplish, nothing to do."
Some mention a "loss of bod-awareness", which reminds us of Suzanne Segal's description of what happened to her: when consciousness, in the mind-body unit called Suzanne, was dissociated from the body itself, Suzanne could see her image in a mirror, but there was no connection anymore with the consciousness at work. Likewise, U.G. Krishnamurti can say "I have no way of knowing whether I am dead or alive," because the consciousness that says those words does not feel anymore the connection to a specific body; self-consciousness is no more.
When U.G. Krishnamurti describes his condition after his "calamity", he states that without a conditioned brain there is no knowledge in the usual sense. "Normal" knowledge is always a relation between a knowing-subject and a known-object. It is always knowledge about something. Without the apparatus of concepts to which sense-impressions can be related, classified, and known, and without the separation between a subject that has the knowledge (the self) and an object that is being known, no knowledge in the usual sense is possible, and reality becomes the Unknown.
The ego-less mind-body unit functions in an entirely automatic way. We also do, but we believe that the self gives us (the illusion of) freedom and autonomy, doer of decision and action. The "enlightened" one does not labor under this illusion. Except in a very practical way, the enlightened ones don't have the sense of being a person (a separate person), and they don't even have the "feel" of their own body (since there is no self that "owns" the body). Time has trained (or retrained) them to function in everyday life, but for the rest they face the Unknown and the Unknowable, day and night and forever.
The ego-less functions as well as we do. He is not in a coma (at least when communicating with us), he is more than a chunk of inert (lifeless) mineral matter. And yet, just like the rest of us, he is nothing but a chunk of mineral matter. The paradox is resolved when we understand that mineral matter is more than just mineral matter, or rather when we understand that it is more than our conception of it. Matter is also consciousness, but man knows matter only by breaking the unity of the One, by making consciousness one thing, and matter another, which is not consciousness.
What is there on the other side of the break, on the other side of knowledge, on the side of the Unknown? U.G. mentions the end of knowledge, an he speaks of that "energy," that "thing," that "consciousness," which is always there, even when he is asleep. These are different words to describe a reality that is forever unknown, forever changing, forever renewed; something that can never be connected to a concept that would make it knowable.
U.G.'s Krishnamurti often says that even though falling into the "natural state" apparently happens to one in a million (to pick a number), it can nevertheless happen to anyone and everyone. He also says that he does not know why it happened to him. He also remarks that we are all in our "natural state," but we don't know that, precisely because we want to experience it—with the expectation of something glorious and exhilarating.
U.G.'s testimony confirms what has been established in the first part of this book: that the self, by knowing itself, posits the object as different from the self. This separation between subject and object is itself the result of another separation, or break: the break between an object (in the material sense) and its idea (the information-content inherent in matter). The processing of information in a human nervous system (that is, the functioning of the understanding) brings about a break in the fundamental unity of reality (matter and consciousness as one), and that in turns brings about—as a by-product of this processing of information—the sense of self, which posits itself as a subject different from the object it knows, and thus denies to the object its (the object's) consciousness aspect. But if the self, for some reason, fades away, then the type of knowledge that goes with it stops, and another type of knowledge takes its place.
This new type of knowledge cannot be known through the "normal" type of knowledge, which is based on what the new type is not: the separation subject-object. In this new type of knowledge, there is knowledge without a knower, since the self as subject having the knowledge is gone. Sri Aurobindo calls this type of knowledge <<unitive>>, by opposition to the normal knowledge which is knowledge through <<separation>> (between subject and object).
This "knowledge" is entirely beyond the categories of the understanding, and beyond the separation of a knowing subject and a known object. Anything of that kind cannot be grasped be a human understanding. Any attempt to know this "identity" will put an end to this identity and put us back into the separative knowledge between subject and object, and back to the categories of the understanding that help us know reality by classifying it and by breaking the unity of matter and consciousness. So, in one kind of knowledge we have total identity, with no knowledge in the normal sense of the word, and in the other we have the break-up between matter and its information-content, followed b the processing of information as distinct from matter (even though it takes place in a human nervous system which is matter-based). And finally, as a by-product of this processing of information, we have the appearance of the personal self as a non-material entity that becomes the subject that has knowledge about the object.
THE SELF IS A CONCEPT WITH NO SPECIFIC CONTENT.
In the first part of this book, we saw that when the self discovers itself, it knows itself to exist, but knows precious little else about itself. That's because the self is simply the idea of reflexivity knowing itself. The concept of reflexivity, of course, is different from other concepts (orange cheese, etc.) that are being reflected, and that do have a specific content. But the self posits itself, and exists by being different from the concepts, feelings, emotions, etc., it "has." They are the things being known, and the self is the subject knowing them. By its very nature, the self cannot have any specific content. This, by the way, proves how futile is the search for one's "true self." Once the sense of self manifests itself in us, there is nothing else to learn or to do about it, a decision which is not our to make.
As has been explained in the first part of this book, the sense of self comes at the end of the mental processes, as a by-product of those mental processes. Thus, the end of self means the end of self, and of nothing else. The end of self does not mean the end of knowledge (of the reflection of impressions in the nervous system, their storage, sorting out, and all the other processing of information that takes place). The end of self means only the end of knowledge for the self. The end of self does not mean the end of consciousness. U.G. Krishnamurti says "There is consciousness, but it is not normal consciousness." Consciousness is still there, as solid as matter, because it is part and parcel of matter; but human understanding will never know that, because it functions by separating consciousness from matter (although of course it can posit the concept of the oneness of consciousness and matter). The vibration of matter in the nervous system (sense impressions) is stored in the system and can persist in it even when the impression from the outside ceases; the vibration then becomes a mental event, which exists by being perceived by man as not matter, even though it is matter (a network of neurons, or a certain vibration of neurons, or whatever).
That's why in the "state of unknowing" matter and knowledge of the world (by no subject in particular) are not an illusion. What has come to an end is not the world as illusion, but the I as an illusion, the illusion that it is the creator and center of consciousness, and the denial of consciousness to anything that is not as self. The separation between subject and object stops (since the subject is gone), but everything else goes on. This separation is necessary for knowledge, and for the existence of the self. The problem, of course, for mind-body units like us which function as individual selves (in our own subjectivity) is that we cannot imagine a knowledge that is not centered on the self. For us, a knowledge based on the separation subject-object and on the ontological distinction between matter and consciousness, is simply an un-knowledge. Hence, the expression "a state of Unknowing."
THE SELF CANNOT BRING ABOUT ITS OWN END.
U.G. Krishnamurti, commenting on the cause of the loss of the sense of self, says, "I don't know why it happened to me. (As for you) I cannot do anything for you, and if I can't, nobody else can." On the loss itself, which he calls his "calamity," he says "It is a purely physiological event."
OUR CULTURE DOES NOT ACCEPT THE POSSIBILITY OF THE END OF SELF. IS THE LOSS OF THE SENSE OF SELF A PATHOLOGY? NO. RATHER, IT IS OUR "NORMAL" STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS WHICH IS A PATHOLOGY (OR AT LEAST A FUNDAMENTAL ILLUSION), WHICH MAKES THE EGO-LESS LOOK AT US WITH COMPASSION.
The self has been defined as the concept of reflexivity which knows itself. Unlike other concepts, it cannot trace its source to anything in the world or to any other concept. As a result, it sees itself as a self-caused entity. I have deliberately stressed the conceptual aspect of the process, and have ignored or minimized the emotive and affective side of the self. But if the self sees itself as a source of consciousness, and if it also sees itself as the controller of mental processes (of which it is only a by-product). then it will as easily appropriate to itself the vital energy, the universal conatus (Spinozist term) expressed in each living body.
Regardless of what aspect of the self we stress, the question inevitably has to be asked: Is the loss of the sense of self a pathology?
The concept of the illusion of the ego (which implies that the loss of self is a "liberation") is not part of the heritage of Western culture. (The concept of "salvation" may imply the loss of personal self, but that is not clear.) When confronted with the problem, our modern priests and shamans (psychologists, doctors, clergy, intellectuals in general) either ignore what happens, or they pathologize it, since they don't understand it.
But what of our witnesses? Suzanne Segal spent many years anguishing, because she was trying to find an explanation in a cultural context which had none to offer.
U.G. Krishnamurti is not impressed by any culture, Indian or Western.He thinks that India produces too many "sages" who, he says, are simply in what he calls the "holy business." As for Western sages (intellectuals and others), he simply disdains their opinion. If psychologists think that he is mentally deranged or otherwise unfit, he says that that's their problem, and no concern of his. He knows that they have nothing to offer him. On the contrary, they could learn something from his, but they carefully stay away from him. Arrogance on their part? The intuitively understood need to preserve their territory, their own dogmas? Ignorance? Probably all of the above.
Those remarks bring to attention a central, or maybe the central fact of the human condition—even though it rarely comes to the surface of consciousness: the fear the self has of losing itself, of not grasping itself anymore. The self (this concept of reflexivity) exists by knowing itself to be. If it does not apprehend itself, it ceases to be. Hence, the double motivation basic to each individual mind-body unit that perceives itself as a self: first, the universal desire to sustain and increase its power to be and to act. This is the "selfish" part of the motivation. But even more powerful is the second aspect: even when totally altruistic, my unselfish actions reinforce not my selfishness, but my sense of self. By forsaking my interest or even my life, I am a "good" self, but the purpose of being a good self is really to be a self at all. As for those who cannot be a good self, they reinforce their sense of self by being a bad self. "What's in it for me?" That's how, in is usual direct and concise manner, U.G. Krishnamurti sums up this dual motivation that lies, says, behind every human action or endeavor.
THE SENSE OF SELF LIES AT THE CORE OF EACH INDIVIDUAL. IT COLORS EVERYTHING. IT IS FOR US THE MEASURE OF EVERYTHING.
With the self go relativity (good and bad, subject and object, etc.), inferiority, subjectivity. Without the sense of self, there is no interior life and no relativity. Without the self, we are beyond virtues and values.
CAN THE SELF UNDERSTAND NO-SELF? IT CANNOT.
Comments that we have already encountered with Suzanne Segal (How can self understand no-self?) and U.G. Krishnamurti (You cannot understand what I am telling you. And if you think you understand, you still have not understood.)
VIRTUE, THE WILL, THE SELF.
It seems that there is a simple explanation of the "faculty" of the will. This view of the will has been proposed by Spinoza. He said that there is no such thing as the faculty of the will. He had already noticed that thought alone cannot bring us to act; only emotion (that is, the energy that is part of an emotion) makes us act. So the so-called will is simply a desire that is aware of itself. Using the terminology presented in this book, I would say that the self wrongly appropriates to itself the energy of the emotions "it has." Animated by that energy, it sees itself as a center of decision endowed with the faculty of free will. Just as wrongly, it sees itself as the center of consciousness which "has" knowledge of the ideas that comprise it.
We are not of our own making. When we go to the bottom of things, man is really no more than an object among other objects, although it is an object endowed with self-knowledge. Outside of that, the rest (free will, moral responsibility, creativity, all the values that go with the illusion of the ego) has dissipated, just as the waters of a mirage in the desert dissipate as we get closer to them.
"...It is apparent that although two attributes [i.e. Thought and Extension, or Consciousness and Extended Matter] may be conceived as really distinct—that is to say, one without the assistance of the other—we cannot nevertheless conclude that they constitute two beings or two different substances." Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Proposition X.
"...Thinking substance [i.e. consciousness] and extended substance [i.e. matter] are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, and now under that. In the same way, a mode of extension [i.e. a material object] and the idea of that mode [i.e. its counterpart in consciousness, but not necessarily an idea in man's mind] are one and the same thing, but expressed in two different ways." Spinoza, Ethics, Part II, Proposition VII, Note.
Consciousness in man is usually approached as something unique in the order of things, a mystery, almost a miracle. The mystery comes from the question, How can a series of physical changes (electrical impulses, chemical exchanges at the level of the nerves and neurons) be the cause of a conscious perception (of a color, of a shape) or of a conscious sensation (of pain, of pleasure) in the mind?
How is it possible for consciousness to exist in a world which, for everything else, is entirely physical and material? For a dualist philosopher, like Descartes (there are two realities, the physical reality and the world of the mind), explaining the communication or interaction between the two realities presents a thorny problem. How can the mind be the cause of a change in matter? (I "decide" to pinch my arm, and my fingers start moving.) And in the other direction, how can the pinching (a physical event) be the cause of a sensation? The problem remains whole if one is a monist (there is only one reality, either matter or the world of the mind) rather than a dualist: How can one explain matter in a mental world, or consciousness in a physical world? Different solutions have been proposed (for example, consciousness as a subtle "emanation" of matter), all highly speculative.
There is mystery when the self sees itself as a shining beacon of consciousness, throwing light on a dark, opaque, unconscious world. There is mystery when we try to understand how the human brain "produces" consciousness, how neurons in the material world, connected by electrical or chemical reactions, bring about the mental and non-physical event of seeing red, or the feeling of sadness or joy, or the remembrance of things past. In one word there is mystery because the human mind cannot accept the counterintuitive idea that matter and consciousness are the same thing. The self poses by definition that it has a monopoly on consciousness; the self exists by denying consciousness to anything that is not a self. This view brings us to an impasse, to a false problem, which cannot be solved because it arises from a dual confusion: confusion between the processing of information and consciousness as such, and confusion between primary consciousness and reflected consciousness. Before dealing with the confusion, let's look first a consciousness.
Consciousness can be defined negatively, as something that "exists" (i.e., is being perceived by man) but which is not extended matter, and is absolutely different from it. Or, it can be defined positively, as being precisely perception in man: reflected consciousness, the ability of an individual human being to be sensitive to the world and to himself, the ability of a human being to feel himself to be. This approach leads directly to the mystery. The individual I sees itself as a beam of consciousness shining on an inert and mineral world. It sees itself as essentially and radically different, and, needless to say, "superior" to what we rarely see in only some animals, and what we never see in matter. To explain the self, one can invoke another even more opaque mystery (e.g., man is made in the image of God), or one can go to the opposite end of the mystery, and invoke the materialist explanation: all we have to do is look at the brain, and explain how neurons somehow "produce consciousness." The mystery remains, because nobody can explain how a network of physical neurons (matter in space) can bring about something which has been defined precisely as not being physical. Let's look at the dual confusion, which is the starting point of the mystery.
1. Confusion between the processing of information and reflected consciousness.
Thought, or mental activity in a human being, presents two aspects: it is the processing of information, and the awareness of the process. It is a mistake to believe that, without awareness, there can be no processing. In fact, awareness is a result of the processing, a result of mental activity. That is, there is no awareness of the process if there is no process in the first place. But the savor of the awareness is not caused by the activity. Its ontological root cannot be found in the physical processing of information. The process only reveals the savor of the awareness.
Connections between neurons, or any other interaction of matter with itself, will never explain how consciousness arises. Neuronal activity does not create consciousness; it just processes information. The brain does not create consciousness: it is only the place where information is stocked and processed. This information is encoded in a material substrate (networks of neurons and synapses), but consciousness itself cannot be found there. The brain does not create consciousness, because consciousness is already co-existing with matter. It is possible to study how the brain processes information: connections between neurons, electrical impulses, chemical reactions, etc. But we will never be able to explain how the firing of a neuron brings about my sensation of red, blue, or my knowing tis or that concept. For a very simple reason: the brain is not the seat of consciousness. Not that consciousness will be found in the heart, or the knee. Consciousness is not to be found anywhere in space, because it is part of the attribute of Thought, not of Extension, as defined by Spinoza.
Descartes made the fatal mistake of trying to find a bridge between matter and consciousness, that is, a bridge between two separate substances (a substance bing something that exists in itself and by itself). Rather than trying to explain consciousness through events in matter (as modern "materialist" researchers are trying to do), he tried to explain events in matter through acts of consciousness: how a "decision" (a mental event) can create a change in matter (a so-called "voluntary" movement of my arm, for instance). Descartes had to propose an explanation because, like almost all of us, he was functioning in the illusion of the ego; the illusion of the self as a source and center of consciousness and as a free and voluntary agent of action in the physical world. If I am an agent of action, how can my ethereal mind give orders to my physical body? He used the hypothesis of the pineal gland, an organ so "subtle" that it could be slightly "moved" by "movements" of consciousness, and thus transmit the impulse to the nerves and to the muscles. Obviously, the enterprise is doomed from the very beginning. Either the bridge is material, in which case we are stuck at square one, trying to derive consciousness from matter, or it is mental, in which case we should be able to move objects at will, from far away, just by looking at them and willing them to move.
We cannot explain how a conscious "decision" can make my arm move, any more than we can explain how the electro-magnetic impulses that stimulate the cells of my retina, and then of my brain, become the subjective sensation of red or green for me. The simple fact is that they don't become red or green, they already are red or green: the capacity of the brain to store and process information ("mental activity") makes possible the reflection (the echo, the reverberation) of consciousness. Through this reflection the preexisting consciousness knows itself to be and thus discovers, or experiences, its own "savor." Brain activity allow consciousness to know of its own existence, it does not create it. Considered from the attribute of Extension, impressions on the senses are waves of material particles, elements of information that can be represented by numbers (wave-length). The numbers are the information, in Thought, about matter. The color green or red is the information, in Thought, about itself.
Man, or the human brain, does not have a monopoly on the processing of information. Information is being processed everywhere and all the time in nature, in mineral matter as well as in biological matter, every time there is a change in matter. Neither does man have a monopoly on consciousness, which is everywhere and co-substantial with matter. The human brain is different only in its greater capacity to abstract and to store information. The human brain is only the place where information is stored, and then reflected on itself, thus becoming reflected consciousness. The brain creates neither the information (although it processes it, thereby bringing about information in a new form) nor the consciousness (although, by making the reflection of consciousness possible, it brings about consciousness in its reflected form). The brain does not create the color red. It just processes the information, which is already both a wavelength and the color red. It's just that nobody knows it till there is an I (a human being) to perceive the color red. Which brings us to the second aspect of the confusion.
2. Confusion between primary consciousness and reflected consciousness.
The confusion comes from restricting the meaning of consciousness to reflected consciousness. Reflected consciousness in man adds no contents whatsoever to the primary consciousness of which it is a reflection, or an echo. The contents, the quantity of information, remain the same, but their quality is different; with reflected consciousness, the information know that it exists, through the individual I, the focal point of consciousness looking at itself Consciousness knows that it exists by savoring itself as being red (or any other qualia).
A knowing self is conscious both of itself and of what it knows. But underlying that statement here is the fallacious implication that without an individual I there is neither consciousness nor knowledge. This is nothing but a manifestation of the illusion of the ego.
The denial of consciousness (un-reflected, of course) to everything that is not another self is characteristic of the individual self. Confronted with the material world, the I sees itself as the sole source and center of consciousness. It sees consciousness nowhere else around itself (apart from the other selves, with which it can communicate), and denies it to the rest of the material world. It does not see that for consciousness to be able to bounce and reflect on itself through the focal point of the I, it has to exist already.
The conventional view of consciousness is that reflected consciousness is something else, something more, something radically different from the primary accumulation of information already inherent in matter. It is not. Consciousness is only the image in a mirror of something already existing. The reflection does not add any content to the already pre-existing data. What happens is not a miracle but simply the consciousness-information being projected onto itself, thus becoming information about itself rather than about matter. Consciousness focuses on itself by using the focal point of the I, in the form of individual consciousness. But the I takes things completely upside down, or the wrong way, and sees itself as the source rather than as the reflection of consciousness. By denying that reflected consciousness is simply a reflection of something already there, the self cannot figure out where this reflection comes from, how it can exist at all in the opaque world of matter. It sees itself as a mystery, or a miracle, or as something connected in some way to the divine, to something that is "not of this material world."
[One can ask the question: how do we get from non-reflected to reflected consciousness? How does consciousness become a partial and limited echo of itself in the human brain, at the focal point of the I? Several theories can be offered.
—One theory has been described in the first part of this book. Reflected consciousness is possible because an idea becomes an idea of itself, rather than being the idea of an object. (The idea, instead of being information about a specific object, becomes information about itself.) The individual self is this concept of reflexivity of some ideas which in turn becomes information on itself, and knows itself to exist: an event described with great clarity and forcefulness by René Descartes. Clarity and forcefulness, certainly, but at the same time total misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the facts of individual consciousness. A basic and fundamental error of the I about itself, which I call The Absolute Illusion of The Ego. Spinoza's interpretation of the human mind as the "idea of an idea" avoids the pitfalls in which Descartes lost himself.
—Spinoza explains the individual human mind as follows [See Appendix 2, Part 1, p-53]: "There exists in God the idea or knowledge of the human mind, which follows in Him and is related to Him in the same way as the idea or knowledge of the human body." (Ethics, Part II, Proposition 20.) For Spinoza, "there is in God" simply means "there is, there exists."
For Spinoza, God and nature are one and the same thing. To say "there exists in God" means simply "there is in nature" or the "something is." What Spinoza calls "the human mind is the totality of information abut the human body (the information pertaining to the physical body). It is information (which he calls "idea") not only about the human body, but also about itself; it knows itself to exist. When Spinoza says "thought" it is not of course thought as a thought in a human mind, but information at the level of non-reflected consciousness. This information is "knowledge" of the body, but not knowledge about itself. It does not know itself to be, as such. But, says Spinoza, there exists also a knowledge of that knowledge, an image or a double of the human mind. When information about the body becomes information about itself, it becomes the idea of an object which is itself, and thus knows itself to be: reflected consciousness, a limited echo of the total consciousness-information inherent in the body. Why limited? Because, says Spinoza )Proposition XXIII): "The mind does not know itself except in so far as it perceives the ideas of the modifications of the body." In other words: when the organization of the body is modified by the impact of the outside world on the senses. Why is there knowledge of knowledge only in the case of the human mind-body unit and not in the case of other mind-body units? (at least as far as we can tell). Because says Spinoza, the human body has a structure or organization more complex than any other body in nature. In modern parlance, the fact would be expressed as "The potential for extremely complex and numerous networks of neurons in the human brain." Still, one should not take this complexity as the cause (the creation) of reflected consciousness, which is nothing but the counterpart at the level of consciousness of the neuronal complexity at the material level.
—Other similar explanations are possible. For instance, the idea that consciousness in man "folds" upon itself like a sheet of paper folded on itself, and sees itself; the mind (mental activity in a mind-body unit) looks at itself instead of looking at the world, thus bringing about reflected consciousness, the sense of an individual I.
—The following hypotheses: the idea "echoing" on itself; or the "idea of the idea"; or the mind "folding upon itself" all have in common that some mental event brings about a double of itself. This is what we know happens in biology: a living cell will, in some circumstances (size, energy level, nutrients, etc.) duplicate itself into two identical new cells. We know that a "mental event" is the counterpart, in the field of thought, of certain disposition of neurons and synapses. Thus, a mental event can be considered the counterpart of a cell at the level of physiology. In the same way as a cell will divide itself, the mental event will also create a cop of itself if the circumstances are right. That is, if there is a surplus of energy. For instance, if a sense-impression reaches and impacts an already existing pattern of neurons whose information-content is very close to the information brought by the sense-impression, then the new information will very easily "overwrite" the existing information, or just meld with it, without expanding any energy to do so. This excess energy will then organize itself into a new "cell", that is, a new mental event, which will be similar to the first one. But its information-content will not be the specific information, which is already safely stored in the first "cell" (the first mental event). The only information it will have is that it is like the first cell. It will be information about the fact that there is a first mental event, regardless of the specific contents of the first mental event. The first mental event, by bringing about its twin, or clone, creates information abut itself, i.e., knows itself to exist. When this mental event is the idea of reflexivity looking at itself, the sense of a personal self appears.
Future advances in neuro-biology will very possibly enable researchers to confirm, or deny, this hypothesis about mental activity mirroring the splitting of cells in physiology, in order to bring about the phenomenon of reflected consciousness.
—U.G. Krishnamurti says that there are only thoughts (non-reflected mental events) but that a "counter-thought" comes on stage and brings about the "thinker" who accompanies and is aware of each thought. He mentions "the thinker with which you read every thought." U.G. also talks of a "mirror of reflection" which is at the same time the thought and the I. There is a "movement of thought" which continues at all costs, an energy to keep being: the I never stops thinking itself, it is terrified to leave the stage, even for a fleeting moment. In U.G.'s case, and for reasons that he does not understand, this movement of thought stopped for a brief instant, which U.G. describes as his "calamity." Without this movement of thought the sense of the I, which is a by-product of mental activity, cannot continue. The sense of being a person existing as a separate entity comes to an end.]
There may be other possible explanations of reflected consciousness. None of them will change the essential fact that there is non-reflected consciousness before the individual self comes on stage. The "mystery" of consciousness, the apparent absence of consciousness in everything that is not a human self, derives entirely from the mistaken belief that consciousness starts only with the self. Let's illustrate the point with an analogy. Optical rays form an image (on film or on the retina) by passing through a focal point. The rays exist independently of this focal point. They exist without it, but the point cannot exist without the rays. Likewise, the "rays" of consciousness (this is just an image, since consciousness does not exist in space) pass through the focal point of consciousness, the individual I, and form an image, which apprehends itself as reflected individual consciousness. To know of its own existence, to know of itself and "savor" itself, the preexisting un-reflected consciousness focuses on itself through the focal point and can form a reflected image of itself. This reflection of consciousness on itself adds no content whatsoever of being or knowledge to the already existing consciousness-information. Consciousness discovers itself just as America was "discovered." Both existed before the "discovery." Of course, when I don't know of something, I do discover it when it enters my field of knowledge. But the discovery is in relation to me, and has no bearing whatsoever on the reality of the thing in question. I do not create something by discovering that it exists.
We now have a less human-centered view of consciousness and of its diverse manifestations. We see that it extends beyond the limits of an individual human being. We have also said that, negatively, it is not extended matter. But what is it exactly?
Rather than focusing on man, let's have a look at the totality of nature: man, beasts, and things. Everywhere we see that matter is sensitive to itself and reacts to itself constantly, impeccably; one might want to say, implacably because, to our great sorrow, tings do what they want, regardless of what we want them to do. Let's call this sensitivity of matter to itself (mineral as well as organic matter, for we see that the reactions are rigorously the same in both cases) un-reflected consciousness. Why consciousness? Because there is sensitivity, there is transmission of information; we don't have inert matter, an unresponsive matter, as at the level of the absolute zero. It is consciousness, but un-reflected, because there is no awareness of the process at work. There is sensitivity of matter to itself, but not sensitivity of consciousness to itself. There is nobody to say, "Here is what's happening, I know what's happening, and I know that I know what's happening." The so-called mystery arises only when consciousness is limited to reflected consciousness, as it manifests itself in a human individual. It's as if one would profess to be awed by the images on the television screen, simply by ignoring the impulses which ave impacted the receptor, and without which there would be no image.
It is interesting to note that the explanation advanced by Spinoza is seldom mentioned. Spinoza says that the ultimate reality is neither matter nor consciousness but an absolutely infinite substance, of which we know two manifestations (among a potentially infinite number of other manifestations): matter in extension, and consciousness, which he calls "Thought." Spinoza is a monist because he believes there is only one reality, one infinite substance. We cannot have a direct apprehension of this Substance, which he also calls "God" or "Nature", in its totality, but we can form a concept of it: that of a substance absolutely infinite. "Absolutely" stresses the fact that the substance is not infinite in its own kind, but infinite in an infinity of ways, I.G. it has an infinite number of attributes, or manifestations. The human mind can apprehend two attributes of that substance: Extension and Thought.
Thus Spinoza is a monist at the level of the first or ultimate reality, which is one, but he is a dualist at the level of man, in the way we perceive this reality through the action of human understanding, through the way the human mind functions. This approach resolves in one stroke the intractable problem of the "mystery" of consciousness. There is no need to explain how matter creates consciousness, or how consciousness brings about extended matter, or which one comes first, or how either can be the cause of changes in the other (for instance, how can a conscious decision in the mind move about the muscles of the body). If matter and consciousness are essentially one (because the absolutely infinite substance is one, there cannot be two absolutely infinite substances), then not only is there no need for an explanation, in fact it is impossible to offer any explanation whatsoever. The separation between matter and consciousness starts with knowledge. It is not an expression of reality as such, but is brought about by the functioning of the human mind. Knowledge is possible after tis separation, and thanks to it. The separation between matter and consciousness makes knowledge of the world possible, and knowledge of the absolute impossible. Knowledge before the separation is impossible: it is impossible for the human mind to know the unity of the absolutely infinite substance, although it is quite possible to pose the concept of such a substance.
That's why it is so difficult for so many to accept the Spinozist approach. It is impossible to know the unity of matter and consciousness, because it is impossible to know the one absolute substance, before the separation. We know either one of the two (matter and consciousness) very well, but separately, not as one. And the knowledge of anything (an idea as such in consciousness, or an object in extended matter through the idea that we form of it) is possible only because they are separate and different. Their total separation, their irreconcilable difference, is the pre-condition for knowledge. Yet, the concept of their unity poses no problem at all. It is a theory, something that is routinely done in science: a theory is proposed, which goes against all accepted ideas, and seems to defy "common sense," but has the advantage of offering a simpler explanation of the observed facts. Instances would be the equivalency between matter and energy, or the principle of the conservation of energy, or a new theory about space, which from absolute suddenly becomes relative.
Changes happen at the same time in both matter and consciousness. The two cannot have an impact on each other because they are the same thing, but apprehended by the human understanding in two different and mutually exclusive ways: either as matter or as consciousness. Thus, trying to derive consciousness from matter, or the opposite, is like asking the question: when a coin is rolling, is it tails that makes heads turn, or the other way, and how? The answer is simple: neither makes the other turn. There is only one coin, which rolls because external forces make it turn; the two sides turn with the coin, and either side can neither make the other turn, nor turn independently from it. Labeling the sides "heads" and "tails" is nothing but a convenient way to know what we are talking about. It does not create two separate coins. Likewise, the mind sees reality under two mutually exclusive aspects, but it does not create two realities.
Too bad for us if we don't understand the functioning of human understanding, and believe that we apprehend two different realities, rather than two different aspects of the same reality. If that's what we believe, then we are forced to pose the problem of the connection, if any, between matter and consciousness, or between body and mind, and which one comes from the other, and how they interact, and which one controls the other, etc. This is all a result of the illusion of the ego. The personal self exists by being a concept; it exists and functions after the separation between matter and consciousness, and as a result of it. The self can exist and can manifest itself only by taking as a given the separation between the two. The self exists by not being matter. Not only does it grant itself the monopoly of consciousness, it has to deny consciousness to matter: it has to separate the idea (in the mind) from the object (in matter) in order to know the object. The human mind has to separate one reality into two aspects: an idea, and its object. The information is posited separately from the reality it expresses. The understanding functions in a dualist way; reality is known either as matter or as consciousness. Without that separation, no knowledge is possible.
Thus the "mystery of consciousness" exists solely from the point of view of the knowing self, which reduces consciousness to reflected consciousness, and by so doing reduces the whole of consciousness to self. The sad truth (for the self) is that knowledge, as it functions in a human being, cannot apprehend the unity of reality. This separation is the price to pay for the individual self to exist.
The brain does not produce consciousness; it only processes information provided by the senses, as well as information already stored. It is the site where the consciousness-information, which is already in matter, can be stored, processed, and reflected upon itself, thereby bringing about reflected consciousness, which is mistakenly taken to be the whole of consciousness, whereas it is only a limited aspect of it. The illusion of the ego (the self as a high beam of consciousness shining on an inert mineral world) makes us believe that the consciousness is only reflected consciousness, and thus that the brain somehow produces consciousness (even though nobody can explain how the brain manages the feat).
The brain is just a biological information-processing machine, where data are stored, recorded, manipulated. It is the echo chamber where consciousness can resound on itself, and become information about itself rather than about matter. Consciousness then knows itself. The brain no more produces consciousness than the eye produces the optical rays that it receives and processes before sending them to the brain for more processing.
The death of a human being means the end of the functioning of the biological machine. One specific result (among others) is that the processing of information in the brain stops. Thinking comes to an end. The sense of self is nothing but a by-product of the activity of thought. It too comes to an end wit biological death. But nothing else comes to and end. Consciousness as such, non-reflected consciousness, is not dependent on the functioning of the brain. Thus, death does not affect non-reflected consciousness, which never stops being. It goes with matter, and as long as there is matter, in whatever form, this consciousness-information is also present. Te human body disintegrates, but not the molecules and atoms of which it is formed. They remain, and go into different combinations, and so does the consciousness-information that goes with them. And so does the intelligence that goes with consciousness. Thus, life goes on after death, not the life of a dis-incarnated or ghostly individual self, but life in a different form, e.g., the bacteria and worms that feed on a decomposing body, or the plants that are fertilized by the same body. The ashes of a cremated body will fertilize the ground, and the carbon dioxide in the air will feed plants.
Let's look more closely at the human concepts of time, space, and matter. We don't know things, or reality, as they are in themselves. We know the concepts that we, as mind-body units, form of them. For man, can time be conceived independently of space? No. It is impossible to conceive of time in a world where matter (extended matter, whose existence implies the concept of space) would be totally inert, unchanged, with no movement or change whatsoever. Time starts flowing only when there is change or movement in matter, that is to say, in space. And man has recently discovered that, instead of flowing at the same pace always and everywhere, time flows relatively to the speed of movement in space.
Space itself has meaning only in relation to matter. If there is no matter whatsoever, space becomes a meaningless concept. Totally empty space, with no material reference point, even if virtual (points A and B, or point A only) becomes meaningless. Space exists (that is, is conceived by man) as that which exists between separate chunks of matter and makes them separate. The absolute void, nothingness (that is to say, our concepts of void and nothingness), become space only when some matter is also present, even if it is only one sub-atomic particle. But not any matter: matter without any discontinuity, un-separated and infinitely opaque matter would leave no space for space to exist.
So the concept of time implies movement or change in space. Space itself implies matter. But what is matter? It is what human thinking takes as what is not consciousness, what does not have-consciousness, and hence does not have the characteristics of consciousness. So matter as such is what does not have consciousness, but which can be apprehended by consciousness as extended matter. Matter (the concept of matter) exists only insofar as there is a consciousness that apprehends it. Consciousness as it functions in a human mind-body unit. And what is at the center of consciousness in a human mind-body unit? The sense of self.
We have seen that the self posits itself by denying the consciousness element in matter, by making matter inert, opaque, heavy, "solid," whereas consciousness is ethereal. Human understanding creates matter by making it what is not consciousness, by creating the divide between matter and consciousness. Now, let's remember that by saying "matter", "space", "time", etc., we are not talking about those things as they are in themselves. We are talking about the concepts that the human understanding has about those things. So by saying that human understanding creates matter, I do not mean that the human mind creates the galaxies and the rest of the cosmos and the material world, including the human body. I mean that the mind apprehends matter by making it what is not consciousness, by creating the divide between matter and consciousness. As a result of the working of the understanding (the information-processing brain), the knowing subject and the known object become two separate things. Matter becomes what is not consciousness, what consciousness apprehends as not being itself, and from matter the concepts of space, and then of time, become possible.
Physicists tell us that matter and space (and also time) were created at the Big Bang, and that before that there was unextended infinite energy, or some kind of other reality, which cannot be grasped or known by the human understanding. In that case, the One would be that which cannot be known, and the Big Bang brings about, for reasons which of course we cannot understand, the Many and the separate (separate as human understanding conceptualizes it): energy, matter in space, consciousness as separate from matter, and time as a result of changes of matter in space. The human understanding function by conceiving of matter and consciousness as different in essence; it then classifies and organizes the sense-data in the structures of time and space; it cannot know or understand the One. Thought cannot grasp reality right at the moment of the Big Bang, because the Big Bang created matter (which includes energy and consciousness), space, time, and because human thought cannot function outside of those parameters. So we cannot know the One at the time of the Big Bang, and we cannot know the One now, because we know only the Many, which is the One "exploded" as extended matter, energy, and consciousness.
These remarks may explain why vacuum has suddenly become so important in physics. Having reached the extreme limits of matter and energy, scientists are confronted with a void, which seems more complex than anything we know about matter and energy. It seems that, contrary to the wisdom of the ages ("nothing can come out of nothing") everything is coming out of nothingness. Is it possible that this nothingness is a void only to the human understanding which, limited to Thought and Extension, cannot grasp any of the other attributes (of which there are an infinite number, since, says Spinoza, "the Substance is absolutely infinite, rather than infinite in its kind") and thus can see only the void when other attributes (by definition unknown and unknowable) are concerned? It seems to me that, contrary to the hopes of some who are looking for the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, we will never have an answer to that question (short, maybe, of unforeseen and unimaginable genetic mutations).
[The Substance is absolutely infinite, rather than infinite in its kind: this is the Spinozist definition of the One Substance, which he calls also God, or Nature. This "God" is obviously not the personal God of the Bible, who acts as a self, or as if it had a self or were a self, some kind of Supreme Self. The attributes (which are what the human understanding perceives of the Substance) are infinite in their own kind; that is, thought (unreflected consciousness) and extended extended matter, by their very conception, are infinite, but only in their own kind. Extended matter cannot be conceived as having an end, a limit, a boundary, since the other side of the boundary is necessarily conceived as more space. It is infinite, but does not include the concept of something, which exists outside of it, for instance an idea in thought. So an attribute is infinite only in its own kind. The Substance, on the other hand, by having an infinity of attributes (only two of which can be conceived by man), is absolutely infinite. It is therefore necessarily One, since anything that can be conceived is necessarily part of one of the infinite number of attributes, which themselves are infinite in their own kind. Nothing can exist or be conceived outside of the One Substance. Again, we are talking here about what the concept of an absolutely infinite Substance implies logically, not that there is such a thing, or that we know it.
The waters rushing down the mountainside to form rivulets, then a stream, then a river, obey the pull of gravity. They don't do up, or sideways. the behave "intelligently" rather than chaotically and incoherently. In space, the chunks of matter that aggregate to form spherical planets that orbit stars as well as each other behave also "intelligently." In a nervous system, the neurons (or rather, the molecules and ells that make them) that form patterns, retain them, and reassemble them to produce "mental events" and "thinking" also behave intelligently. Intelligence is another word for the way the consciousness-information inherent in matter exists and functions. Without it, changes in matter would be random, chaotic, unpredictable, un-intelligible. Because of that intelligence, changes in matter, when reflected in a human mind, are intelligible. The same thing is obviously also true in the case of animals. The world is intelligible to them as much as it is to us. They don't run into trees or walls any more than we do; they understand very well that a predator, who was not here a minute ago, is now present, and that they have to run. This intelligence-consciousness-information of matter is manifested to us in the form of the laws of nature (laws of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc.) Matter behaves intelligently, and the result is the world as we see and understand it. And therein lies the problem: we see intelligence at work, but because we believe that intelligence (and the consciousness of which it is an emanation) is a monopoly of a self-conscious human mind-body unit, we are at a loss to explain what is at the same time intelligible for us. We understand that it works, but we don't know why. We understand how it works, but we cannot understand how it came to be. We see that the same intelligence that enables us to understand the world is at work in the world, but because we deny that intelligence to the rest (i.e., to matter) the whole thing remains a total mystery, regardless of any accumulation of scientific knowledge.
We must guard against the anthropomorphic tendency to project ourselves onto nature. We cannot say that, because we act "with a purpose", then Nature too must have a purpose. But let's go all the way. If things happen in Nature without a purpose, why is it that we think that "having a purpose" is the cause of what we do? The river does not "decide" to gather its waters, to turn right or left, to go fast or slow. There is no entity at work here. It simply obeys, or rather expresses, the force of gravity, the plasticity of water, the nature of the rocks underneath. If there is no slope, the waters will have nowhere to go, and there will be no river, just a marsh. The river does not decide its own behavior. Having dismissed the river entity as an explanation of what the river does, why do we keep it to explain our own behavior? The river does not decide its own behavior, and neither do we. The only difference is that there are just a few factors in the case of the river (gravity, etc.) whereas in our case there is gravity, plus all the physical and chemical reactions and interactions that are possible, thanks to the complexity of our nervous system. Just like the river, our behavior, at our own individual level, is only an expression of the laws of nature, even though we mistakenly believe that we "decide" to do this or that.
Intelligent design is the new expression of an old argument—the argument of the watchmaker. A watch is a complex mechanism, which has a specific purpose, and which could not have been put together by the "blind" action of forces in nature, as for instance the shape of a mountain, or the course followed by a river, all things which have no apparent specific purpose. A watch is a watch because a "conscious agent" has made it, with the purpose of keeping time. And so it is, the argument goes, with the world: it is a complex mechanism, exquisitely calibrated to make life possible (life in general, with human life at the apex, endowed with consciousness and capable of "conscious purpose and action", etc.) Obviously, says the argument, the whole thing cannot be the result of random blind forces in nature. The hypothesis of a cosmic or divine watchmaker (God, the Creator) is necessary to explain the whole thing, which, like the watch, could not exist without a maker.
Nowadays, the argument uses, among other things, the Omega factor, which has to be exquisitely close to 1 for the universe to be what it is. Were Omega a tiny bit bigger than what it is (over 1) the overwhelming gravity would crush matter on itself soon after the Big Bang, and the universe would not be able to expand to what it is now; were Omega a tiny bit smaller than 1, there would not be enough gravity for the galaxies to form, matter would remain a thin "soup," clouds of dust; there would be no Milky Way, no solar system, and no earth to support life, including monkey and anthropoid life, with its crowning refinement, human life. The whole thing is too much of a coincidence; there must be some intelligent design behind it, with presumably an intelligent designer capable of conceiving the design and of executing it.
The basic error in this reasoning is to believe that the watch is the result of the work of an intelligent designer, i.e., the watchmaker himself, an agent of consciousness, of design, of purpose, and of action. Subjectively (the subjectivity of the watchmaker, s well as our own), that is a good description of the process at work. Objectively, on the other hand, the process taking place is more complex but exactly similar to what takes place when water runs down the mountain. What we have are forces at work, be they gravity, or the weak force, or the strong force, or whatever force we can discover and name. Watchmaking involves more complex processes, but they are essentially the same. Patterns of neurons in the matchmaker's brain stand for the concept of time, of watch, of wheels, of spring action, of economic activity, of gain in order to make a living, etc. These patterns of neurons are matter and they are also specific information, and specific energy. In other words, given the right amount of information and energy, things will happen, and the watchmaker will make a watch—or the water will run down the mountain, in a certain precise way. The watchmaker is a conscious self, but the sense of self is a result, an abstraction, of all this self-reflected information (in this case, information that brings about watch-making). The watchmaker's sense of self, and of purpose, is the result of this specific information and of the corresponding specific energy. But, like the rest of us, the matchmaker is in the illusion of the ego. He believes that he, as a self, is the cause of the activity of watchmaking. And we believe him, because that's what we feel about what we ourselves are doing. The reality is that the so-called center of information, and agent of decision and of action, is only aware of the processes at work, rather than being their originator or their cause.
So the world as we know it, in all its complexity, with us human beings in the middle of it and as part of it, is nothing, but natural processes at work (matter which is also information, matter which is also intelligence, matter which is also energy); processes which bring about, among other things, man, and the processes at work in man bring, in turn, the processes of watchmaking. If the watchmaker were a zombie, with no self-awareness, the processes would still be the same, because they come before the self. The watchmaker would still make excellent watches, whose quality would depend on said processes, not on the watchmaker as a "agent." We don't really understand those processes (we would have to know all the millions of different patterns of neurons at work in the brain). So, we conveniently ignore the processes, and describe the whole thing as "the watchmaker, a conscious self, making a watch." The reality is that the self is useless, except for being a reflection and a focus of consciousness, of information, and of energy.
The argument of "Shakespeare versus the monkeys" is sometimes used to buttress the argument for a cosmic watchmaker: take fifty monkeys hanging randomly on fifty typewriters, and it is very unlikely that they will produce one correct sentence, and even less one work of Shakespeare. More likely, they would end up smashing the typewriters to pieces. So the world needs an intelligent maker, just as we need Shakespeare (a conscious self) to produce the plays. The error underlying this argument is to believe that Shakespeare, like the watchmaker, is doing anything at all, as a self. Again, we only have natural processes at work.
Another error is to believe that, because of his works, Shakespeare (and by extension the rest of us human beings, who understand and appreciate his plays and see meaning in them) is superior to a monkey. But take fifty Shakespears (or any fifty specimens of the human kind) and place them on the top of trees: rather than jumping safely and gracefully from branch to branch, they would miserably fail to grasp any branch, and would end up smashing themselves on the ground. Given the specific genetic and cultural conditioning, one monkey will produce plays similar to Shakespeare's (or maybe even better, with monkey malice). The reality is that the man Shakespeare, given his genetic and cultural conditioning, produced his plays. Given another conditioning, another monkey will do wonderful aerobatics in the forest. In both cases, natural processes are at work, different but essentially equally complex.
One last comment on the subject, lest the reader believe that I am harder on the creationist than on the evolutionist. The creationist believes in a divine maker—i.e., a cosmic self, agent of creation—and he believes also in his own individual self. After all, as Woody Allen noted, faith in one's self is the necessary precondition for faith in a cosmic self, a divine maker. So the creationist has a coherent approach to the question, be it at the individual or at the cosmic level. The evolutionist, on the other hand, denies the cosmic self and the cosmic agent. The ultimate meaning of Darwin is that God is superfluous—which is why some are not pleased with his theory, while others praise it, for exactly the same reason. But what about the individual self? Now that's another matter. The scientist who denies any cosmic self as a conscious agent of creation sees himself (and herself, too) as an autonomous self, a free-willing agent who acts with a purpose—all the while stating that there are only blind purposeless evolutionary processes in nature. He denies the miracle of Creation of the whole universe out of nothingness, only to accept the miracle of his own self at his own individual level. He explains how every cell in his body is the result of blind and random processes, and then takes his own willful and self-aware and conscious agent of a self for granted. He never offers any kind of scientific explanation for what he is—and presumably does not see the need for any explanation for what he is—and presumably does not see the need for any explanation. He is perfectly comfortable denying the miracle of self at the cosmic level, and accepting it at his own level. No to the cosmic self, yes to the individual one! Evolution and natural selection blindly brought about man, but now things are different: man is taking over, and will organize the future with a conscious purpose, for the good of all of us, and of the planet too.
The waters falling on the mountainside "know" what to do: they have to obey the pull of gravity as well as the lay of the land, and they "act" accordingly. Of course, they don't know that they know, and they don't know that they act. And yet they act as if they knew of the law of gravity. At each level of change, from the simple to the complex, matter "knows" what to do. The result is the world as we see it. We can understand its organization and its complexity because the intelligence that organizes it and the intelligence in us that grasps this organization are one and the same thing. But we think of matter as inert, blind, stupid, because we don't see in it the manifestations of reflected consciousness that we see at work in the human mind. The illusion of the ego makes us believe that, because we apprehend ourselves as a conscious agent doing tings with a purpose, we actually are the "doer," the cause of the action—and conversely that no intelligent action is possible without a self-conscious self. But when we "decide" or "act" the only thing that is, objectively, is matter in act, together with the awareness of what's happening, and together with a misunderstanding of the real cause of what's happening/
A noun (common singular) stands for a general idea. It is the label that we give to a concept, which is always a general idea, even though the representation that refers to it in the process of being known is specific. Without the reference to a general idea, the impression on the senses remains un-known and un-graspable. Knowledge is possible only because we accumulate a battery of general ideas to which each specific impression is related; whether or not the connection is valid is a different problem.
This identification of sense impressions to reference points (general ideas) is called thought, or thought processes. Without this mental activity, sense impressions on the nervous system cannot be know, They can be felt, but they remain unknown, incomprehensible, meaningless. This is what happens during so called mystical experiences, which cannot be understood, either by us "normal" individuals, or by the person to whom they happen.
Thought, knowledge, and meaning are noting but a specific organization of matter (which is also consciousness, energy and intelligence) in order to know itself. Contrary to common belief (an expression of the illusion of the ego) the individual self does not organize anything of the mental processes. The self is a by-product of this organization. It is the mental structure through which this organization knows of its own existence (without knowing anything of the organizational details themselves). Like Descartes, the self looks always downstream of itself, never upstream. The self apprehends its own existence, but not its true nature as simply a by-product of mental activity. Looking ahead, the self (beyond the animal instinct for survival and reproduction) sets itself goals, objectives, and values. If it is more intellectually oriented, it will strive for still more knowledge, and thus more "control" of nature. If more spiritually oriented, it will strive for a "higher consciousness," "closeness to God," etc. But there is no higher consciousness. There is nothing to know but more of the same, i.e., practical knowledge of reality. Outside of that, there is nothing to know, nothing that can be known, no ultimate reality, and no noumenon.
The "ultimate reality" cannot be known, not because of the nature of the "ultimate" but because of the nature and functioning of knowledge in a human individual. Unlike the traditional different approaches (empiricist, rationalist, idealist, realist, scientific, intuitive, spiritual) which all strive to find true knowledge, or the true path, or the true ideal, the objective should be not to question the contents of thought, which is what Descartes did with is methodical doubt, but to question thought itself (which of course e did not do, but which the Indian tradition has done). Kant, it seems to me, has questioned the mechanism of thought, the span of thought, but he has not questioned the individual self, even though he saw that it was empty of knowledge.
We have seen earlier (in Part I) that meaning and the personal self are closely connected: things have meaning only for an individual self. Without a self, the information that exists with matter is there, but it has no meaning, because there is nobody looking at it. Not surprisingly, we have seen (in Part II) that, when some people lose their sense of self, they are in a state where things have lost their meaning. But for us "normal" human beings, who function with a sense of self as a center of consciousness, what exactly is meaning?
There is meaning when an impression from the outside "finds its way" to the corresponding general idea in our nervous system. I know that this is a door because the image of the door fits the general idea of a door that I have formed from past experiences. If I see something for which there is absolutely no corresponding general idea, then the thing is a mystery for me ("I don't know what it is"), and at the same time it has no possible meaning for me I may or may dread the thing, but if I do dread it, it is because I associate it with other things that can be a threat for me. In other words, the meaning of dread does not come from the thing itself, but from the fact that, not knowing it, I can associate it with something dreadful (a meaning that is already part of my stock of general ideas).
So meaning is associated with the sense of self and with general ideas. There is meaning when an individual self is a witness, so to speak, to the fact that a sense impression (or an idea or impression already stored) connects to a general idea in the mind. the knowledge becomes reflected, and consciousness "savors" itself: whenever I know something, the reflected knowledge, which at first was knowledge of the thing, now becomes knowledge of itself, knowledge of "its own taste," so to speak. The "taste of things" is what the self apprehends as "meaning."
The "search for meaning" is nothing but the self trying to reinforce and affirm itself more strongly. The search for meaning is the quest of the self for itself. For people in a state of ego-lessness, the self is gone, and so is meaning, and so is the quest for meaning. In our "normal" state of consciousness, the self needs meaning, and meaning needs the self. We dread the absence of meaning, we dread the sense of the "absurd," because no meaning means that the self has nothing to lean on, and is faced with its own emptiness. That's why scientists, whose search for knowledge can never uncover any meaning, either resign themselves to the state of affairs (Stephen Hawking says that the human race is just an astrophysically insignificant "chemical scum,") or try to face the absence of meaning as best they can, finding, like Camus, meaning in our strivings. (Steven Weinberg: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself") (in The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch, p. 346).
The same David Deutsch never questions the "faculty" of free will (not that he should. He is a scientist, not a philosopher). So, he tries to rescue it (and other "humanistic values") from its impossibility in classical physics by introducing the theory of the multiverse, which is that reality is made up of not one but many universes, which exist in parallel. Deutsch says, "I am...pointing out that, thanks to the multiverse character of quantum theory, free will and related concepts are now compatible with physics." (ibid. p. 339). Well, why not? If free will and other humanistic values cannot be found in this world (except in our imagination) then let's find them in other universes (or at least propose a theory that will find them somewhere).
Purpose, like meaning, is intimately connected to the sense of self. Both are patterns of neurons, which stand for mental events in a human mind-body unit. As far as I know, they cannot be found anywhere else in nature. Does that mean that they stand outside the normal order of things?
Purpose is like the will: it is a desire, a force, an energy that becomes conscious of itself. It is the planning that will make it easier to reach the goal. As in the case of the will (or of what we call "decision") we confuse awareness of the desire with the actual energy that makes accomplishment of the deed possible. If we have the awareness, but accomplishment is impossible because of the outside context, or because of an opposite and stronger desire, we feel "powerless," "impotent," "conflicted," and not "action" will take place, no change in the world will happen. If, on the other hand, there is no awareness of the desire (that is, no sense of purpose, no "will to act") and no conflicting and stronger desire, and no obstacle from the outside environment, but the necessary energy is indeed there, and has to be expended, "action" will take place, changes in the world will happen. In that case, we say: "I don't know what happened to me," "I don't know why I said that," "I don't know why I did it." If the deed is a crime, a lawyer will plead "diminished capacity" or "temporary insanity," based on the premise that if we are aware of what we are doing, our conscious self is the cause of what we are doing; and if we are not aware, if there is no conscious self, then the cause is to be found somewhere else, you are free to go. Because what's important is not what actually happens, but whether the self was involved. Our entire justice system, together with the concepts of guilt, responsibility, etc., is founded on the illusion of the ego, the illusion of a free self that acts in the world.
The scientific approach ignores purpose, of course, and looks only at the actual cause: the rain does not fall with the intent of watering our crops or, if there is too much of it, with the intent of punishing us for our sins. The scientist who studies the weather does not invoke the purpose of the rain to punish or reward us when she tells us that it will, or will not, rain tomorrow. But the scientist herself, in her own subjectivity, believes that everything that she does is done because she has a purpose, and that nothing would get done if she did not have the purpose; or that without a purpose she would be lost. In other words, the scientist understands the rain much better than she understands or knows herself. Now, if we don't understand ourselves, how can we really understand the world? I submit that we neither understand nor know either ourselves, or the world, except in a very superficial way (the way of thought which, as it progresses, pushes away from itself the limits of knowledge towards a forever receding horizon).
The human nervous system has the capacity to retain some traces of impressions on it, after the impact from the outside has ceased. It also has the capacity to merge separate impressions, from similar impacts, into one trace, which may be called a "general idea". By this process of retention impressions, which were at first physical impacts of the outside world on the nervous system, are "mentalized." That does not mean that they lose their material substrate, that they become ethereal; it simply means that they persist in the nervous system without any direct impact from the outside. Those "mental events" which represent at the same time information, un-reflected consciousness, and energy, and make connections and networks among themselves—according, of course, to the laws of physics, chemistry, etc. Once this mental activity echoes on itself and reaches the level of reflected consciousness, we say, following Spinoza, "Man thinks."
This power of abstraction, and retention, is more developed in man than in other animals. This is the main difference between man and other animals, be they hominoids, apes, birds, or slugs. This power does not make man intrinsically superior to the other animals. It is a capacity to function in a certain way, and like all other capacities it is a result of a certain psychological organization (neuronal in this case). Capacities that animals have to a much higher degree than man are, for instance, the capacity to perceive or to emit ultra- or infro-sounds, to detect smells a hundred times weaker than what man can sense, to perceive or to emit all kinds of magnetic radiations, etc. A fly can compute all the necessary information to land upside down on a ceiling. But man's superior power of abstraction gives him a definite advantage in many ways. Concepts can be formed, registered, stored, organized, manipulated, transmitted. As a result of this mentalization, knowledge in man can accumulate upon itself, generation after generation. In other animals (as well as in the rest of nature, biological or mineral), knowledge also exists (at the level of unreflected consciousness) but the process of building upon it is much slower. It depends on genetic mutations, which require countless generations to take place.
It is also thanks to this capacity to abstract that self-consciousness is possible in man, in the form of the individual self: the concept of reflexivity (rebounding of ideas on themselves) which knows itself to be.
General ideas are formed in the mind, each one being an abstraction from specific and similar impacts on the senses. The mind does not create ideas (out of nothing), but is only the place where pre-existing information is processed. This explanation is based on Spinoza: the theory that Nature is One, with the consequence of the parallelism of the attributes of Thought and Extension. An Idea in Thought and the corresponding object in Extension. An idea in Thought and the corresponding object in Extension are the same ting, but human understanding, that is, the mechanism of thought, apprehends them under the two different attributes, and therefore makes two things out of what is in essence one. Thus, the at of knowing creates dualism out of the basic oneness. In forming a general idea (by stocking similar and repeated impressions and simplifying them), the understanding creates the object. That of course does not mean that the understanding creates the material object. It means that the mind stores the idea as separate from the corresponding object. It means that the understanding creates an object as something separate from the idea, by precisely forming that idea. It separates object and idea by conceiving a separate and opposite concept for each. The object is perceived b human understanding as a mode of Extended Matter, and the idea as a mode of Thought. The human mind needs the concept of space in order to have knowledge of a material object.
Here is how U.G. Krishnamurti describes the process: "You create a space between the object and you." In his "natural state" U.G. does not create a space between himself and the object, that is to say, there is not in him awareness of the idea of the object; thus the object does not exist for U.G. as an object, as something apprehended as separate from him and from other objects; without this apprehension of separate objects, space does not exist (that is, it is not apprehended, or "created," by the understanding, the functioning of a thinking subject). As a result, in his "natural state" U.G. senses things, but he does not know what they are.
There is still some kind of consciousness or awareness in him, but knowledge as such has ceased functioning. He is no longer a subject knowing an object, unless we ask him what an object is. Then, he gives the name, or any other necessary information.
Reflected knowledge in man is made up of concepts. It does not matter whether it is a feeling, an emotion, an intuition, a physical sensation, or an abstract idea. As soon as something, anything, is known by me in a reflected way (that is, I am aware of something, and I know that I am having that awareness), there is a concept at work.
Human knowledge functions on the separation between object and idea, or concept. What is known, what we are aware of, is not the object as such, directly, but the concept that we form about it. Direct "knowledge" may be possible, but then it would not be knowledge in the normal sense. Subjectively, we would not be aware that we know (or not aware of what we know), and objectively we could not express that knowledge (through concepts and language) and we could not transmit it. This is the condition of the ego-less, the "enlightened," when they find themselves in a state of unknowing.
The concepts that form our knowledge are called "general ideas." They are derived from similar, even if different, previous impressions. They are known—are specific and discrete, and always different, because reality is in constant flux and change. Particular impressions are know when they relate to a general idea, already formed in the nervous system. This general idea, unlike the different (even if only minutely different) impressions, is always the same. It is unchanged, and unchangeable. Knowledge takes place when a specific impression is recognized, that is, connects to a general idea already stored in memory and derived from previous impressions. Thus, when as a baby I recognized my mother from, say, sound, or sight, or smell, a specific impression was connected to one of those general idea, or a combination of them; the impression was bringing to the fore the general idea, and I would be aware of the presence of my mother. Without the general idea the impression would have been felt, but not recognized.
It is important to keep in mind that a general idea is never a simple idea, because it does not stand for a specific, discrete object. It may look simple at first, but it is only a simplification of multiple impressions. Simplification is not specificity. In itself, it is never a specific bit of knowledge, because it does not correspond to a specific object. A general idea is a simplification of diverse sense-impression, since it retains only the general characteristics common to the diverse impressions. Nevertheless, the general idea is necessary: when a sense-impression connects to it, this impression is immediately know; it can be connected to something already familiar.
This lack of specific content is true of the sense of self, which is nothing but a general idea of reflexivity. The self, in itself, does not have any specific contents. But instead of seeing itself as a general idea, it apprehends itself as a simple idea, an idea that corresponds exactly to a specific object—this specific object being, presumably, the self as an entity. It grants itself a misleading simplicity and unity, and believes that it stands for the mental entity described by Descartes. This error by the self about its true nature brings about the illusion of the ego.
Because knowledge functions in man within a structure of concepts, "reality" is not accessible as such, and remains only a concept. For one thing, the functioning of knowledge splits the unity of reality into two "shells," the concept of material reality and the concept of mental reality: the separation between object and the concept of it (concept known by a thinking subject) creates an irremediable break in the unity of reality, unity which is forever beyond the reach of man's "normal" knowledge or consciousness. For another, concepts are unchanged in order to serve as reference points. A concept is a frozen snapshot of an ever-changing reality. Without general ideas we would have to forge a specific concept for each specific impression. The result would be a tremendous mental overload. It is easy to see how the power of abstraction—conceptual knowledge—gives man a decisive advantage over most other animals for survival in the world, while at the same time causing all kinds of illusions and dead-ends for consciousness.
Human understanding can form the concept of unity, as different from the concept of multiplicity. But it cannot grasp the unity, the oneness, of reality. In order to function, human understanding makes a duality out of unity. That is because knowledge—the result of the functioning of the understanding—is knowledge of an idea (idea meaning a basic mental event, which can be a sensation, an emotion, as well as a concept). Knowledge is never direct knowledge of an object Human understanding does not grasp an object, it grasps the idea of an object. Knowledge is not about the objects that impact our senses it is about the changes that those impacts cause in our nervous system.
When the basic un-reflected consciousness focuses on itself, in order to be information about itself rather than being merely the information on matter, it needs a focal point. That focal point is the individual self in a human mind-body unit.
But when the self becomes aware of itself, it sees consciousness only in itself, and denies it to the rest of nature. It knows of its own existence, and it knows of the rest of the world, by positing itself as the only consciousness, the rest being unconscious matter. Thus, by focusing consciousness on itself, it hides from itself that very consciousness of which it is only a focused and finite expression. This joke (at the level of the individual mind-body unit) is called the illusion of the ego.
The joke starts with the human body. At first, the infant is only in contact with the environment. This contact creates networks of neurons in his nervous system. After a while there is reflexivity (the toddler recognizes himself). Another escapee from the state of ignorance of oneself has appeared, only to be trapped by illusion. Now that there is in the toddler a sense of his own separate existence, we say that he has a sense of self. But the newly appeared self feels that it is the agent of recognition of the environment, whereas it is only a by-product of that recognition. The self tricks itself into believing that it is the source of the information (not the specific information, of course, but the fact that there is information), whereas it is only, at best, the way the information looks at itself in a human mind-body unit.
This is not the end of the joke. Not only is the self misguided about its own true nature, it is also misguided about the true nature of what it knows. The reflexivity that brings the self about is possible only if matter is separated from consciousness, separated from the information that is consubstantial to it. This separation exists of course only in theory. It is a virtual reality type of separation. Nonetheless, at the level of human knowledge, this separation is only too real, since it is the precondition for that very knowledge to be possible. The underlying oneness is broken, and the more we know, the more this oneness is beyond our reach. If for some reason the knowing process is broken, the sense of self has nowhere to anchor itself to, and the mind-body unit falls into a state of unknowing. Until then, the separation between matter and consciousness, between knowing subject and object known, is the precondition for human knowledge.
Because of this separation, the oneness of reality is beyond our reach. We don't even know a thing as such, in itself; we know only the concept that we form about it. To be known, a sense-impression has to relate to a pre-existing general idea, already stored in the mind, and with which it shares some resemblance. It is then, and only then, that I know, that I can tell myself this is a wall, this is a cat, this is my mother, this is my father, this is my friend, this is my enemy, this is good, this is bad. We don't know the sense-impression as a wave or a vibration of particles and atoms. We know it as a concept of person, of landscape, of abstract idea; in the same way, when we watch television, we don't see the unequal stimulation of phosphorescent dots on a few hundreds of horizontal lines; we see people, landscapes, and all kinds of things that we can recognize and identify.
x x x x
The definition of consciousness as the sensitivity of matter to itself is a concept that is implicitly accepted at the very core of scientific inquiry. Science is nothing but a study of the modalities of the sensitivity of matter to itself. Scientific inquiry looks at changes in matter, and takes it for granted that there is in matter an inherent information that will exactly mirror the physical changes. This information in turn, under the conditions of a biological nervous system, will echo on itself. This echo takes place in the brain of the scientist, who then has knowledge about the world. Hopefully, this knowledge is true (rather than being distorted by fallacies, pre-conceived ideas, errors of the senses, etc.). But what about the personal subjective knowledge of the scientist? The scientist knows himself by seeing himself as different from the world that he is studying, by seeing consciousness only in himself. Thus, in this process of consciousness knowing itself to be, an illusion is created, but at the level of the self, not at the level of consciousness. That's why the joke is on us.
In some people, and for reasons, which as of now are not understood, the sense of self comes to an end, and so does the joke that goes with it (which explains why those who have experienced the loss of self feel compassion for the rest of us). The mind-body unit knows itself to exist, but only as a distinct mind-body unit, not as a self separated from the world. This mind-body unit does not see any difference between the consciousness at work in it and the consciousness at work in the rest of the world. In that state, the sense of self is truly useless, because consciousness no longer needs this focal point to know itself. The mind-body unit continues, not as a self, but only as I, the first person singular pronoun, that labels this mind-body unit as different from other mind-body units. The joke is no longer active in the mind-body unit. For the rest, nothing changes.
U.G. Krishnamurti calls mental activity "the movement of thought." For him, it is the same thing as the self. The self continues because we think all the time. U.G. maintains that if this movement of thought stops, if only for one second, the self cannot maintain itself and will come to an abrupt stop. It will explode and annihilate itself, in some sort of "nuclear explosion." This is what happened to U.G. in his forthyninth year. He calls that event his "calamity." When the brain stops processing information, the sense of self no longer has a foundation. The very source from which it springs—mental activity—has come to an end, at least temporarily. But the sense of self does not gently fade away; it is so much at the center of our conscious being that its disappearance is anything but gentle. It is cataclysmic.
The sense of self is at the center of our conscious being, but it is not the beginning and the end of consciousness. It is only the concept of reflected consciousness looking at itself. The end of the self does not mean the end of consciousness; the loss of self does not mean that one falls into a coma. On the contrary, the senses function at a peak of intensity, because the burden of mental activity is no longer present to fatigue the nervous system, and also because the sense of self acts as a kind of filter to sensory input. Without that filter, the senses are assaulted (and, as our witnesses attest, often overwhelmed) by the impact of the outside world. So there is heightened consciousness at the level of the senses (direct sensitivity to the world), but there is no knowledge at the level of the separation of a subject knowing an object, or at the level of the separation between object and concept (a subject knowing an object by having a concept of it). This heightened consciousness is no longer filtered, organized, focalized around the sense of self. It is all over the place, so to speak. Our witnesses say that, without the protective filter of the self, the senses are overwhelmed, and a "re-learning" phase is necessary to be able to function again reasonably well in the world.
The "new" consciousness seems to function in a dual way. On the one hand, normal mental processing starts again (U.G. had to relearn many things, including the vocabulary for everyday life). On the other hand, mental processes stop when they are not required by practical needs. When they stop, the "new" consciousness comes to the fore. It functions outside of the normal structure of knowledge, and cannot be known by normal mental processes. Impressions on the senses cannot be sorted out, translated, referred to the normal conceptual framework. In that state one is sensitive to everything, but knows nothing, since the self, the focal point necessary for knowledge to be personalized, is no longer there. There is nobody to say, or think, "I know this, I know that."
After the "re-learning" phase a new conditioning is put in place, so that the mind-body unit that finds itself in this situation an survive and function in the world. This is another illustration of the basic intelligence-consciousness always at work. This conditioning parallels the old conditioning (our witnesses still have to survive in the same world as before), yet is different because the self is no longer there to see everything in relation to itself. Consciousness is disconnected from the sense of a knowing self, and bypasses it, so to speak. The meaning of things is no longer there. The state of unknowing that U.G. mentions about his functioning is that, for him, things no longer have the meaning that they normally have for the rest of us. But the meaning of things is not necessary, either to communicate information, or for action. Meaning is necessary only for the self.
The senses function by themselves, without any self-consciousness. The brain processes the information provided by the senses, but the process stops there, without the usual by-product, the sense of being a person.
U.G. may be sitting by himself, totally still, with a blank or absent stare, almost like a cat at rest. As stated in the above testimony, he may look at the clock, the wall, the window, and not know what those things are. Literally, they mean nothing to him. But, like the cat, he is not at all oblivious of his surroundings. On the contrary, his senses are hypersensitive to everything around him. Everything impacts his senses, but nothing is mentalized, that is, known. Ask him any question, however, and he will give you an answer. And he is never late to catch his plane or his bus.
It is difficult for us to imagine or comprehend how this different kind of consciousness functions. The information aspect of consciousness is fully there. Our witnesses are functioning like you and me. We can have a coherent exchange with them; they write books and take care of their finances, etc. But subjectivity, centered on the self, is totally gone. And so is the meaning of things. And so is the person who used to say or think: I know this I am aware of that I am doing this or that.
The only things that can give us an inkling of this different kind of consciousness are the haphazard, exalted, sometimes incomprehensible, pronouncements of the mystics. We can accept them on faith, or reject them as incoherent, Or we can try to make some sense out of the mystery patiently, even though we cannot really grasp them intellectually.
The sense of self gives the subjective illusion that, in addition to the objective mind-body unit, there is a person who thinks, decides, feels, and acts. With the end of the self, the illusion that there is a person is dissipated. If there is nobody, the subjective identification with the body—at the physical level—and with the emotions and thoughts—at the mental level—is impossible. There is nobody to identify with the living body with the thoughts thought or the emotions felt. There is a body, and a non-individualized consciousness, which does not function with a direct connection to the body. Our witnesses state that this consciousness functions all the time, regardless of whether the body itself is awake or asleep. That's how U.G. can say: "I don't know if I am alive or dead." Consciousness as such no longer identifies with the self—which itself was restricted to a specific body—and which is no more.
This impersonal consciousness is a heresy in traditional Western thinking, which, following Descartes, identifies consciousness with a conscious individual, and conceives of consciousness only as individualized. In our witnesses, this impersonal consciousness observes the individual mind-body unit (and whatever happens to it, thoughts, feelings, emotions) with total detachment. It functions day and night, even when the body is asleep.
Normal knowledge still functions in what U.G. calls the "natural state," but it is based only on the senses, with the brain to process the input; there is no sense of self to centralize all the threads in what Kant calls "the unity of apperception." As far as we an tell, this is also the condition of most animals. U.G. has often been compared to an "intelligent monkey" (he concurs without batting an eye). The only difference with the animal is that our witnesses, endowed with a human brain vastly more capable in its power of abstracting, storing and processing information—and after the needed "re-learning" phase (during which a new conditioning is acquired)—can "know" what the rest of ordinary mortals know in everyday life, and thus can keep functioning reasonably well in society.
These testimonies may be difficult to accept; they seem mystifying, or improbable. They seem so different from the way we experience our "normal," everyday consciousness. But let's examine the way we, "normal" people, function. Looking at myself talking with somebody (either to exchange information or to argue a point) I notice that I hear something, and a response comes out of me. I notice that the meaning to myself, and the very words I am uttering, are there at the moment I am saying them, not before. I know what I am saying at the moment I am saying it and not before. What I just said is not the product of my conscious self, but of some other mental mechanism, which works before the mechanism of self-awareness. Thus, I function exactly like U.G. The only difference comes after: my sense of self comes on stage as I am speaking and decides that it is doing the talking (and the processing of information that brought about the sentence that I uttered). And of course, because there is a self, there is also meaning. U.G. has no sense of self and does not experience meaning the way we do. And yet he expresses himself as coherently as you and I. Neither self nor meaning are necessary to function in this world and in society. The so-called "enlightened" or "liberated" ones function exactly as the so-called "normal" or "non-liberated" people. We communicate perfectly with them, if of course the conditioning (language, concepts, etc.) is the same in them and in us.
Everybody functions in the same way objectively. Subjectively, of course, there is a big difference: the self is buzzing around as we "normal" people function and are aware of things and of ourselves. This self-consciousness is so important to us that we cannot conceive of its disappearance before biological death. Hence, the mystery of the condition of the "mystics." Self-consciousness is at the center of our inner (subjective) being, and yet it is useless. That is, it is useless for our objective functioning, which, like everything else in nature, is entirely automatic. The only use for the self is for itself, to know itself to be. Of course, consciousness (un-reflected and impersonal) knows itself to be trough the self, The irony of the situation is that, by knowing itself to be through the self. The irony of the situation is that, by knowing itself to be, the personal self hides from itself the true nature of this universal consciousness. The personal self is a cosmic joke at its own expense. Once it has conceived itself, it cannot "deprogram" itself, it cannot stop thinking itself; and it cannot stop iding tis consciousness, which knows itself through it. And yet, we do have te testimony of the "enlightened" ones where, through divine grace or otherwise, the sense of self is gone while at the same time the mind-body unit continues to function normally, after a "relearning" phase.
That's why U.G. tells his audience: "It never comes to my mind that I am different from you, that I function differently from you." How coul it be otherwise? The sense of self does not add anyting to the functioning of a mind-body unit. If that were so, it would introduce an element of miracle in nature, wherein a center of consciousness, of decision, and of action, would initiate changes in nature without any cause but itself; something outside the chain of causes, a true miracle.
The testimony of such "liberated" or "enlightened" mind-body units as U.G. represents the opposite of conventional spiritual aspirations. Instead of a self having more and more and newer and newer concepts, they offer the cessation of thought, the end of the concepts, and the dissolution of the self. Liberation does not involve a higher level of consciousness but the opposite: the end of consciousness of self, which has been considered to be mankind's rowing achievement, supposed to make us "different" from (and no doubt highter than) the rest of the animals. Not only does self-consciousness come to an end; knowledge and the meaning of things go overboard. As J. Krishnamurti put it, there is "freedom from the known."
The loop is now closed. At the beginning there is consciousness of things, but not of consciousness itself. It is the situation of the human baby, and of most animals. This condition has been defined as a state of ignorance. Mental processes in the human mind-body unit enable consciousness to know of itself, in the guise of a personal self aware of itself. The state of ignorance comes to an end, and is replaced by the illusion of ego, the personal self, whih sees itself as a source and center of consciousness, and denies it to the rest of nature. The self is a concept, and as long as the mental processes that bring it about continue, it cannot simply disappear. Talking about the illusion of the ego does not help: stating that the unicorn is a fiction does not make the concept of unicorn disappear. In some people, and for reasons that I don't understand, consciousness rids itself of the temporary virtual lcenter of consciousness. The individual self, which is no longer neessary, and represens a useless burden, disappears: Te Useless Self. What is lelftl lis the individual mind-body unit, no longer separated subjectively from the rest of nature.
The I is a concept of reflexivity that knows itself to be. If it saw itself as nothing but that, things would be fine, because the I is just that: a concept. But the I sees itself as more than that. It apprehends itself as a self, an entity, center of consciousness, of decision and of action. Thus the I slides into the illusion of the ego. The I, as a concept, presents two characteristics which make this slide almost unavoidable: The I as continuity and it as dynamism, it is energy.
Continuity. Like any other concept, the I has continuity: Once it is formed, it is unchanged and unchangeable. I am talking here about the sense of the I in an individual, not about the personality of an individual, which of course can change and evolve. A concept can change and evolve only by bing replaced by another concept. The I senses this continuity about itself, but it does not perceive itself as just a concept. As Descartes has so well explained, te I appreends itself as something that is, an entity that has ontological substance. So it senses its own continuity, which is that of any concept, but mistakes this continuity as expressing that of an entity, a a manifestation of ontological substantiality.
Energy and dynamism. The I, like any other concept, has a certain amount of energy. As a result, it apprehends itself as a dynamic entity: it "has" desires; it has a "will". Just as the I appropriates to itself the consciousness inherent in all the ideas in the mind, and limits this consciousness to itself, it also appropriates to itself the energy inherent in all the ideas in the mind (whether they are reflected or not). It is this energy at work that makes us act and do things. The I, which is just an idea, becomes a self—an entity—and sees itself as a free agent that initiates action. In fact, it does no such thing. The self is only the focal point where there is awareness of both the energy (the desire) and the unfolding action. There is confusion between the awareness of the desire and of the action, and their cause. The I then falls into the illusion of the ego: it sees itself as the initiator and agent of action of which it is only a witness. The illusion of the ego is the result of the I being in error about its true nature. Unfortunately, no intellectual clarification of error (what this book tries to be) will by itself dissipate the illusion: the self will always think itself, no matter what it thinks of itself.
The theory of the illusion of the ego. Each individual apprehends himself as an autonomous entity. In pilosophical language, as a substance: something which exists in itself, without the need of something else to exist, and which also can be conceived by itself, without the need of another concept. This entity is of course not to be found at the level of the body; everybody knows that a human body comes from another human body, and is made of the food that sustains it and gives it energy. This intity, at the level of the mind, perceives itself as a mental, non-physical reality. It therefore cannot come from or be caused by material factors. But could it be caused by some mental factors? It thinks not because, as Descartes explained, it is proof to itself of its own existence, and as a result, by a fallacious short cut, believes itself to be self-caused. It posits itself as separated and different from the emotions and idea it "has". The cause of this error is that the self can see what causes these mental events, it can see where they are coming from (e.g. an emotion is caused by some event in my life, an idea is learned from somebody else, or derived form some already existing ideas), whereas it cannot see a cause for itself in the outside world, and feels itself to be self-caused. Unaware of its essence as simply a concept among oters (and actually deriving its self-consciousness from the reflexivity inherent in some impressins and concepts), it sees its cause, and its continuity, only in itself. Self-created and self-sustaining, it sees itself as a center of consciousness, of decision and of action (an itiator of actions that will be executed by the body). It sees itself as enjoying the faculty of free will.
Because this "entity" sees itself as a self-caused substance, it cannot understand how it could come to an end, and looks at that inevitable event with explicit or implicit anguish. On the other hand, it can understand (and therefore accept more easily) that the body, being dependent on outside factors for its beginning and for its sustenance, can come to an end because of those same outside factors. Death is frightening because, while it is easy to conceive of the demise of a physical and biological machine, it is very difficult to understand and accept that the self-caused self-sustaining mental entity can also come to an end. How can an entity which is also a substance come to an end? As a result, some of us think that it does not, that tere is an after-life, not for the body but for the self. They don't even want to tink about the opposite, which is truly scary: the fear of biological death is nothing compared to the real terror, the terror of the living death; the terror of being dead to oneself while the body keeps functioning.
The illusion of the ego as it is lived. Our normal state of consciousness is to live in the illusion of the ego. Every second of "my" waking life is lived in the belief that "my" cactions are the result of "my" intentions. "I decide" to raise my arm, to move my hand, to grasp something, to write a book, etc. That's how things appear to me, that's how I interpret what's happing. The reality is totally different. Everything that "I do" is nothing but another event in nature. The only difference between an event that takes place at the level of a human mind-body unit and an event in the rest of nature is that the "human action" knows itself to exist. At the level of the individual self, serving as a focal point for consciousness, there is awareness of the action being initiated and of the action unfolding. But the self does not decide and does not do anything, even though it believes otherwise. It is only a witness; it is the form that consciousness uses to know itself to exist. When I move my arm, I know why I move my arm. But "my" intention is not the cause of the action; it is only the awareness of the context (the need for a given movement, as well as the energy available for it) which has brought about the given action. The energy is the real cause of the action, the I is only the witness of this chain of events. Everything would have taken place in the same way without a self whose "intention" is believed to have been the initiator and the cause of the action.
The illusion of the ego is to believe that "my action is mine, whereas there is only Nature in action. Nature, that is to say, a unity of material existence, energy and consciousness. The huan understanding grasps certain aspects, but not all, of that reality; because it does not grasp all the aspects of the reality that is presented to it, it lacks the concepts that world show it the exact limits of the knowledge it has of that reality. Because it does not know any better, it appropriates to itself an action, wich is in fact an expression of the energy inherent in matter. Because it does not know any better, it appropriates to itself a consciousness, wich is in fact an expression of the consciousness inherent in matter. Thus the illusion of the ego is, strictly speaking, an error, in the Spinozist sense: the absence of a concept that world limit the concept that we already ave about a given aspect of reality.
The illusion of the ego is the individual self placing itself at the center of what's happening, consciousness-wise (a high beam of consciousness shining on a Nature which, it believes, would be inert without it, opaque, and devoid of consciousness). The illusion of the ego is also the self placing itself in the place of nature, action-wise (energy-wise), tus displaying a stunning arrogance (as well as blindness as to its very own essence). Because of the illusion of the ego, the mind-body unit sees itself as an entity that "acts". And yet, this action is not different in essence from any other event in Nature. A river also "acts": it flows, roars at certain spots, and calms itself at other spots, etc.
Once the self knows itself, it wants to be itself, it wants to keep being itself, but at the same time it recoils in horror at trying to know what it is exactly. As Nabokov puts it: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Althought the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for." (In Speak Memory, p. 19. Wideview/Perigee Books, Revised Edition, 1966). This lack of curiosity about our pre-natal situation is revealing. It prevents us from considering the void at the center of our being; it prevents us from even considering the illusion of the ego. As Maharaj used to say: "Where were you a hundred years ago?" Indeed. Why ponder so obsessively on what will become of us a hundred years from now and not consider what we were a hundred years ago? The answer is obvious: a hundred years ago, we were nothing. So, let's ignore it. Rather, let's start from now, when we think we are something. Something out of nothing? Certainly. Tis view reinforces the miraculous view of the self. But then, what will become of the precious entity, the dear self, after death? How could it become nothing, if it is something now? So let's pay tribute to the Right Powers (whatever they may be) and hope for the best. That way, we keep things under control, we can rest in peace. By looking at the nothingness a hundred years ago, the real fear is to contemplate the nothingness now, the nothingness before death, while alive. Is there anything more awful than being alive and yet not feeling oneself to be? This is the fear described by Suzanne Segal. Look at us: we do everything in our power, at every waking moment, to prove to the world, and above all to ourselves, that we are somethng, that we are not nothing. But the fear is repressed, we are not really conscious of it. Supreme irony: it is the sense of the I, the illusion of the ego, that protects us against this fear, and enables us to function. Prodigious ruse of nature, invincile Maya of the Indian tradition! The illusion of the individual entity enables man to function (subjectively) and protects him from depression and from contemplating the void, thus reinforcing itself! U.G. Krishnamurti is one of the rare exceptions to the norm; his personality is such that he does not know fear. But he does mention that extraordinary courage is necessary to face the challenges to the self, a courage much higher than what is necessary to cross the deepest oceans, or climb the highest mountains, or face physical death.
What is now my self did not exist 100 years ago, and it won't exist 100 years from now. For now, it is nothing but a virtual entity, like a virtual drive inside a real physical drive. What did exist 100 years ago were the molecules making up my body, together with the consciousness-information that goes with them. They will still be here a hundred years from now, in a different form [molecules, mostly, but information is not conserved as human extinction is possible]. That's why U.G. says that it is the body, not the soul, which is immortal. For now, the sense of self is the focal point that consciousness uses to know itself. Just like the wave in the ocean is the foca point of movement in the ocean, the manner in which wind energy is expressed and dissipated in the ocean. The illusion of the ego is like the wave that believes that it is moving the ocean; it is like the wave that believes that it is master of its own movements; it is like the wave that believes that it is master of the ocean itself, if only it tries hard enough or cleverly enough.
Nature at its basic level of matter-consciousness-information-energy never errs. It is constantly in a state of change, and these changes take place according to the rules encoded in the information inherent in matter. The system never fails. The reason for that is very simple: even though man knows and conceptualizes matter and the consciousness-information as two different things, they are the same thing, but their separation is the precondition for knowledge to be possible in man. It is impossible for matter to be wrong. The "mistakes" of nature (natural catastrophes, mutations in the "wrong" direction, genetic mishaps, "evil in the world," etc.), are of course nothing of the kind. They are mistakes only for man, when he compares what is to some ideal that he has formed in his head. He thinks (wrongly) tht some ideal should be the norm (on the basis of his moral values, of what he perceives to be his interest and well-being, etc.)
At its non-reflected but stored and processed level in biological beings, consciousness functions also impeccably. An example is instinct in animals, a pre-programmed non-reflected (presumably) set of behaviors, which helps animals to survive. Of course, if the context or the environment changes, instinct can be a negative rather than a positive factor. But this is not a failure of the system. The purpose of nature is not to help this or that species to survive. Nature has no purpose. Purpose exists only in relation to an individual self.
As we move away from this non-refleted level, the potential for mistakes at the reflected level increases rapidly. Human thought, which is the highest level in nature of reflected consciousness and abstraction, is in error most of the time. Once the information component is abstracted from matter (in te form of patterns of neurons that are no longer directly connected to outside impulses), thought is on its own. It can recombine concepts in any way possible, and the potential for errors is now infinite: errors of the senses, errors of logic, errors triggered by emotions, etc. As a result, the most widely shared beliefs, the most solid theories, the seemingly most secure knowledge, become ridiculous aberrations with the passage of time, and sometimes even before that. Contrary to one of the most widely spread superstitions in human societies, mind is not superior to matter, and does not lead it; in fact, thought is always one step behind matter; it is also behind events most of the time. All the so-called progress of knowledge and of thought represents only painful efforts to catch up with matter, to adjust to the constant and for the most part unforeseen changes that matter throws at us. The whole endeavor of scientific knowledge is to codify in abstractions intelligible to man what is already happening in matter, to deciper the information that is already there at work.
Matter is always one or more step ahead of thought. Matter is always and effortlessly right; thought is most of the time in error. Yet man has forever worshipped his own thought, and at best, used matter, and at worst charged it with being low, vile, impure, and other names. There are two reasons for this error:
—First, man knows of his own existence through thought. The self is a conceptualization, a by-product of mental activity. Man exists (in his own mind, as a self) by being different from matter, by not being matter.
—Second, the essence of thought activity in mind is the power of abstraction. Man onceptualizes, stores his abstractions, and polishes them. He marvels at this power of his (not realizing that he himself is a product of this characteristic of nervous physical matter in man), which enables him to conceive almost infinitely; what a wonderful thing, compared to his painfully limited control of matter! Matter is stubborn, uncooperative, often perceived as hostile; even when not hostile, it rarely does what we want it to do. Thought on the other hand is flexible, pliant, and ready to serve and go anywhere. Even better: thought lets us participate of perfection (whcih itself, of course, is nothing but a concept). It is very difficult to create a perfect circle with wood, stone, metal. But with thought we can conceie a circle, and it's automatically perfect, ideal, unchanged for all eternity! Like Plato, man puts ideals above everything else. He starts worshipping what he calls values, eternal and perfect. He loves mathematical beings. He finds eternal truths, the essence of reality, in esoteric numbers. He is awed by the beauty and severe grandeur of moral values. That makes him so much better than animals, and even closer to God.
Unfortunately, all these abstractions and conceptualizations are perfect only because they are frozen. They never change, not because they are already perfect (perfection itself being nothing but another concept), but because they cannot change. Once conceived, a thought remains the same forever. It is nothing but a frozen snapshot of a constantly changing reality. Because concepts don't change, they make knowledge possible. A constantly changing reality impacts our senses, and these impressions can be known—i.e. recognized—only by being related to a known point of reference which has to be the same at all times. Without these stored and unchanged abstractions, knowledge is not possible.
Thought grabs reality and freezes it, like the butterfly specimens under a glass cover. They can be looked at, organized, classified, but they have long been dead. Likewise, reality escapes from the grasp of thought. The minute thought knows something about it, matter has already changed, and thought has no choice but to start again, try again, so that it can re-impose its ontrol on matter. The attempt is doomed to failure.
A philosopher once said, "One never swims twice in the same river." That is true: the river changes all the time and so does the rest of the material world aroound us. But what about the person who is swimming in the river? It is also never the same person who goes in the water. It may seem that one can swim twice in the same river, because the river has the same name from one day to the next, and so does the one who is swinning. Names do not change, but everything beyond names does. Subjectively, the self sees itself as unchanging, but everything else, which exists in the unceasing flow of change, is different. The actual reality of the water and of the mind-body unit that swims in it are in a constant state of change. Thus, "nobody swims twice in the same river" is twice true.
A person is a given mind-body unit where, in spite of appearances, impersonal forces are at work. They are the same impersonal forces at work in the rest of nature. These forces are expressed as events in nature, changes in the world, changes in the organization of the world. In man, these changes are called action, because we labor under the illusion that when we "do" something the self, as a conscious agent, is the deciding agent and the doing agent for what's happening. Looked at objectively, there is no difference between our "actions" (presumably caused by our "decisions") and any other events in nature; whether in mankind or in nature, the same impersonal
forces are at work. The only difference, at the subjective level, is that there is consciousness of what is happening, including the awareness of the energy hehind the changes. This awareness at the level of the conscious self is called "desire" or "the will." The self, aware of the energy and of the change, calls those reflected events "decision" and "action," and considers that those changes are different in essence from other events in nature. Yet, the same processes are at work, with only varying levels of abstraction and complexity.
U.G. Krishnamurti keeps telling those who listen to him that—as far as "liberation" is concerned—all their efforts are in vain, that they will get nowhere, that he cannot do anything for them, and that they should go away and not come back. Why does he say that? U.G. is simply pointing out to his listeners, and to all of us also, the absurdity of the human condition. Our "normal" knowledge functions on the basis of concepts and with the focal point of the self, which itself is a concept. Tis type of knowledge can store and manipulate concepts, and by mimiching or mirroring the processes that take place in matter, this knowledge enables us, to a certain extent, to manipulate matter for what we think is our interest.
The human baby, like all other animals, starts life in a state of ignorance: it does not know about itself. After a while, the sense of self (concept of reflexivity knowing itself) comes into being, and the baby knows that it exists. It is no longer in a state of ignorance, but falls into a state of illusion. Also, at that level, error appears. Error is not possible at the level of matter, where matter and information are one and the same thing. But when information looks at itself, it is disconnected from matter: thought can go in any direction it pleases (or, rather, it will go were new patterns of neurons will go, coherent and true to the laws of electricity and chemistry, but disconnected from the outside object in matter that they stand for). That's why scientific knowledge has to be confirmed by what happens in matter. Matter is the ultimate arbiter of the value of a theory. We of curse strive to avoid error (most of the time without success, but that's another thing), but lessening error does not lead to an escape from illusion. On the contrary, lessening error means more mental activity. The self is a be-product of mental activity. Thus, reducing error reinforces illusion, the illusion of the thinking entity doing the thinking.
That's why U.G. says that he cannot help us. Provocateur, he tells us to our face: "Go away. I can do nothing for you, and if I cannot do anything, nobody else can." He is brutal, but coherent. He keeps telling us that his "calamity" happened in spite of all his previous efforts to discover what liberation is, and how to get it. Everything collapsed in him, body and mind. This is the absurdity of the human condition: The search that is initiated by the self ends, if it is successful, by the annihilation of the self. And if it is not successful, man continues to live in misery; the self is constantly searching, and wanting more knowledge, which reinforces the sense of self. The concept of liberation, (or perhaps also "salvation") represents the supreme value in human life—at least for thouse who are "spiritually" oriented. But the search itself is mental activity, and cannot not be mental activity. So the whole process reinforces the sense of self, and the state of illusion. There is nothing it do.
Einstein says that Spinoza's view that the attributes of Thought and Extension are the same thing (but apprehended by the understanding as two differeent essences) led him to the theory of the equivalence of Matter and Energy. In fact, this equivalence, and the parallelism of the attributes, are not exactly comparable. Matter and Energy can change into one another, and when tere is more of one there is less of the other. Thought and Extension, on the other hand, are always co-existing, and cannot convert into one another More of one does not mean less of the other. They grow together, or decrease together, like the two sides of a coin that is flattened to have more surface, or cut to have less area. "Thought," for Spinoza, means of course non-reflected and non-individualized consciousness-information.
Even if they are not exactly comparable, it is useful to ponder the two views. They force us to question the most basic concepts, and adjust them to a reality stronger than they are. At the level of reality as such (that is, at the level of unknowing, before it is grasped by human understandig), matter un-reflected consciousness, energy, are the same thing, similar to what was at the onset of the Big Bang, a reality which we cannot know or conceive. But at the level of human understanding thought and extension are mutually exclusive. The concept of one exists be excluding the concept of the other. Thought is what exists but is not extended, and extension is what exists but is not thought. "Exists" here means of course "conceived by man." Thought does not need space to be known, and extension does not need time (does not need the concept of time to be known). But if we leave this level of separation and exclusion, which the human understanding needs to function, we land at another level, much more uncomfortable, where we do violence to concepts that seem so obvious at the first level. We break the concepts, and form other concepts that include what the first ones excluded. This comparison forces us to see concepts for what they really are: not an eternal expression of "the truth," but frozen snapshots of a constantly changing reality, which they cannot grasp in its totality. They help us grasp only a limited facet of what is, and when we want to extend our knowledge further, we have to discard them, and adopt new ones, which make almost a mockery of what was thought to be such an impregnable foundation for truth and knowledge. A concept is a tool that can be useful for a while, and then it has to be dropped or broken wen it becomes an obstacle, precisely because of what made it originally useful and necessary: the fact that it is a reference point, which cannot change if it is to be useful and reliable as a reference point.
Is religious aspiration the supreme good? Is it what can give meaning to life? Or is it only a projection of the individual self onto an idea which it conceives as being greater than itsef, and therefore worthy of attachment because it is then the best way for its own aggrandizement? Is love of God the sign of the waning of the illusion of the ego, or the sign that it is still there, stronger than ever, but in a disguised form?
Religious aspiration may be a trick the ego plays on itself, but it still represents an instinctive desire to escape from a state of illusion, a certain intuition that "something is missing" at the level of everyday consciousness. This aspiration is quite often very confused and not clearly articulated or conceived, yet it is essentially valid; illusion is a real limitation of individual human consciousness, even if one does not have a clear conception of it. Unfortunately this lack of a clear conception is in itself an error (a clear conception would establish beyond any doubt that the individual cannot escape from a state of illusion just be believing in something). Starting from error leads to an infinite succession of errors. So, even if the original impulse is valid, religious conceptions and constructions are errors springing from the original error, the lack of a clear conception of the exact nature of illusion and of the nature of the self. On the other side of the illusion, when the sense of self is gone, religion becomes meaningless—or at the very least religious devotion.
If religious aspiration can be seen as a confused attempt to escape from illusion, philosophy, on the other hand, sees itself as a clear and deliberate attempt to escape from error, or reduce it as much as possible. And much of philosophy is an attempt to reduce the errors of religion. The Enlightenment, in particular, was an exercise in rationality, meant to escape from perceived errors and shortcomings of religious thinking. Unfortunately, correcting—or trying to corret—erros is commendable, and necessary, but not enough. In its fight against error, Enlightenment missed entirely the other target, which religious aspiration at least has in its aim, even if in a confused and random manner: the state of illusion. It is relatively easy to attack the errors and falsehoods and contraditions of religious thinking. Realizing that we are in a state of illusion, and aving a clear conception of what it is, is quite another matter. Not to speak of the next step, wich would be an escaping from the illusion.
Attacking the "errors of religion" without having at the same time a clear concept of the illusion of the ego removes all constraints: God is dead, man is everything, and everything is possible. Religious aspiration is replaced by ideological dogmatism; religion is still there, but without the moral limits imposed from above. Man is now the supreme authority instead of God. there are no limits to the ideological halluscinations of thought, all in the name of reason and of the mastery of man. Kant at least tried to establish the limits of rational thinking, to reduce the scope for error in matters of religion. Unfortunately, the concept of illusion was not part of is intellectual world.
Thus, religion, at least as far as it is spiritual aspiration, is an attempt to (unknowingly) escape from illusion; pilosophy, on its part, is a conscious attempt to reduce or eliminate error. They are both ultimate failures, because neither targets error and illusion at the same time. Religion is a confused attempt to escape from illusion without having a clear concept of what illusion is about, and without bothering about error. A clear idea of illusion would show that the attempt to escape from illusion (to reach beyond the self) comes from the self, and can only reinforce it. A clear idea of illusion would show that the attempt by the self to escape from illusion is impossible, becasuse the self cannot decide to stop being: to decide is to think, and to tink is to reinforce the self. On the other hand, philosophy is an attempt to escape from error, without bothering about illusion. Philosophy, by putting all eggs in the basket of rationality (but does it have a choice?) does not see that the real problem is not just error; rather, the real the ultimate problem, is illusion. Reducing error to nothing (if that were possible) would change nothing to the human condition, which is to live in a state of illusion.
Of course, objectively, sub-specie aeternitatis, error and illusion are not a problem: everything that we think, like everything else that happens in nature, is an event in nature, neither useful nor useless, neither necessary nor unnecessary, neither good nor bad. These are all meanings that we try to impose on the flux of things. But at man's subjective level, religion and pilosophy are the only approaches we have to correct or limit error and illusion. Religion is useful because, by posing a God infinitely superior to the individual self (even tough similar to it) the self is reduced to its correct status as infinitely small and ultimately irrelevant. Pilosophy is useful because it brings attention to the fact that thought is ultimately an infinite succession of errors, even though it (philosophy) does not bring tis infinite succession to an end.
Philosophy and religion are both useful and necessary, but ultimately they are of course total failures—at least as far as their declared aims are concerned. (Practically, as a human ocupation, they may provide emotional comfort, and jobs too, a place in te soial system). They bring about the end of neither error nor illusion, which continue as strong as ever, and increase as te earth's population grows. Philosophy and religion fail, and man continues to be in suffering and misery, as the Buddha and others have noticed. Sometimes, by a fluke of Nature (whih could be a providential mini-stroke, for all we know) the individual self stops perceiving itself, and the mind-body unit escapes from the state of illusion, from the illusion of separateness and the suffering that goes with it. With the end of self, suffering ceases because there is nobody to suffer any more. Only te cessation of the sense of self will bring an end to the state of illusion, and make error irrelevant, even if still tere. Only te cessation of the sense of self will make philosophy and religion both unnecessary and irrelevant.
Many factors are necessary for knowledge to take place: the structures of time and space, the split between matter and information, and the separation between the knowing subject and te known object.
We apprehend information about matter within the structure of time: Events follow one another in time; without it, they would all be compressed or superimposed on each other, like double exposures on film; they would be undistinguishable from each other; they could not be known. But time itself exists because of changes in space; without changes in tings that exist in space, time does not flow, that is, does not exist. Everything stays frozen as it is, forever. Space, in turn, can be known (tht is exists for us) only because changes in space are spread out in time. To go from one point to another in space time is needed. If there is no flow of time then there is no extension of space. Again, this is all at the level of knowledge in man, at the level of the conceptual framework through which man gets information about reality (which itself, of course, is nothing but a concept in man's mind).
How do we conceptualize space? U.G. says that we know a thing by naming it. ("By knowing the object, you create a space between you and the object.") Knowing and naming a thing objectifies it. (Knowing and naming are themselves made possible by abstracting several sense-impressions into one abstract idea.) Knowing and naming a thing objectifies it. (Knowing and naming are themselves made possible by abstracting several sense-impressions into one abstract idea.) In addition to having a subjective sensation, a felt sensation, we now have an object that causes the sensation: we know the object as being something separate from us in space. The separation between the sensation and the object that causes the sensation becomes space, or is expressed for us and grasped by us as space. The conceptualizations of space and of object go together. Instead of having just a sensation felt subjectively (with no space component) we now have the sensation plus the conceptualization of the object (done by naming the object) as separate from me in space. The separation subject-object is what creates space, and it is the way knowledge functions in man. So now, when my hand touches the surface of a table, I say that the table is smooth, or rough. Instead of just being felt, the sensation is now known, and I have conceptualized an object different from me, and separate from me in space.
Time follows automatically. By having a concept (by giving a sensation a name) the mind objectifies, that is, creates an object separate from the sensation (in turn, the object is viewed as being the cause of the sensation). When a different sensation is felt, and objectified in turn, a sequence is created. If not, the two sensations could not be differentiated from one another. When they are known, the two sensations are felt successively in time, just like their respective objects are known separately in space. I write: "the mind objectifies" rather than "I objectify" because those mental processes take place before the sense of self is also conceptualized in the little baby, as an abstraction of those processes. The illusion of the ego is of course the belief that the self does the conceptualization, whereas it is a result, or by-product, of the mental process of knowing.
Knowledge is manifested in man as the duality of the knowing subject and the known object. The subjet knows itself as existing in Thought. It knows the object as something existing in Extended Matter. (If the known object is an abstract idea, it exists now in Thought, but was originally an object in Matter, which has then been abstracted into an idea in Thought.) It is this separation that creates the sense of space and time: the subject knows the world by having successive ideas, in time, about objects, which exist in space. We are told that time and space were created at the moment of the Big Bang. That leaves us perplexed, because our concept of time makes it expand infinitely, forward or backward. Ditto with space. So, rather than saying that time and space were created with the Big Bang, we should say: the conditions for our knowledge of matter (spoace and time) appeared at some point. Before that (before, in terms of uman knowledge), watever was existing (and may still exist, but by definition unbeknowst to us) was existing as part of some other attributes of reality (the Substance of Spinoza, which has to be conceived as absolutely infinite, that is, can be manifested in an infinity of attributes, only two of which, consciousness and extended matter, are known to us). Those other attributes are of course beyond our reach, beyond the reach of human knowledge. We understand now how the universe may appear out of the "vacuum" of the cosmologists. This "nothing" is not the nothing of the philosopher ("nothing can come out of nothing") or the logician. It is a nothing because it does not exist in the two attributes within which human knowledge functions, but in some oter attribute(s) beyond our understanding. It is nothing because we cannot perceive or conceptualize or understand it.
Values are abstractions derived from events or things that we like or that are favorable to us. This is how we form our ideas of the "beautiful," the "good," the "moral." Or, if we don't like some event or thing, we call it "ugly," evil," "sinfu," etc. Values exist only as patterns of neurons in a human brain. They cannot be found anywhere else.
And just as in the case of the self (which believes that there is no consciousness and no impressions without a self), we reverse the order of things: we say that an action is good or moral because it conforms to an eternal concept of the good, whereas in fact this ideal good is but an abstraction derived from other events or deeds that we deem favorable to us.
Another aspect of values is their strength, their seemingly irresistible pressure on us to act in a certain way; this strength is nothing but the force of the attachment of the self (itself a concept) to other concepts that reinforce it. The self is comforted in its existence by adhering to values, no matter what they are. The self feels that it adds substance to itself by believing in values. Values get their meaning from the adherence of the self to them, and the self
reinforces its own meaning and existence by adhering to values. The self exists be giving meaning to things, and reinforces this meaning by adding a negative or positive connotation to that meaning.
The sense of self gives meaning to things, which by themselves have none. Values themselves are nothing but more meaning, with a negative or positive "flavor" added to the basic meaning of a thing (this is a door, this is a window). Forming a concept of someting, and ten adding a positive or negative charge to something that by itself is neutral, reinforces the sense of self.
Values are a way for the self to exalt itself, to feel itself to be "more," or "better." Without a self, there are neither meaning nor values.
When the sense of self disappears, values become meaningless. There is no longer any perception or conception of good and evil, of god and devil, of morality and immorality. This has been repeatedly and forcefully affirmed by a number of ego-less mind-body units, from the Buddha (Buddha is beyond good and evil) to our present witness (U.G. Krishnamurti). It is not that they don't understand what a value is, or a passion, or an emotion. As a matter of fact, they do have emotions, which are a burst of energy associated with a perception of something. They can feel anger; they do have likes and dislikes. But once the energy of the emotion is spent, nothing is left but the neutral idea that there was anger here a few minutes ago about something or somebody. The emotion is spent, like a ripple on the surface of the water, because there is nothing that can identify with the emotion, which thus cannot last once its energy is spent. There is nothing that can give substance and continuity to the emotion, by latching on to it, which is what the sense of self does in our "normal" state. It is the same with value: there is no self to latch on to the value, and identify with it, and give it continuity once the energy has dissipated.
But just to state intellectually that one is "beyond morality" does not mean that one is ego-less, beyond self. It means only that the self conceives of the opposite of morality, and finds the new concept a more convenient crutch than conventional morality. In this case, the self reinforces itself not by submitting to another concept (the good as higher than my own desire), but by the opposite: by stressing its refusal of any outside and constraining value. The self decides to affirm nothing but itself, to exalt nothing but its own will to power.
Values are the added positivity or negativity that the self projects on concepts. Without a sense of self, values mean nothing anymore, because their foundation is gone. And this is true not only for moral values but for other values as well, including aesthetic values, or any other values created by man. U.G. Krishnamurti says that he hears music only as a sequence of noises. It is we, he says, and not the instrument, who create the melody by giving meaning to the sounds. He also says that the most expensive perfumes are nothing but an irritation to the nose, affecting it no more positively than the smell of excrement.
Free will and conditioned behavior are presented as the two opposite principles governing uman action. Free will is viewed as specific to man (the rest of the animal world being dominated by conditioned behavior) and a proof of man's superiority. This view is wrong in two ways:
—First, it posits a difference between man and animal, and between man and the rest of nature. This difference is a fiction. Whether physiologically or psychologically, man is an animal that functions like the rest of nature, and as a part of nature.
—Second, this view gives free will a positive connotation, and conditioning a negative one, which again is a fiction of the mind. Conditioned behavior is neither inferior nor superior, it is the norm. The belief in free will is just another aspect of the illusion of the ego.
I take conditioning to be more than its usual definition of acquired conditioning, in the psychological sense. Everything that exists in nature is conditioned. Matter is conditioned, and reacts to itself according to this conditioning. It is called the laws of physics, or the laws of nature. This conditioning is inherent in matter, and immutable—at least at the level of classical physics. Next, at the biological level, genetic conditioning controls the very essence of all living beings. Lastly, the human mind too is nothing but conditioning, but in a more subtle or complicated way. Nervous matter in man can acquire conditioning beyond the genetic conditioning of the newborn baby. Nervous matter is sensitive to outside influences, malleable, and it can retain traces of those influences. Thus, the new human being is being conditioned to speak a given language, to behave in a certain way according to certain norms and values, to think certain thoughts in certain ways, etc. This is all learned and acquired conditioning. The programming is more complicated, changeable, and evolutive, than the conditioning of mineral matter (which does not change or evolve) but it is conditioning all the same.
Conditioning is the mark of determined reality. Without conditioning we are at te level of the absolute, un-determinate substance; even right after the Big Bang, in the expanding soup of basic particles, the conditioning that will bring about te universe is tere, at least potentially. As soon as we leave the level of the absolute, conditioning is king. It is wat makes possible the determination of the un-determinate and infinite into the determinate and the finite. It is what makes change in matter possible. If there is change in matter, it has to be according to some rule, it is not haphazard or chaotic. I call this rule conditioning.
Consciousness also, as manifested in human beings, is nothing but conditioning. The stock of general ideas, which makes knowledge possible, is the conditioning of consciousness. Without these general ideas, discrete impressions on the senses cannot be related to anything, and thus cannot be known. Without this programming, the human brain is in the condition of a computer without an operating system.
The laws of physics express the conditioning of matter. If we add to this basic mineral conditioning the next level—genetic conditioning—the result is vegetal and animal life. Next, if we add acquired conditioning, the result is the full range of human consciousness and human behavior. These three conditionings are the condition of human intelligence.
A human being, a person, is a conditioned mind-body unit. This unit reacts to different stimuli and constraints, from both within and without, according to its conditioning. The more complex its conditioning, te more the given mind-body unit is capable of "action," "creation," and oter great deeds. The conventional view is that tese happenings are te proof and the expression of the autonomy, the liberty, and the creativity of the "agent" doing tose deeds. There is nothing here at work but a given conditioning. If some of the conditioning is missing, as for instance in te case of a "wild child," then the power of action in the world is limited; the child has no master of language, cannot walk like a human being, or even stand upright.
The interaction of the three levels of conditioning brings about, as well as explains, the totality of human behavior. Many things, at the level of physiology for instance, are explained by mineral conditioning (laws of physics and chemistry). More and more can be explained at the level of biological or genetic conditioning. Things are more difficult at the level of acquired conditioning, not because the process is different, but because this conditioning is capable of an almost infinite number of variations; the compounding of conditioning by itself is great, and the substrate (networks of neurons) is only just beginning to be understood. But this complexity should not mislead us into believing that there is such a thing as "freedom," or the faculty of "free will," any more than the complexity and unpredictability of the weather, a week or a month from now, endows weather with the faculty of free will.
When reflected human consciousness discovers the basic structure of matter, it discovers the conditioning of matter. Consciousness of the world is the discovery of conditioning. But this consciousness is possible because there is conditioning in the first place, and it is nothing but the conditioning of the world discovering itself. Hence, U.G. Krishnamurti's statement that "intelligence is conditioning." Without this conditioning, which controls the determination of the absolute into the determinate and the relative, there is no consciousness, non-reflected as well as reflected.
The conditioning of the ego-less. U.G. Krishnamurti and others insist that after losing their sense of self, they continue to function in everyday life in society only because some of the conditioning previously acquired remains, or because there is a new or "relearned" conditioning. They insist on the fact that, because some of the conditioning has been lost during the upheaval, they have had to "relearn" how to function in everyday life (use language, communicate with oters, go out in the street, etc).. They have had to recondition themselves. But now this mental activity (the conditioning at work) does not have as a by-product a sense of self. It stays at the physiological level of the nervous system, without any mental by-product. But the "re-conditioning" is the reason why, objectively, U.G. and others function like us, and can have a normal communication with the rest of us.
In our "normal" way of consciousness, many sense impressions are reflected in the self, which "knows" them and gives a sense of unity to the whole. But it does not have to be so Sense perceptions can stand by themselves; the information about the world can exist and be active, without a self as a constant witness of what's happening. This is of course what's happening in the case of animals, where sensory perceptions enabe them to function, without at the same time triggering the sense of being a self which "has" those sensory perceptions. One can say that the self needs the sensory input in order to be, whereas the senses don't need a self to function. It is this autonomous functioning of the senses which enables the "enlightened" to function in everyday life in society after the loss of the sense of self.
The Buddha saw suffering, and tried to help. U.G. Krishnamurti tells whomever cares to listen to him: "You were born in misery, you live in misery, you will die in misery. You are misery."
Some might respond: "I don't feel misery. I feel fine, thank you. I don't know metaphysial or existential anguish. My needs are satisfied, I am happy."
Is it possible that U.G., the Buddha and others like them, might simply be in a state of chronic depression?
No. Their statements are an expression not of depression (how can there be depression when all subjectivity and interior life is over?) but of compassion for man's condition, the misery of man in the fetters of his own individual consciousness, in the very fact of being a self. With self
comes attachment. The self has to give meaning to what happens to it, and exists and continues to exist by being attached to that meaning. That means that the self is totally dependent on what happens (good or bad) to the mind-body unit. And what happens, of course, is not under the control of the self. It is under the control of the chain of causes. Attachment, and dependence on the context, makes the misery of the self. Once the sense of self is gone, attachment and dependence are gone, and so is the misery.
Mental activity brings about the sense of self. The more man thinks and knows himself and the world, the more the sense of a knowing subject, separated from what is known, is reinforced. In other words, less error does not mean less illusion, it can only mean more of it. The misery of the illusion of the self is not consciously felt by most, because we know that we crave attachment, but we don't know or question why. And of course it is different from te misery of having a stomachache. No wonder the mind-body units, where the fiction of a personal self has stopped, feel a certain compassion for those who are still in a state of illusion but don't even know it.
This misery (attachment to the separate self) is expressed by the fear of death, which puts an end to the separate individual. Ironically, death puts also an end to the misery. But the fear of death is nothing compared to the anguish of the thinking self confronting the possibility, or the actuality, of its demise before biological death. Those torments have been well described by Suzanne Segal. Nothing seems more terrible for the self than the idea of not feeling oneself to exist while the body and the senses continue to function.
The loss of self is a possible but highly unlikely happening. So U.G. tells his listeners to go their own way, and "forget about the whole thing." He calls his own "awakening" is "calamity," and tells all those who keep coming to see him "If you knew what it is really like, you would not want to have anything to do with it." That is, leave well enough alone. You are in misery, but you don't know it, so forget about everything and go in peace. Trying to escape your misery will only increase it.
For most people, the state of illusion comes to an end only with biological death.In the case of the "enlightened" the illusion of the personal self is dissipated while they are alive. The mind-body unit is back to the condition of a baby in a state of ignorance, but because of the acquired conitioning of the nervous system, it can function in the world. Thus it is possible to function in a state of "unknowing," where things no longer have the meaning that we usually project on them.
We who are in a "normal" state of consciousness do see meaning in things; when we don't see it, we desperately look for it; we try to create it any way we can. The accumulation of meanings in the world is called "civilization": a store of values, which comfort and appear to give substance to an otherwise empty self. For the "enlightened" the whole thing is dissipated in a state of "unknowing."
By being in a state of "knowledge" (out of the state of ignorance) man creates his own misery. By knowing himself to exist as an individual, man has to give substance to his empty self, by creating meaning and values and constantly reinforcing them, anyway he can. The self as such has no information content and desperately needs values that it an identify with, thus giving itself some "substance," something that is knowable, that has some information content. Once the self has found values that it can latch onto, it feels more secure. A more or less conscious self-image is created. All efforts will now tend to conform to this self-image, and reinforce it. No sacrifice is too great to achieve that goal. Everything is gauged in relation to that self-image. That self-image is even more important than the social image, the standing in society. The opinion of others is of course very important to reinforce the self, reassure it that it is on the right path, doing the right thing. But the subjective self-image, even if sometimes a very confused and indistinct one, is a more powerful motivation. It is the central obsession in our lives, and we will go to extreme lengths to bolster it. The result is, quite often, a state of absolute misery. The "enlightened," who lives in a state of "unknowing," sees his or her contemporaries living in this state of misery, and has compassion for them.
The left brain knows things in their diversity and separateness, the right brain apprehends the oneness of "what is". The left brain achieves discursive, rational, linear knowledge; the right brain has the intuition of the whole. What the left brain knows is useless to the right brain. What the right brain feels remains opaque and impenetrable to the left brain. The left brain strives to dissipoate error, and does not know about illusion; the right brain feels tat, left to its own devices, it is beyond illusion; it as no business with error, it simply ignores it.
The left brain does not understand the right brain; the right brain has no use for the left brain.
The left brain and the right brain live in a state of war. The left brain is aware of the state of tings (it derides the right brain as often as possible) but the rigt brain, fixated on someting else, does not pay attention. It seems that the left brain is winning the war. But things are not that simple.
The left brain is the seat of mental activity. Mental activity brings about the sense of a separate self, which exists by being diferent from te rest of te world, wich exists by not being the rest of the world. Thus, in our normal state of self-conscious awareness, te right brain is either denied or repressed. It is relegated to the subonscious level. But that does not mean that, in this contest, the right brain ends up the loser. The quest for the absolute reigns supreme in human endeavors, even though the left brain is not aware of that fact. The left brain, being unsuited for the quest for the absolute, ignores it, consciously or not. It does it at its own (and man's) peril, because by acting at the subconscious level the right brain is all the more all-powerful.
Each human being has a comprehensive view of the world, and of himself, based on a set of beliefs, conscious or not, articulated or not. Holding a belief is a substitute for reaching the absolute. I have a belief because I hold it, consciously or not, to be absolutely true and absolutely good. The right brain rejoices, and the left brain goes to work to confirm that that is indeed the case: experience, facts, reasoning, are used to confirm that the belief is indeed absolutely true and absolutely good. The left brain is proud of the tool (linear mental activity) it is using, and believes that that very activity denies legitimacy to the right brain. The use of the tool affirms the individual self in its own separate existence. Yet, the more the left brain, and its by-product the self, delight in these self-affirming activities, the more they serve, albeit unconsciously, the aspirations of the right brain.
Religious people openly and consciously acknowledge the supremacy of the right brain. People who place their faith in reason find an easy target in religious beliefs. Yet reason itself, if looked at critically by itself, can be found as lacking as the most irrational beliefs. But who wants to go there? The self boasts of its use of reason, believes that it has dissipated the dark clouds of the irrational, but all we have is one faith that has displaced another one. The right brains reigns supreme, openly and consciously in the case of the religious person, subconsciously in the case of the anti-religious one. The only difference is that beliefs and faith are articulated in one case, and unarticulated (and thus even more powerful and dogmatic) in the other.
The most rational people are, like the religious ones, in a search, desperate or not, for the absolute. The affirmation of the slef through the use of mental activity and of reason becomes the affirmation of the absolute. The right brain, apparently denied and ignored by these activities of the left brain, is actually in command. The supreme irony is that it uses the supreme by-product of left brain activity, the sense of a separate self, to further its own quest for the absolute, in a disguised way.
In the case of the so-called enlightened ones, the search has come to an end. The apparent but superficial victory of the left brain has gone up in smoke. The tyranny of the left brain is finished. The right brain is no longer repressed, and functions normally. The left brain too functions normally: it deals with the practical needs of each moment; it serves in the field that fits its nature, and does not go beyond its intended purpose. The desperate quest for the absolute has come to an end.
"Man thinks". (Spinoza, Ethics, Part Two, Axiom II)
"Neither intellect nor will pertains to the nature of God". (Spinoza, Ethics, Part II, Proposition XVII, Note.)
U.G. Krishnamurti says: "Thought is the enemy," a well-known theme in Indian tradition. Conscious thought, the act of understanding, which separates man from the other animals, is the enemy. How can that be? Why does he say that? Indian thinkers, who have developed some of the most sophisticated and subtle concepts in world philosophy, are not anti-intellectual brutes. So, why such a theme? What do they mean when they say, "Thought is the enemy?"
To understand, we must go beyond the classical parameters of the Western tradition. It is not thought as opposed to imagination. It is not thought as opposed to emotion or feelings. Imagination, emotion, feelings, are all thought (mental activity) as soon as they are known, as soon as tere is a subject who thinks (or feels) that he is thinking, or feeling, or emoting. They are all mental events, regardless of their contents, wild or wise, rational or illogical. This is what the Indians mean by "thought." This is also why Spinoza says, in effect, "God does not think." Thought is a purely uman phenomenon.
Reflected mental activity is the enemy because it brings about te sense of an individual self, a person, an "entity" endowed with subjective consciousness and separated and different from te rest of nature. Any mental activity reinforces the sense of self, and the illusion of the ego. It does not matter whether the thinking is wild or rational. Even if the thinking process unfolds correctly (which, as we know, is not always the case) it may eliminate error, but automatically reinforces illusion.
Mental events, like everything else in nature, doon't need an entity to start or to do the action. Mental events act on themselves, because everything in nature is matter, energy, and consciousness all at once. Mental events take place because of themselves, not because of an entity (the self) that would precede them. Mental events happen for a cause (networks of neurons, chemical exchanges, etc.) They are events in nature, just as the wind blows, the rain falls, plants grow, continents drift, and a cat scratches. We do not infer any entity as the cause for those events, although we did in the pst; nowadays this type of explanation is no longer valid, but in the case of man's subjectivity we keep using the same obsolete view that has been rejected in the study of everything else in nature.
Thus, thought is the enemy because it brings about the illusion of the ego. But there is more. When we are thinking, the separation of subject knowing and object known is necessary for knowledge, as it is functioning in a human being. This separation is neessary for the conceptualization of the object. Conceptualization makes knowledge possible, but at the cost of creating dualism in the oneness of nature. Without dualism, knowledge of individual objects is impossible (that is, knowledge of the concepts that stand for those objects). The categories, the structure of mental activity, posit multiplicity as a necessary condition for knowledge. But this does not mean that reality is multiple, only that dualism (and multiplicity) is necessary for knowledge. It is quite possible that reality is essentially one, but by definition this ontological unity is erased by the very act of knowing.
Another and final way in which thought can be said to be the enemy comes from the very nature of concepts, and the way they make knowledge possible. Concepts are general reference points to which separate and different sense impressions can be connected and classified, sorted, named, in a word, known. To serve that purpose concepts must remain unchanged and unchangeable; they are useful be being static. Concepts have to be frozen snapshots of reality. A reference point cannot be a reference point if it constantly changes, shifts, evolves. If it did, different impressions could not be related to this shifting target, they could not be connected to something already known; they could not be known. Knowledge, as it functions in man, would be impossible. Impressions, either coming directly from the senses, or already stored in the mental universe, could be "felt," but they would not be recognized, sorted, named, known.
It could be objected that thought "evolves," that knowledge changes. Knowledge, yes, but not the concepts that form knowledge. Thought on any given subject evolves when a concept is replaced by anoter, which may be close to the first, but is nevertheless different. Newton's classical absolute space is replaced by the flexible and elastic space of the theory of relativity. It is the same word, but one new concept has now replaced the first or, rather, has taken place next to it. Concepts, by their very nature, don't change.
In order to know reality, a reality that is eternally fluid and changing, thought imposes on it the straightjacket of a system of concepts, which are fixed, unchanged, and unchangeable—even though they can be replaced by others in time. Thought enables man to have knowledge about reality, and by doing so cuts him off from the direct connection to this reality. Thought knows Unity or Oneness by making it multiple. It apprehends fluidity and eternal change by reducing it to frozen snapshots, the concepts that enable us to have knowledge of the world. Without doubt, thought has a practical use. It enables man to control, and manipulate the material world for what he perceives to be his interest. Beyond that, thought is the enemy.
Man, motivated by the will-to-power to "control" (he believes) reality (knowledge is power) or motivated by the desire for aggrandizement of the self (it's really the same thing) relies on thought. Man relishes thought (even though he, like me writing this book, may believe that his is a disinterested soul "looking for the truth.") But God himself does not think, and thought does not take us "nearer the Thee." It takes us away from what we want to reach.
This book is about the self as a concept that knows itself and by so doing falls into a state of illusion. It is also about the way knowledge functions in a human being, particularly the way the mind apprehends matter and consciousness. Man cannot know the unity of matter and consciousness, because he apprehends them through concepts that mutually exclude one another. Matter is known as what is not consciousness, or has no consciousness. and consciousness is what exists but is not extended matter. It is on this separation that Descartes has built his entire philosophy which permeates man's view of the world and of himself, and which at the same time leads straight to the illusion of the ego. More precisely, this view is itself a direct expression of the illusion of the ego.
Even though man knows matter and consciousness as separate, it is possible to pose the concept of a substance absolutely infinite, infinite in all possible ways. That is what Spinoza did, thus denying that matter and consciousness are two separate substances. They are simply different expressions of the same thing. But when man knows (rather than conceive or pose the concept of) reality, he knows it either as matter or as consciousness. The act of knowing breaks the oneness of reality, which becomes multiplicity. It is this separation between matter and consciousness that enables consciousness to become information about itself, and to see itself through the focal point of the individual self. The illusion of the ego is that this focal point sees itself as the only source of consciousness, and exists by denying same consciousness to whatever is not also a self.
Because man lives (that is, apprehends his own existence) in the illusion of the ego, he feels separated from the rest of nature. The basic oneness is forever beyond his reach. The oneness cannot be known. It presupposes the dissolution of the sense of self, which is an accident that does happen to some of us, but whose cause, as far as I know, is not explained.
Having the concept of the illusion of the ego does not make us ego-less. But it puts things in perspective. It puts a limit on the individual self, which otherwise expands infinitely, because noting else is like it in nature. It becomes a mystery, an object of worship for some, and a miracle for many. The concept of the illusion of the ego also enables us to better understand the testimony of the mystics, which otherwise remains clouded in mystery, or disdain.
Once consciousness is separated from matter and focuses on itself through the individual self, the meaning of things comes to the fore. Meaning is the savor that the consciousness-matter-energy has of itself at the level of the determinate and the multiple. But the self has no awareness of any consciousness outside itself. The self relates everything to itself, and thus the meaning of things simply reinforces the sense of the self of being something (the entity for which things have meaning). The self gives a positive or a negative value to its own perceptions. By identifying with the positive and taking a stand against the negative, the self acquires more being and more worth in its own eyes.
The self takes itself seriously. It feels itself full of meaning, values, and energy. It feels itself to be a person. It believes that everything depends on what that person feels, knows, decides, and does. If the waters rushing down the mountain because of gravity had a self, they also would feel that this force is theirs. They would feel that rushing down is good, and that they are accomplishing great things. Or, when reaching the flat land, they would feel that moderation is a better way. Unless, of course, they get mad or indignant at someting, and they might "decide" to flood the plain. Like the self, the rushing waters are innocently unaware of the reality that they express, of the forces that move them.
The show of the subjective self to itself can be exciting, or it can be boring. It depends on the context, what happens around us and to us; it depends on the chemical balance in the brain. Regardless of the phase we happen to be in, all of us can observe the theater of the subjective self, and take it for what it is.
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[2] Suzanne Segal, Collision with the Infinite, Blue Dove Press, 1998.
[3] The Useless Self, Jean-Michel Terdjman, Paris Les Deux-Oceans, 1996.