Self Inquiry — Getting rid of the “you” you hate.

Who are you?

Serious sounding question - But please give it a few seconds of thought.

If you are somewhat into spirituality - whatever that word means - you might have come across this question before, if you are somewhat deep into it you would know that the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi is often quoted as having said that this is the only question you need to answer if you wish to get enlightened, again - whatever that word means.

But do not be sad if you are not into spirituality, you have not missed much! So let us skip that stuff for a while and focus on the question at hand and see where that takes us, shall we?

Are you your name? Birthplace, ID number, address, clothes, hair color, and so on?

No?

Well, most people would kind of agree and respond to these of the bat: — “Yes, that is me” is likely what you would say if someone mentioned some of these facts in order, or pointed to a picture of a human wearing your face, hair, and clothes, right?

The thing is that you could change most of this and still be the “you” you usually talk about if you think about it.

If you got recruited to be a spy and you had to leave all these behind, you would still be you, right?

Well hold on a minute, I said face as well, didn’t I?

Yes, even if you lost your face, in some sort of horrific accident, or happened to be a part of a nineties hit movie where they swap it, you would still feel and be you, right?

Your mom would still be your mom, and she would still call you her child and so on, even with that new face.

Ok, if you are still on board: - Are you your body?

Well, I guess in some sense, but then again, I think most of us would still “be” us even if we lost bigger parts of it, so we are at least not all of our body.

Once again, we have hands, we have legs and ears and so on, we are not hands in common language, so you would still be you without most of these.

Are you your thoughts and feelings then? Well of course not, because they change all the time, don’t they? So no, can’t be those because you have those as well.

How about your memories, are you your memories?

Well no, that sounds stupid just saying it. You have memories just as have thoughts and the rest, but you are neither of them.

Well stupid me, you are your brain, right?

More specifically, you are electrochemical signals pulsing through it!

Yay, we solved it!

At least, that is what some futurists seem to think. If that was the case, we would be able to find some specific neural correlate that is always online, because you are always you right? Well, this deal gets a bit tricky when looking at flow experiences, meditation, psychedelics, and other funky things I have an interest in. Because these experiences seem to have in common that they lack this sense of self and that they do all kinds of cool stuff with the brain, with the most acknowledged of these being that they “turn off” the so-called “default mode network” - which seems to be the neurological basis for your normal day sense of self.

So, what happens in the brain itself when we get into these? Well, as this brain-state that seems to correlate with your felt sense of self is shut off, the thing is that there is still very much someone or something is still functioning. Heck, it is even functioning better according to some, as is the case when you are in flow. The reason for this heightened sense of perception and cognition might very well be because, in them, we are not aware of ourselves and hence we do not have to think about what others are thinking about us or to criticize whatever we are doing, because per definition, there is no one there to do that - there is just the experience and the doing itself.

The “you” I want to get at here is the “you” you call “I”. But chill, I don’t want you to flip out entirely, because the amalgamation of all of the above is still useful in order to function in society, so make sure to keep those at hand whenever you feel like going out to partake in it, otherwise people will think you are craycray!

But the realization I want you to get to is both profound, interesting, and to be frank quite simple once you have had it, and the reason I want you to get it is that it holds great practical value!

An example would be what best selling author Eckart Tolle said to himself before he realized this paradox:

“I can not live with myself”

Hopefully, not everyone reading this has been all the way there in the dark side of the mind, but most of us seem to have felt the feeling or thought the thought that we dislike ourselves at times, or maybe even that we hate ourselves. But the thing here to question is WHO is this I that we are hating when we are saying that?

Sure, we might dislike a behavior, or specific fact — such as our hands being too large or small, or that we have a shitty job. But in that case, we dislike those things, we do not dislike ourselves, and that feels a whole lot better. By now, you should see that this self you are hating is pretty hard to find.

At first, when writing this out myself I wrote “You should stop thinking that you dislike or hate yourself when you can not even find yourself” but the fact of the matter is even stranger, and I also tend to forget it at times, as I did just now. You do not have to stop, you should simply realize that these thoughts, as well as my thought telling me to write that you should stop, are just appearing, without you or I having chosen them in the first place.

So instead of trying to stop them thoughts, something I assure you that you will not be able to do if they are happening at a somewhat frequent basis; Stop prior, stop as the observer of these thoughts, whatever they are, and just see them for what they are - thoughts; thoughts among hundreds of other sensory perceptions that are just happening and fading away, happening and fading away — without you having chosen or even having to do anything with them.

For those still curious, I guess I will continue, with the caveat that things might likely get a bit more strange as we go down. But I am in that writing flow so why not make up some more stuff just for the heck of it.

I do have some proposed solutions for those still curious about the question itself and who is not happy with leaving where we are now.

Enter emergence - Emergence is this really cool and somewhat trippy concept or idea that something arises out of something else, without really being it.

I guess a fair analogy would be a city, New York City for example. New York City emerges when you merge Manhattan, Queens, and all of those other places that I do not remember the names of.

But not so fast, you kind of also need all of the things within these parts right, you need the Empire state building, the Madison square garden and you need the Central park — when you have all of these, and many more iconic and less iconic things that I do not know the names of, you have “New York City”.

So either you are just like NYC, an emergent phenomenon arising out of all of these prior examples that I started with questioning about, and the great “you”, just like the genie out of Aladdin’s lamp appears when you have them all, this is what some people seem to think at least.

However, emergence as usually stated usually requires the prerequisites to arise, so if you remove one or a few of these parts, the “you” would go away. But I think most would agree that it does not because you could imagine being without some of these in the previous examples right.

Let us drag this whole thing to the edge, or used a classic “reductio ad absurdum” as the more tryhard and pretentious part of me wanted to write: Say we gouged out both your eyes, cut off your ears and face, took off your clothes, most of your limbs, lobotomized the crap out of your brain so as that your memories, your motor functioning, and the rest of your senses went out the window and also made sure that your ID number, name and all of the rest of these external labels was deleted from every database and paper. And by the way, sorry for turning this into a horror movie scenario, but I think you get the point, you would still be “you” right?

Kind of the same goes for NYC I guess, if you removed most of it, in terms of buildings, people, roads, and even some of the land, it would still be NYC in some sense, but the difference here is that while NYC would be NYC because it is socially constructed, in other words, because we all agree that it has that specific place on the map at least the NYC we talk about 99% of the time I guess, but I will have to let NYC go here because I can not drag that analogy further than here. But I’ll keep you, because you are not, or you are in many senses, but you are NOT only socially constructed, as NYC is, however much any sociologist would like to tell you that you are.

So the “you”, the “you” that you are, is still there, and would still be there, even after all of this, I think, being the semi Buddhist that I am, that “you” exist prior to all this, I think that you just are, without any other label needed or possible.

The “you” I am writing to, that “you” does not exist in some senses but still does, it is just emptiness or awareness, waiting for stuff to pop up and for experiences to be had within it, in the most secular and nonspiritual way possible.

Now wrapping up, I’ll be getting back to what is often called the more spiritual terrain, because to drag this whole questioning to the very end, for those that want to be really picky, you are not even “that”, that “that” simply is, or rather it is what it is, without any you, even if the felt you is still in there.

As I was alluding to earlier, prior to this getting as strange, this does hold great value in some “light version” of the realization, because when you come to the understanding that whatever is arising in your mind is not you, you do not have to worry about it but can rather just be there and observe it.

When it comes to this more “full version” of it, it also holds value, at least in some sense of that word, but it is just a bit hard to define. Since getting there, in my experience entails getting right back where you were before doing so — this is what in Zen is called Mumonkan, and is translated as the gateless gate — An expression which I love as it is so fitting to my own experiences.

Basically, you get there, but at the same time instantly realizes that you got nowhere, with the only difference being that the you that used to be there is now replaced with nothing. And while this experience in and of itself is likely the most profound one you will ever have, one will also instantly be aware of that getting there annihilates every perceived worry and evil there ever was, but also comes with the price of simultaneously annihilating all the perceived good there ever was, because as mentioned before, it just is.