PATHWAYS
‘I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no “I”, no “me.” Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance.’1
If there is no traveller, no walker upon the path, how can the path exist?
At first glance the claim, ‘there is no traveller’, does appear to be nonsensical – especially so if we were walking together along a path, accompanied by the scents and sounds of the forest
Paths are undeniably useful. Life is full of paths, both physical and metaphorical, so perhaps a meditation on path-ness may be useful.
What is a path? Or, more correctly, what properties determine the existence of a path?
That this path, (a portion of which is depicted in the image), exists is true, by convention. Yet from another viewpoint or perspective the path does not truly exist. This path, as all paths, may by convention be defined more by what surrounds it, and by being walked or travelled upon. In fact, an honest evaluation of what we call path in reality has no separate, phenomenal, self-essence or self-nature. Thus the path does not exist essentially. The path’s apparent existence directly depends upon other things, events, activities and so on for its perceived presence.
One could, therefore, legitimately declare the path both exists, (conventionally), and yet does not exist, (essentially). And since it does not essentially exist, (the path is empty of self-nature), one could also rightly claim the path neither exists nor is it non-existent, (it exists dependently).
Ultimately, however we go about differentiating path demonstrates the futility of attempting to objectify, describe or rationally define any so-called aspect of reality, and we are left with a possibly unpleasing, ‘none of the above’. This four-fold ‘view’, as you may by now determine, applies to every thing.
As the path, so with every other ‘thing’ or phenomenally perceived object, including thought, and ultimately our very selves. It is this idea that the self, the ‘traveller’, has no essential existence that may initially be disconcerting, or even unacceptable to some. However the issue becomes even stranger when we consider the full inferences of the paradox.
That a person exists conventionally is difficult to refute, but that the ‘I’, the ‘self’ is empty of self-nature, and whose existence is therefore absolutely dependent is also necessarily true. That the self both exists, yet does not exist, and that the self neither exists nor does not exist, must also be necessarily true, and we are once again left dangling with the four-fold paradox: None of the above.
At this point it may be tempting to consider we are indulging in mere semantics, but if one contemplates the implications it becomes clear that we are perhaps approaching a perspective that honestly reveals the limits of dialectic reason, and may open the way for us to see clearly what has been before us, and present, all along.
Indeed, to arrive at where we are already, despite illusion or delusion, is the entire point of all this, however odd or disquieting it may seem initially.
It is a matter not of acquiring a philosophy, or a metaphysical or epistemological method. Nor is it a question of discovering some ‘higher knowledge’ or viewpoint, but a removal of what has impaired what may be simply our clear and honest sight.
The rigorous dialectic of this enquiry is intended as a transitory means by which to clarify the mind and awaken to what is real. It is a method intended to overcome our deeply engrained ignorance, and not to become a dogmatic, pointless practice in and of itself.
What are you, truly? How are you to find out this – clearly the basis for knowledge – for if you don’t understand your true self, how can you discover the truth about anything?
Experiment: As you ask ‘yourself’ the question, ‘Who Am I?’, what comes to mind? Do you visualize ‘yourself’?
For example, as you are dreaming, who is the ‘audience’ watching the dream? Who is inventing and creating it? There is the creation, the activity of the dream – a more or less fluid, constantly changing stage, populated by characters which effortlessly morph into others. As you dream, even the perception of time is just as effervescent as the imagined space of the stage and actors. As you dream, you also observe the dream. You, as audience, are the fictional mirror upon which your dream characters dance and shine.
Awake, at some point during what we commonly accept as wakefulness, occasionally you may, for a moment, briefly observe your own ‘inner reality.’ If it occurs to you, experiment: As you gaze within; as you eavesdrop on your internal monologue; as you attend to each new thought without effort, without judgement, what begins to happen?
Have you ever noticed how, when your attention is fully engaged, that internal monologue, or mental images, ceases? Then someone may speak to you, (for example), and you discover that five or six minutes have gone by, unremarked by you. If someone were to ask you what you were doing for those minutes, you would naturally say you were watching the sunset, listening to birdsong or a musical passage – whatever the event – but where were you? The body was evidently there and then, but where was the observer? Where was the inner critic? More significantly, what is the inner critic composed from, or how does it arise? Can you pay attention to the way you analyze, classify and assign values to each and every act or thing?
The grand mistake is to suppose that we have ideas of the operations of our minds.
It is vain and foolish to expect such matters to be apparent. They are on the other side of the perceptual transaction. There is the ‘object’, which we assume is ‘outside’ of our ‘self’, and there is the ‘subject’, which we infer is the ‘self’, which arises because of the apparent interaction with the ‘non-self’.
It ought to be obvious that the eye cannot see itself, the perceiver cannot perceive itself, and that we cannot be aware of that which is aware.
The deduction of this method demonstrates there cannot be any such mind state as ‘self-perception’. Any ‘self awareness’ you may think you ‘have’ can be nothing more than a sensation, an ‘a posteriori’ experience, — that which arrives after the fact. It cannot, therefore, be an immediate perception in the present. Your so-called self-awareness is a reflection, an echo, of what has already happened. Essentially, what you determine to be your ‘self’ is an after-thought.
Simply put, you cannot perceive ‘your’ ‘self’, because that would require a perceiver separate from whatever you were perceiving.
The oft-quoted dualist statement, ‘I think, therefore I am’, presupposes the existence of that which it claims to prove. Descarte’s a priori error was in making the claim that since the process of thinking seems to be non-physical in nature, the existence of thought must require a non-physical entity — a ‘thinker’.
But along with the fallacy of presupposition is the equally mistaken notion that consciousness, or thought, is an immaterial phenomenon, when there is overwhelming evidence that it is an emergent property of the very material brain and body, and no evidence whatsoever of a non-material origin.
Although thought seems to be a non-physical process, the evidence increasingly indicates otherwise.
The more you try to grasp this, the more it evades your grasp, and the more you come to realize there is nothing there at all; neither ‘perceiver’ nor ‘perceived’, but pure, self-less, perception. It is this that emerges from the physical.
Consciousness, which is perception and cognition, necessarily objectifies existence, thus creating the illusion of a subject, with which we tend to identify, because we have evolved to do so. The ‘self’ is mostly a positive adaptation, providing a powerful incentive for individual preservation.
It is, however, a mistake to assume the existence of an enduring entity as the source of this awareness.2 The notion of a separate, ‘essential self’, that is, an entity which has self-essence, and persists unchanged at some basic level, has no reality whatsoever. As in the example of the path, our apparent existence is merely a more or less useful convention. Our ultimate existence is utterly dependent upon the interdependent nature of the Universe.
The self we may think we are in terms of conventional reality changes, like the path, from moment to moment, and it is only our primitive survival instinct which tends to constantly promote or produce the notion of ego; a separate autobiographical self, a personal psychological continuity.
The key to unlock this seemingly paradoxical four-fold puzzle of simultaneous existence, non-existence, both non-existence and existence, and neither existence or non-existence, is to become aware of our attachment to inappropriate conceptual thought, wherein we become fixated upon our beliefs, ideas, memories and so on. Ironically, it is by initially using the power of conceptual thought that we can engage in a rigorous dialectic, with the aim of eventually abandoning the very dialectic itself as just another concept.
Only by relinquishing the deeply ingrained tendency to search for some essential nature to things and to our life, can we find liberation and awaken to reality. This obsessive delusion we have in thinking that we are dealing with an existing, enduring self-identity is ignorance, as all we really have is a sandcastle construction of our minds.
1 Claude Levi-Strauss, introduction to his 1977 Massey Lecture “Myth and Meaning
University of Toronto Press, 1978, pp. 3-4
2 Especially in the light of modern neuroscience, which provides strong evidence that conscious awareness arises as an emergent property of our physical selves, and that the feeling of awareness tends to produce the illusion of a persistent, ‘self’
sandcastles 