The Voices Within Are Voices From Without

The desire to belong to something greater than oneself is a longing found in humans everywhere, though it tends to be considered in a purely ideological sense. The notion of doing something for the ‘greater good’, for example, is often in the minds of those who profess such a desire. However, ask around and you’ll likely find many who'll claim they’ve never had a desire to be a part of something larger than themselves, and indeed some will seem concerned by what they mistakenly perceive as a dearth of empathy. However, when considering the concept in a more fundamental way, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that this desire is innate in all people.

Is not a union of two people, a partnership, something that can easily be perceived as greater than oneself? A person married with children can and often does consider the family as a whole to be more important than herself. Even one engaged in a loving relationship with another may come to express sentiments that reveal a sense of self-transcendence; it’s easy to recall at least one time in which a character in a romantic film gushingly stated, “My life would be meaningless without you,” to his or her lover. What about the quintessential loner, the intellectual type who is stimulated more by the ideas of poets and philosophers than the daily comings and goings of the people around him? He too experiences a sense of belonging to something greater, which includes not only the ideas but also the great thinkers who put them forth, as well as all of the people who have come to appreciate them.

Even if we have great difficulty in identifying with anyone in our midst, we can always imagine an ideal person to identify with and engage with while frequenting the coffee shops and bedrooms of our mind. Even the most cynical desire to connect with others. The individual human being’s mind, being an open system, is a product of and always remains connected to a global network of human minds. This global mind stretches not just across the planet, but across the whole timeline of biological history.

Scanning the spectrum of human experience usually results in a bombardment of noise, but when we engage in fine-tuning, rotating the dials in increasingly smaller increments, we come to detect coherent signals. We listen more carefully, and sometimes we lose ourselves.

And, when it becomes too much, we turn down the volume and come back to individuality.

I Am, I Will: Part 1

If you're an adult and you think you're the same person now that you were at the age of eight years old, one of the following is true:

1. You are a delusional person who actually feels like he/she is experiencing life from the standpoint of an eight-year-old child,
2. somehow your inner subjective experience was mysteriously put on hold at the age of eight and has just been reactivated, or
3. your notion of 'the self' includes the notion of enduring personal identity.

A rational person would assume 1 and 2 are not true, with 1 being possible but highly unlikely, and 2 being seemingly impossible, which leaves 3 as the only viable option. Now, by viable, it is meant here that it is most likely true that this is the way you think about yourself and your continuing experience.

However, by being an entity with an ongoing inner subjective experience, one is constantly being bombarded mentally by sensory experiences which challenge beliefs, give rise to a greater understanding of the world, and shape ways of thinking about it and our interactions with it. If you can at all remember what it was like for you to be an eight-year-old, how much of what you experience these days gives you the sense of what it was like to hold the attitudes, beliefs, and desires you held back then? Some of those attitudes, beliefs and desires must have persisted, but what percent of your inner subjective experience these days is like the inner subjective experience of the eight-year-old you? If you're honest, I suspect you'll answer, Very little.

The way experiences with the world create enduring impressions in one's mind (which endure as long as the mind of the subject of experience hasn't been degraded somehow) leads to a propensity for creating a narrative, a fiction of the mind that allows one to believe that all those experiences are connected in some meaningful way that shapes the experiencer, indeed defines the experiencer. Yet, we know that new experiences change ways of thinking brought about by previous experiences. Sometimes we undergo such profound changes in thinking that we end up holding negative attitudes toward those experiences which led to beliefs and patterns of thoughts we now eschew. Are we to think of such experiences as bad? Are we to think we were mistaken to have let them inform our thinking in the ways that they did? Or, should we accept all experiences as motivators for change within, to help us learn and grow? Do changes in thinking brought on by experience necessarily foster growth? Whether the succession of experiences we undergo has a fundamental cause or is pure randomness, we don't know.

All of your experiences change your beliefs and attitudes toward different people, places, things and ideas. New experiences are happening right now, to you, an entity which holds beliefs and attitudes toward different people, places, things and ideas that it didn't hold years before. This entity we call 'the self', what is it?

What are you right now? You are a momentary expression of an ever-changing unity of mental states, such as beliefs, thoughts, desires, perceptions, and imaginings. Right now, you are the one who knows what it's like to be you at this moment. And what it's like to be you now is certainly not what it was like to be you when you were eight years old.

What it's like to be you now is not what it was like to be you before.

Yet, we hold on to the past and remain fascinated by our own personal stories.

What vain creatures we are.

An Island Unto...

Man is condemned to be free
--Sartre

All you’ve come to know was once unknown to you, and there is so much more left to learn, yet it would be impossible to form a meaningful idea about just how much it is that you still don’t know. You are aware of the existence of knowledge that others have which you don’t. You would even admit that there must exist knowledge had by others which you have not considered. And then, of course, there are things yet undiscovered by anyone. All of the books in all of the libraries on this planet contain a mere fraction of what humans have come to know in the relatively short time we have been around, and this knowledge is seemingly infinitesimal in terms of all that we have yet to discover about ourselves, our planet and the universe.

Faced with such an abysmal lack of understanding, it might seem pointless to ask questions about the grand scheme of things, let alone one’s role in it. To refer to a scheme at all is a very human thing to do. We want things to make sense, which is evidenced by the order out of disorder we see all around us. Yet, to try and make some semblance of sense of something which you have incomplete knowledge of requires stretching the imagination. And, since what you can imagine is limited by your experience, it seems likely that you will come to quite different conclusions than others will when considering the abstract.

You are the experiencer, the perceiver. To say you are one of many experiencers is to say that you perceive the collective presence of others in the world and accept that they exist as you do. However, what you accept as truth based on your perceptions doesn’t change the fact that the only perceptions you are truly aware of are your own. Even if you believe that the world and the living beings you perceive all around you do truly exist, you must accept that you are the prime experiencer. Of this, there can be no doubt.

Knowledge is limited by experience. If you were to have been shut off from the rest of the world from birth, kept in solitary confinement without any information available to you about what there was outside your isolated existence, what would you be? What would you think about your existence? To what degree would you consider its meaning? Constrained by the limits of our own perceptive abilities, we must necessarily conclude that existential meaning is completely subjective.

You were thrown into the world, and at some point in time, you became self-aware and soon after realized you were a hostile participant in a game you hadn’t chosen to play. After a long, slow transformation, you went from wanting to change the rules of the game to suit your desires to wanting to become better at playing by the rules as they stood. Or, did you?...

The Self You Worship

The sidelong stare, the apparent sneer, the laugh as they pass out of sight in the opposite direction... These things don't quite boil the blood, but they do cause sparks. A look over the shoulder reveals no further information as both their backs are turned. They round a corner and are gone.

Why does it rankle so?

Who you see yourself as (the idealized self) and who you really are (the real self) couldn't be two more different characters. You've done a smashing job, though, of not recognizing this. Most of the time, anyway.

Blame it on your upbringing, blame it on society... At the end of the day, it's still your problem. And, it will bring you low eventually if you don't get it together.

Start seeing yourself for who you are. Try this: next time you're on a train or a bus, look around for someone with nearly the same posture as the one you have. Maybe his hands are folded resting on his lap, or maybe she's leaning against a support rail. Now, try to guess where they're going, what they're going to do there. Imagine the conversations they might have with others, the feelings they might feel. Don't fantasize. Be realistic.

What's your impression of this person? Whatever it is, you might just understand yourself a little better afterward.