Top 10 Selves !!! – Layman Pascal

(This is a lighter piece to lull you into a false sense of security for the next weighty tome of an article. Hopefully, it will remind us to keep the multiplicity of human interiority in mind. As usual, an audio version is available here for paying subscribers.)

Q: Are you living your best self?

There’s something a bit grotesque about a question like that. Selfhood is a pretty personal thing, almost by definition, and any claims about it are likely to be heavily distorted by boastfulness or anxiety. Or, it seems to me, by the relative poverty of our concepts of selfhood. We too readily default to a singular notion of human interiority without even trying to tease apart and evaluate the diverse functions implied by just “being you.” So on the road to figuring what the heck my “best” self might be, let’s do due deference to the internet genre of listicle clickbait with my TOP 10 SELVES !

#10 – The Separative Self-Sense

Coming in at number ten — my WORST best self (i.e. the lowest ranked form of personal subjectivity on this list) — is what I would call the separative self-sense.

We might also call this the “false subject.” It is a network of sensations and reactive behaviors that act as though it was the essential sensitive core of our inner being. In reality, however, it is just the result of a contraction, reaction, or cramp produced in the organism when it recoils from the creative relational dynamics in which it is embedded. This is what Mr. Frank Jones (later called Adi Da Samraj) explored in his first two books, The Knee of Listening & The Method of the Siddhas.

This is a misperception of our being “at stake” in circumstances that really do not concern us. Or rather, it is a feeling that you have to figure out (solve) yourself before opening your heart to Others, or to activities, when in fact you would be safer, happier, and more competent without trying to solve yourself first.

If you sit very alertly, you can observe that many of your feelings-of-being-you are produced as your body and heart draw back from whatever life circumstances have momentarily taken your attention.

We know that neurotic individuals often fixate on their sense of being a separate and isolated being, bedeviled by others, mysterious to themselves, thwarted by circumstances, and rendered impotent by their own habits of attention. And we know that narcissistic characters amplify and defend this separate self-sense at the expense of the needs and communications of Others. Yet we are all narcissistic and neurotic in countless ways, big and small. This may be the result of simply confusing the sensations of this uninspected clenching of the psycho-organism with our actual selfhood.

The unpleasant experience of being the separative self-sense, combined with the problematic results of conflating it with our actual inner life, is why this one comes in at the lowest rank on our top ten selves.

#9 – The Persona

As you know, people sometimes repeat Latin words to sound cool.

We say persona non grata (or possibly we sing it to the tune of Hakuna Mata from The Lion King) to mean an individual who is unwelcome in a formal social scenario. But beyond that occasional usage, many folks feel like “personae,” in general, are inherently non grata. We are often critical of our basic ability to enact a social character. A per-sona (“via sound” — ie. through the mouth hole of the actor’s mask) is a personality we perform in order to please, entertain or otherwise get along with other social beings. But today we frequently have a bad conscience about this.

We worship performative authenticity and espouse an ideal of the culturally relaxed self who is always automatically embraced for everything that he/she/they “really is underneath.” Liberals want you to accept whatever truth anyone identifies with; Conservatives, at least in principle, want the freedom to say whatever they like… no matter who gets upset. They are all raised in a civilization of internet confessionals, reality TV, and popular psychology. So the idea of acting out a pretend character for other people often rubs us the wrong way.

Yet the pressures that lead people to construct such a version of themselves, oriented toward others, toward society, are real dynamics. And we do not develop these personae in a vacuum. Our social play character expresses many of our actual values and creative choices.

Every civilization involves some artifice. This need not be problematic. Nietzsche was a big fan of trying to live your life as a work of art — in which you slowly become the character that you have been trying to graft onto your born-essence. Dr. Timothy Leary’s infamous 8-circuit model of consciousness describes the “socio-sexual imprint” as one of the main functional operations of the neurogenetic psyche. And in the UTOK model created by Gregg Henriques, there is mind 3a & mind 3b. The former is your self-justified, inner symbolic self and the latter consists of the justifications and symbolic character you present to others.

I’d like us to have a good conscience about our personae but, having just watched Roadrunner (the documentary about the life and suicide of reality TV chef Anthony Bourdain) I am sensitized to the doom that may accompany people who get caught between the Scylla & Charybdis of “persona” and “idealized authenticity.” The hollowness of persona, and our struggles to correct that, can destroy us in both love and life. The persona is also frequently designed by others to be a mechanism of exploitation that serves the family, the nation, the church, or the market (see: Marx’s notion of false consciousness).

So for these reasons, persona still scores near the bottom of our list.

#8 – The Self-Image

We (our civilization) talk a bunch about “self-image issues,” but we don’t talk much about how an organism gets a so-called self-image in the first place. I favor a weird hybrid of Lacanian analysis and evolutionary psychology. Here’s the story:

All organisms have a kind of sentience. They exhibit an adaptive sensitivity that is expressed in tandem with behaviors that seem designed to favor some outcomes and avoid others. They have a kind of “good” and “bad.” They can even, as Dr. Michael Levin would remind us, change their strategies to pursue their goals differently when they have been thwarted.

A special kind of sentient creature is called an “animal.” That means it is animated. It can move around freely. I call these neuromobile gardens because I think of organs as being like a bunch of plants that have adapted to each other within a skin sack — usually with the help of a skeletal scaffold. These creatures develop “brains” to help them move around and become exponentially (sic) more complex. As Mr. Henriques would point out, this is typically where we start getting the best results using the science of psychology instead of just the sciences of anatomy and biology.

And some of these neuromobile gardens stumble into self-image-hood.

Complex nervous systems, combined with extended childhoods and rich social communication, may work out how to self-organize their body-brain system using a distributed “picture” of the individual behavioral body. It is a Frankensteinian quilting together of fragmentary perceptual chunks. Images of other members of your species combined with glimpses of yourself in a puddle combined with the peep show perspective of your own arms and legs. Stitch it altogether and map it over the nervous system. Then learn to control the body by modifying the map.

It’s not a perfect system but it can massively increase the sophistication of an animal’s life. Now it can “pass the mirror test.” That means that if you show it a mirror, it knows that the image is itself. This body. Not some creepy other animal with no odor. Of course, these tests are pretty limited. They emphasize optical recognition and are therefore seriously biased against creatures that are olfactory (or acoustic or tactile) dominant.

Could we build a smelling mirror?

Despite these limitations, the leap forward into self-image is still pretty remarkable. It seems like these species (dolphins, chimps, ravens, elephants, great parrots, octopus, etc. ) also frequently produce enhanced communication capacities & tool use.

However, it is still clumsy and slow to innovate. It is not as facile as symbolic selfhood. And, frankly, the Frankenstein collage of self-image gets a lot of shit wrong. Body dysmorphia abounds. People believe, and act, as though their body was different from its objective structure. Scrawny people vomiting up their dinner because their self-image is too fat. Or people who can’t feel one of their limbs. Or who keep feeling a limb when it’s been blown off by a landmine.

Etc.

That’s why it’s not higher on the list.

#7 – The Waking State Personality

When some people use the word “consciousness” they appear to mean something very abstract. Perhaps even all-pervasive. Others, however, mean something very practical. They are simply describing what happens when a socialized adult human “wakes up” in the morning. Consciousness is whatever goes away when I slip the wrong chemical into your drink…

Yet we have moments of consciousness that are not dominated by the waking state personality. We often have a happy few seconds in the morning before the memory of our life, with all its challenges, boots up. The version of self that kicks in at this moment seems to be highly socialized. It involves all the stresses of our life in society, with others and — interestingly — all the information we learned socially.

That is a tree. Your name is Muhammed. We are in New Jersey. It is breakfast time. I know what words mean. I understand what they are saying on the News. This personality is heavily weighted toward information we have received from other people. And often it is information they “emphasized” (apparently to educate us) by repetition or emotional implication.

Some people theorize that this self is associated with certain dominant brain wave frequencies. There are suggestions that young children may predominately exhibit slower delta & theta electrical waves while they are awake. Adults in civilization seem to be more heavily skewed toward faster beta wave frequencies when they are awake.

So we have this personality that might be made mostly from socially emphasized information received during beta-dominant waking state experience. Possibly it tilts toward exaggerated left-brain sensemaking modes. This personality, though, is damned impressive. It makes the modern world run. It made the premodern world run as well. So have a coffee, read the news & get to work!

On the other hand, this personality may be highly superficial. Perhaps it ignores all the data stored in other parts of the brain at other speeds. It may be blind to intuitive and biological information. It may have difficulty engaging peak states and super-performance. And it could be the culprit behind the accumulating, interlocked crises of “Game A” civilization that is putting all of our future at risk…

That’s why it only comes at number seven on the list.

#6 – The Ego-I

I love the phrase “ego-syntonic.” It means all the stuff in our mind that is aligned with our self-aware ego personality. Information that does not fit is ego-dystonic. So we suppress it or project it onto others. We lack the ability to speak from the point of view of the excised data.

(Mmmmmm. I could go for a tall, refreshing glass of Ego Syn Tonic right now…)

Ego is a tricky term.

When my mother taught me about Freudian analysis, she said that “ego” just means the “I” in German. It is a symbolic locus around which new information can be integrated. A flexible software platform that can absorb new apps. But when my father taught me about culture, he said ego is an attitude of selfishness and self-aggrandizement. Egotism.

On the other hand (from those two hands), my bisexual Kazakstanian cousin Dima claims that ego is a relative term when used in developmental psychology. S/he says that a bigger ego identifies with more types of reality and therefore is, by comparison, less egotistical than a smaller ego. The more of “you” than I include in “me,” the more altruistic I seem even though that’s because I have a stronger, bigger, more flexible unfolding ego structure. A greater flotilla of sub-programs that are organized around the symbolic “I.”

That’s pretty good.

According to those two clowns, Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, this ego-I can be directly located and contemplated with some pretty awesome results. And if you believe, as I do, that arch-jerk Sri Patanjali (ancient author or scribe of the famous “Yoga Sutras”) this central node of reflective selfhood can be concentrated into any object or being upon which you focus with adequately sustained flowing attention.

Wait, that one over there is my “I” ???

It’s a pretty remarkable experience if you can get it.

Yet the ego-I, regardless of the size of its flotilla of integrated perspectives, is driven endlessly across the virtual gameboard of semantic identities. Haunted. Harried. Endlessly seeking. Each moment of coherent self-stabilization dropping away behind you. Always yearning for the Seductive Other who will complete you. Always judged by the Big Other who seems to run the whole system of all Ego-Is.

This endless harassment of the narrative or justified/justifying self, its structural incompleteness, is what brings it at number 6 on our list.

#5 – The Neurogenetic Self

Call me a romantic but I’m pretty fond of the character, intelligence, and worldview that I seemed to have before I learned who & where I had been born. The neurogenetic self is what I call the hereditary complement of the waking state socialized personality. Here’s the story:

We are born with a lot of brain systems ready to go. They immediately start sucking up information from all directions and in all states — waking, dreaming, sleeping. This subconscious data is processed by our inborn nervous system that has peculiar patterning styles that are based in the specifics of our organs and genetics. A certain kind of intelligence and a certain deep “character” is produced over the first few years of life.

We are like all the other animals. We are extensions of a deep evolutionary past expressing itself as a local agent in an ecosystem.

But unlike most other animals, we change our ecosystems quite a lot. Baby horses are ready to go in a few minutes because their biology anticipates a situation very much like all those previous situations with which horses have had to deal.

We can’t do that. A few hundred years, or maybe a few decades, is all it takes for the demands of human life to radically change. So we cannot rely as much on our primary and neurogenetic adaptations. We have a secondary function that gets us up-to-speed for the technosocial, linguistic, and cultural zone into which we have been born. This requires that our baseline neurogenetic personality is enhanced by an “education” that we receive socially — while we are awake.

Then we slowly digest this local historical information back into our “natural self.” Or so it may have been for dozens of thousands of years. But when we started living in cities, learning to write, innovating faster and faster, and making up artificial rules, then the waking state social personality had to take over more and more of the work.

Instead of being a helpful assistant, it became the dominant adult consciousness.

And, depending on who you believe, many natural functions such as true love, authenticity, deep rest, self-unfolding spiritual evolution & trance-like supernormal capacities, were then submerged into the “subconscious.”

Of course, we do not want to return to the primitive conditions of pre-civilized existence but we might want to start emphasizing the need for a concerted effort to merge contemporary symbolic knowledge with the intuitive and imaginal peculiarities of our inborn “character.”

So I give this self a #5 because of the possibility of using it to regenerate a trans-neurogenetic self that has digested the world that we “learned about” from other people.

#4 – The Metacognitive Witness

The mind contains a kind of alert transparency layer. In the back pages of vintage porn magazines, this is often referred to as “consciousness.” Sometimes as “the Witness.”

Anyone who is relatively undistressed & undistracted can turn their attention inward to discover a “coherent looking” that hovers virtually between or behind the automatic flow of thoughts. Some teachers of existential self-development recommend just staying attentive to this feature of the mind — letting all other mental activity simply arise and pass away.

Just be watchfulness — that dangerous rascal Osho Rajneesh used to say.

Some folks claim this is evidence of the all-pervasive background consciousness of the cosmos. Others suggest that it is being newly produced at the very moment when human attention encounters it. Which belief is more true? Which belief is more useful? Which belief is more daring?

Many great thinkers (but not me) have favored the idea that essential ascetic exercise involves suspending the ordinary drives of attention and then biding as if we were neutral disembodied consciousness. Sloterdijk, Schopenhauer and many of the yogis agree.

Just be the mirror of being.

Zen Buddhism specialized in cleaning the dust off the coherent reflective surface of the omnipresent Buddhamind. Although, to be fair, it also sometimes claims there is no mirror. Is that a deeper truth? O just how it looks when you’re really good at mirroring?

Patriarch Hui-Neng wrote:

Bodhi originally has no tree,

The mirror-like mind has no stand.

Buddha-nature is always clean and pure;

Where is there room for dust?

#3 – The Theory of (Your Own) Mind

I personally find this one very charming so I have promoted it to #3.

You might know this thing called “theory of mind.” It is a dull psychoanalytic, philosophical, and cognitive science-y term that describes our ability to anticipate the experience and behavior of other beings.

I do not see you as just a robot or a fleeting bit of perceptual flux. No, I have learned to treat you as a “something” with “interiority” and “intentions.”

I map you. I theorize you (Ewwww) as another valid perspective.

And then I can start to get to know that perspective so that I have a predictive sense of how you might behave, feel, see things differently than me, etc. What are you? What are you up to? What do you want? What do you need? How do you feel? How do you see our relationship?

These kinds of questions, and their possible answers, seem to be instantiated in our brains (parts of our bodies) through a kind of prediction map. Decent guesses that anticipate what might be going on within your otherness.

But what about you? Aren’t you also an Other to yourself?

The goat-molesting (probably just a rumor) integral philosopher Ken Wilber talks about the proximal (“I”) and distal (“me”). Part of you identifies with the part of you that you can look at yourself. That’s “I”. And part of you identifies with the part of you that you can look at. That’s “me.” And this “that’s me!” is a you that is like someone else because you can look at it.

That’s a helluva paragraph. Let’s try it a second time:

The goat-molesting (probably just a rumor) integral philosopher Ken Wilber talks about the proximal (“I”) and distal (“me”). Part of you identifies with the part of you that you can look at yourself. That’s “I”. And part of you identifies with the part of you that you can look at. That’s “me.” And this “that’s me!” is a you that is like someone else because you can look at it.

So, having looked at yourself — what are you like?

What’s your theory of your own mind?

• When you make statements about yourself do they seem to align with what the people who know you best think of you?

• Can you usually guess what you’re about to say/think next?

• When you go to a restaurant (privilege!) can you easily guess what you want to eat or is it a long grueling puzzle every time?

• When you read things that you wrote — can you identify which bits really sound like you? Do you know your voice? Or does that distinction not even arise for you?

• Could you tell if you were sadder than you think you are? Or less sad than you think you are? Are there common patterns to your self-misperceptions?

• Is it easy for you to make plans that take into account the fact that you will feel differently later than you do right now?

In principle, we could all become better experts about ourselves. That’s not the same as indulging ourselves in endless self-analysis or self-justification. It’s a real study. Treat yourself like a zoologist would treat a newly discovered animal species.

#2 – Hyperindividuality

The famous Jesuit paleontologist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin (see I didn’t say anything faux-slanderous about him — I can control myself) said some pretty interesting things about biospheres, noospheres, and the divine Omega point that is coming toward evolution from the End of History.

One of the most “pretty interesting things” he said was about how the noosphere mutates into the Omegasphere (or Christophere or Dharmasphere) through a kind of super-individuation.

He predicted the electrified information envelope that enfolds the biosphere and suggested, fairly accurately, that it would evolve into self-reflective individual nodes in a great web. These nodes would be self-obsessed. They craft their avatars, customize their interfaces, photograph everything they eat, broadcast their opinions, record the idiosyncracies of their lives, etc. Each one accesses the whole web in a superpersonal way.

Even though this sounds gross, it is actually a good thing.

It is good because the transpersonal being who is folding backwards to us from the telos at the Everpresent End of Time, is also being created by us through these super-reflection points. The transcendental being is exquisitely unique and perfectly self-aware. We are building up to that level by causing the noosphere to be increasingly populated by performatively unique and self-reflective characters who wish to be as authentic as The Emergent One actually is.

“I want to be different just like all the different people I want to be like.”

-King Missile (roughly).

I like this link between the transcendental and the hyperpersonal (the alternative to impersonal spirituality). I even use the term hyperpersonal in the subtitle of my book on Gurdjieff.

My immature hunch is that Axial Age traditions of existential development were caught in a cultural disposition that marginalized the material, the finite, the feminine, the imagination, and organic peculiarity. Thus they developed advanced inner training systems that sought to sacrifice the personal into the impersonal. They also warned each other about dallying with imaginal forms instead of focusing only on the abstract neutrality of pure consciousness and impersonal love.

• But what if the universal is actualized in the particular?

• But what if the unique subtle signature of self, through which the Divine enters the world, is only found through imaginative play?

• But what if the actual transmission of wisdom occurs more through the idiosyncracies of personal expression than through the formal content of speech?

I think I’m going to bet on this horse. Be different. Find your different. That’s why I bring it in at #2. Okay, drum roll! Our number one self is:

The transrational transpersonal trans-ontological self.

But unfortunately, we can’t talk about it.

#1 – The Unspeakable Transpersonal Self

Or actually, we can talk about it but not in the normal way.

The problem here, which is not a problem but a solution (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is the universal difference between problems and solutions), is that we are discussing something that is soooooooo awesome that it does not stay in its grammatical, epistemological or ontological box.

It only shows up by not quite being in the right spot.

I mean, yes, we can have direct contemplative (and sometimes spontaneous) experiences of the virtual oneness-or-emptiness of all things but that’s only… close. It is not quite what this thing is.

We could call it nondual but then we would also have to point out that it is the simultaneous duality & nonduality of the difference between duality and nonduality, right? Of course it’s right. This is a thing, a self, a YOU, that you don’t find if you look for it. Or, rather, the fact that you don’t find it when you look for it IS the finding of it — which is YOU.

You can’t put your finger on it.

So is it?

Exactly.

The transpersonal self is also NOT the transpersonal self. That is what makes it more accurate than the transpersonal self that people, including you, call the transpersonal self. And if I wasn’t fucking up the syntax of these sentences, if I was just referring to “the Absolute without quotation marks,” I’d be lying to you.

Worse, I’d be unhelpful because I would be orienting you to a place where it is dangerously easy to conflate the #1 Self with dogmatic beliefs and certainties that make them theologically fragile and out-of-step with the leading edge of science, philosophy, community, and art.

So: the so-called “best self” it is!

And that’s better than THE BEST SELF.

Okay. That’s our TOP 10 Selves! And guess what — we beat the ancient Egyptians by three whole selves! Here’s William Burroughs to explain: