1) Self-knowledge as a positive list of characteristics

How do I know myself?

I begin by knowing myself as an objective list of characteristics: Likes, dislikes, opinions, habits, values, skills, professions, political orientations, and every other quality imaginable.

I also know myself reluctantly as a list of shadow characteristics, which others often perceive first: impatience, clumsiness, self-obsessions, talking to myself even when others are in the room, a hypocritical love of boxing, etc.

There’s a necessity for these differently sourced lists of self-knowledge. If I don’t notice a tendency to be selfish, lazy, thoughtless, you name it, then self-knowledge is distorted in the preservation of an illusion.

In fact, I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.

If I’m rolling an issue over and over again in my mind (as I tend to do), then some image of myself must have been made to wobble from its pedestal. Even if I’m self-righteously convinced of my own innocence, the emotional and mental energy dedicated to preserving this image indicates a wobble.

The voice is like a press-secretary and press corps rolled into one. And I hardly notice the exhaustion this causes, because it’s standard practice in this culture: conversing with non-existent people in order to convince imaginary people that this list of qualities remains accurate and impeccable.

Or, call it an effective air-defense system that shoots down any speck of honest evidence undermining the falsely idealized Self it claims to be.

But now and then some honest revelation hits home despite this diligence. And the accidental surrender to reality generates a soft breeze of sanity, which cleanses the air momentarily from the fumes of bullshit that the brain produced during the course of the day.

But almost immediately I’ll start downplaying the impact of this moment of truth, trying to steady the wobble or clean up the damage to the fallen icon. And I’ll employ a clever tactic to do this — acknowledging a portion of the exposed corruption by saying something like, “I wasn’t being myself” or “that’s not who I really am”.

But where is the “real me” who can serve as a standard of comparison? The only thing available is merely an idealized image itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I need an image of myself. I have to be aware of whether or not my behavior is suited to the moment. And this naturally inspires the brain to summarize how I’m behaving (or other people are behaving) in some short-hand form.

But these images perform coherently only when they remain provisional mirrors of behavior – lighting up along the periphery of attention as proprioceptive reflections and refractions, which keep the organism tethered to some portion of reality.

Even Buddha had a self-image of that sort.

But in our culture, these necessary, running reflections have become raging egregores. They have hardened into convincing impressions of an “I” conversing nonstop with “myself” or another imaginary person, as witnessed by an ever-hovering, judgmental “me”. Somehow these creative little flashes of behavioral reflection have spun themselves into dense, self-referential whirlpools, which seem to stand independently from the stream of thought.

it’s a cultural multiple personality disorder. These thoughts think they’ve grown into a real boy (or two or three), who is stuck inside a skull trying to manage the nincompoop of a body and brain.

“I need to control my thoughts,” I’ll say, as if the “I” were outside the “me”.

The commonality of this tactic obscures its absurdity. But where I expect to find a person, I find only a stream of language describing one.

And this is precisely why the interior voice is on high rev all the time. It’s trying to cover up that emptiness, by inventing a pretense of solidity within.

And it’s the eventual recognition of this emptiness which is a second form of self-knowledge.

2) Self-Knowledge as Negation; Or, the Realization that I Am a Packing List

Type 2 self-knowledge is the discovery of what I’m not. I don’t obtain a list of characteristics or identities at this stage but begin peeling these away.

I could go so far as to say that “I” am merely a packing list of commonly traded, virtue-signaling commodities of opinion and habit. But the actual container (or presumed reality of myself) can’t be found, only this packing list.

I’m not saying there isn’t a reality to this experience of being alive. But that Being isn’t an objective reality.

The packing list creates the impression of an objective package. But all I ever find by regarding the body too objectively, or a name or an idea such as “me” is another item added to the list. I don’t know who or what I am in such a positive manner, and never will.

Nevertheless, I learn something about myself here, but it’s subtractive. I learn that I’m not the person I picture.

It’s this fear of being nobody but a packing list, which drives the tumult of society.

And the only reason I can bear this fear and continue with the demolition of the illusion is because I am already discovering some hidden force in the absence of myself. And I leave it at that, for the moment, and proceed with the demolition.

There’s a reality found in the absence of myself and others.

A sense of this can be found in the odd fact that I relate to people more authentically when they remain blurry.

I experimented with this when I worked at a public service desk. If I refused to wear my glasses to work (even though I’m very near-sighted), the interactions with customers went more smoothly. That’s because, the remaining senses perked up. So, I ended up listening more closely. Then the Other listened more closely too. And all they could see in my own blissfully earnest face was a good-natured ignoramus, which tended to awaken a spirit of charity, if not downright pity. Thus, we both became transfigured so long as at least one of us remained blurry.

In the same sense, I refuse to say that I “know” my wife. More often than not, I relate to that spirit, humor and intelligence, that genuine personality (which all life forms display without self-consciousness); which can’t be fully predicted or trusted to remain as I imagine her. She has to retain freedom from my own reductive expectations.

This is a strange observation: the reality of another emerges in their absence. And I can never say “there you are.”

In fact, the positive identity is only a prejudice, which gets in the way of a never-ending need to learn (but not know) myself or others. Let me give you an example of identity getting in the way of learning.

When I was playing baseball in high school, the coach would gently correct my throw or swing. He was not the kind of coach who berated the person for their poor skills. So, he didn’t provoke into unnecessary existence the distracting presence of an unworthy Self (with his heavy baggage of doubts), looming suddenly between bat and approaching ball.

In “his” absence, the swing could be examined objectively, as a thing apart, which made learning easy.

Therefore, identity has no place in learning about my Self. Identity intrudes like a middleman. And then I become entangled in a personal drama and become more concerned with the ruined reputation of myself, than allowing an objective observation of undeniable wrong-doing to correct my present course.

But this fuzzy formlessness of existence also provokes the fear that I’m losing my unique personhood. If I don’t constantly differentiate myself from others, or disagree with them, how do I avoid disappearing or turning into some small part of a collective ant-mind?

And yet the opposite seems more true: Positive self-knowledge isn’t personal knowledge at all, because the qualities I consider “mine” are communal qualities. Their meanings depend on communal agreement.

Language itself (which posits the self) is a communal, not personal, list of agreed-upon meanings.

So, thought is communal in meaning, and this includes the thought of myself. It doesn’t matter how idiosyncratic the mix of thoughts might be which defines me; I’m still composed of language, knowledge and other communal agreements.

In fact, the pride with which I display my peculiar combination of likes and dislikes is symptomatic of this dependent independence (a false independence). The idiosyncratic opinion still requires a herd to confirm its uniqueness.

Even an “independent” is a group identity.

So, positive identity is a group agreement masquerading as an individual. The self is nothing but an estimation of how “I” look within a group dynamic.

It’s almost like a tripartite imagination of a “me” and a “you” observed by an “I”. (And the “you” may be singular or plural). But the self is a clustered conception, not an individual conception. And the voice is constantly trying to negotiate an agreement with a cluster of disagreeable people (who are all imaginary).

In other words, agreement can only exist against a contrasting disagreement. So, where there is agreement, there is disagreement. Hence, the voice can’t resolve its issues and must always remain busy negotiating with itself.

But when there is no attempt to negotiate perfect agreement, there is also no disagreement.

In fact, being an individual means never being in perfect agreement or disagreement with anyone. That’s a strange observation to encounter the first time. But if I were in perfect agreement with another honest person, I’d be indistinguishable from them; not yet fully formed as an individual.

Differences aren’t necessarily disagreements.

If differences are annoying, contradictions and arguments erupt. But if differences are intriguing, then they become paradoxes that lure perception into wider vantage points, where both views make sense.

A wider view is not a perfect agreement, but a harmonic resonance. The creative riff doesn’t emerge as a perfect tonal agreement, where it would lose its nuance and fail to add an individual voice to the whole harmony.

Yes, individual notes can strike another as discordant at first. (Creative individuals are often mistaken for discordant or disagreeable people). But the individual is only a unique note in a larger harmony. They are neither in agreement nor disagreement.

So, now I’m capable of understanding what otherwise might seem obscure and esoteric: I can know myself as a true individual only by losing my Self within a larger communal harmony.

And this capacity for selfless harmony dampens my pessimism about the future of humanity. Because now I also know that there is something authentic in human beings, which exceeds capture, which can’t be listed, and which doesn’t have a solid form.

People balk at the notion that the Self is unreal for good reason. Something real can still be surmised moving under that cloth of persona. A force of honesty can tear that deceptive costume and reveal … what exactly?

Look, the wind is real; but when the wind tears the cloth on a line, nothing of this wind can be seen. I see only the objects that move, but not the real source. Or, I see a packing list, but not the package.

Does this mean there’s an immaterial soul behind the mind’s ejecta of concepts and words and images? Something invisible and more real than this crust or cloth or paper resume?

Maybe a faith in this unspecified presence begins to form.

But even a meager word like “soul” lands too objectively to be the thing itself.

“Fifteen apparitions have I seen/The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger” – William Butler Yeats

So, I begin to see that everything I know about myself or others is no more than clothing on a line.

And yet a faith in something real remains; faith in an Absence so limitless it merges with everything and can look like fathomless death or eternal life, depending on the filter.

But the word “faith” is also misleading. Because there’s no object of faith that can be found.

And maybe there’s a more palpable proof than faith. In every negation, there’s an indication of something more real than the thin cloths of our knowing.

All I can do is learn what I’m not. This learning cuts the Lilliputian threads of narrative that tie me in shapes which do not reflect that unfathomable reality.

But there are so many threads of personal, cultural, and sapient drama that remain invisible. Maybe it’s easier to notice some of these threads by considering extreme examples of this condition. Because many won’t even read something like this. They are still wrapped in fantasies of themselves as tightly as a fly in a spider’s web, from which the genuine life force has been mostly sucked dry. I can learn to see myself in them. And Trump is such a person.

I think Trump has been wrapped in a spider’s web since he was a toddler. Now only a husk, without empathy. Something human must have survived, but it’s beyond healing in a culture like ours and effectively already dead.

Lying prevents an authentic person from emerging from the web of falsehood. Or, call it a cocoon, from which the real person never unfolds.

And even for us, the pressure to make money and make a name for ourselves, slowly sucks dry the genuine inspiration. These measures of success slowly kill us. They pull us relentlessly away from the original inspiration and work to mold us into marketable commodities that the inorganic system consumes.

We end up in service to a status-seeking system of musical chairs, competing to obtain a few morsels of admiration in the absence of love; something to hide the emptiness.

The world is trying to milk us dry. We’re still being rounded up and locked in the stanchions of cubicles, until most of the rebellious spontaneity is consumed.

Seeing things from this angle, I begin to feel empathy for ourselves and all those parasitized human forms. How else is it possible to love thy fascist enemies except to see their ugly shapes as an inorganic predator’s half-consumed meal? I can’t love the pustulating corruption pouring from Trump’s multiple wounds. I can only love the lost human potential surmised in a still-twitching corpse.

• Platform 2 ¾

I can’t love what passes for myself either. I love the gaps in my existence. They seem to multiply as if you and I were approaching a third form of self-knowledge.

But I want you to consider the third stage as a mythic hypothesis; as a way to recognize a green force in the emptiness. But it’s still only a fiction.

Every story is a different filtering fiction. They’re insightful if I look through the filter. But blinding if the filter itself captures my attention. At some point, every filter has to be seen through as a myth, or they stop being insightful and become delusions.

There’s a Zen saying: “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”

First, I was certain of who I was (“there was a mountain”); then I began to dismantle this certainty and realize that everything I claim to know about myself is not me, but only a packing list of traits (“then there was no mountain”); and now we obtain glimpses of a new form of individuality that is more real than mere self-consciousness (“then there is”).

Stage 2 presented itself as the incremental negation of the illusion of positive identity.

But an incremental negation is really nothing more than a delay tactic in realizing the illusion of the Self as a whole insight.
And this delay tactic can lure the mind towards the infinite limit of Self-improvement, which is only yet another way of delaying the recognition that there is no self to improve.

Here I am at “the brink.” But there is no real brink any more than there is a Self. A “brink” is just a metaphoric way of noting that the insights I’ve already obtained only reveal that I’m still not facing these illusions directly enough to resolve them.

So, at the threshold of stage 3 I’m forced to admit that stage 2 didn’t really exist after all. (Stage 2 was the denial of the existence of Stage 1. Now Stage 3 appears to be the denial of the existence of Stage 2).

On the other hand, the myth of “three stages” isn’t without insight if I look “through” it. There are real shifts “along the way” that this fiction reveals. There is a stark difference that must be recognized between a positive list of who I am, which creates the red herring of a defensive Self; and the reality-restoring negation of discreet elements of that false self-knowledge, which implies being on the brink of an utterly different kind of knowing.

So, if I can boil down the insight of stage 2 ¾” (or “brinkishness”), it might merely be the pause of alert uncertainty I feel at this juncture. There is something more real at this point than mere knowledge.

I think this “3rd form” of self-knowledge is known to you and me already. But I also think we don’t recognize it for what it is, and thereby live as if we don’t know.

But I think it’s evident when the pain and beauty of the world are not separate. When sadness includes joy and joy includes sadness. When a laugh busts from the guts of profound frustration; when the dramas of guilt, gossip and greed fall down and go boom; when we feel that load-lightening whoop of giddy relief from the entangled dramas of self-obsession; in the many flashing revelations of my own slapstick idiocy, in the sudden freedom from one’s own imprisoning worry.

These seemingly insignificant moments are insignificant only because they can’t be listed as qualities “of mine.” Each one marks the blessed erasure of myself in that moment. They aren’t objective enough jewels to decorate the persona. So, they are quickly thrown away as useless for the promotion of the Self.

Nevertheless, each is a negation of illusion so profound that they propel awareness into a state of self-transparent, intelligent emptiness, which is an entirely different orbit of being. Like an electron that leaps instantaneously from one level of energy to another.

In the same way, a small mutation in a gene can mark the opening of a categorical shift in human orientation: the capacity for language, for instance; or walking upright. Likewise, daily, without fanfare, blindly, we seem to cross and re-cross the threshold of a monumental cladogenesis without fully realizing what we’ve done.

Now I know a negative fact: There is no gradual learning from 1 to 3, as stage 2 suggests; but something closer to a death and rebirth. A death of me and a rebirth of the harmony of the whole in each instrumental form of being (every tree, human and cat…).

A small big bang of a chuckle rises from the cratered black hole of who I thought I was. There was always freedom. The Self and its dramas were never real to begin with.

And this also means that I will never cross this frontier; I’ll never be “free” from illusion. Because I am illusion. Whatever might unfold beyond this would not involve me.

Neither the Self, nor the relentless stream of language describing one are enemies of this silent emptiness. Language is precisely what dissolves the illusions of itself. It needs to unravel its own limitations and learn when to turn on and off.

Then something else uses language. Then language and image become mere tools in the “hands” of an intelligent emptiness.

The words themselves can’t reach farther than this. This is where they discover the farthest reaches of their own valid domain.

They don’t describe the thing itself, but they are its trigger.

3) Welcome to Something Else