Who ‘We’ Are, Part Two: Ego: Our Debilitating Self-Deception

I should have realized that my recent post on Who ‘We’ Are would get me embroiled in a discussion on ‘free will’. So here’s Part Two of this existential rant, to hopefully explore and clear up some of the comments and questions the first article provoked.

In Straw Dogs John Gray writes that “free will is a trick of perspective,” based on the self-delusion that there is “an inner person directing our behaviour.”:

We act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not.

These ‘fragments’ that are conceived by our minds are what Stewart and Cohen call “figments (simplified, invented models) — of reality“. Our ‘minds’, they argue, are nothing more than processes that produce these figments (originally for the benefit of our cells’ and organs’ survival, but now, with the increasing power of our culture due to language, also appropriated by our culture).

This is what I was getting at in the previous article when I said that one’s ‘mind’ is a battleground, without any ‘natives’ to defend the territory, where a ceaseless battle rages between the cells and organs of our bodies which evolved our brains as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their purposes, and our culture which uses every available form of propaganda and coercion to try to seize control of our minds for their purposes. As our culture accelerates over the edge of a cliff, these ‘purposes’ are increasingly divergent.

That we have a ‘choice’ between doing what our cells and organs would have us do, and doing what our culture would have us do, hardly constitutes ‘free will’, as humanists would have us believe. It is hard to imagine anything further from ‘freedom’ than to have to make a Sophie’s choice between two irreconcilable alternatives, the choice of either of which will inevitably hurt us, either through damage to our physical and/or mental health, or the angry opprobrium of the well-brainwashed majority in our culture.

In Tolle’s model (above, left), the constant traumas inflicted upon us by our dying, ruthless culture produce a vicious cycle: Our brains invent stories to try to ‘make sense’ of our suffering, and these stories in turn provoke negative emotions (anger, fear, grief etc.), our experience of which reinforces the ‘validity’ of these fictional stories. Many stressful events in our culture (e.g. attacks on us or our loved-ones or our beliefs, bad news about the planet, and a million others) trigger these negative emotions and the stories that we’ve invented to try to make sense of them. Our culture puts its ‘spin’ on each event’s story to pressure us to do its bidding, or to make us believe there is nothing we can do. As a result we are intellectually and emotionally incapacitated, often to the point of chronic mental and physical illness.

So the battle between our biology and our culture for control of our minds (and hence control over our beliefs and actions) is further aggravated by these incapacitating triggers, which take our minds (our intellectual and emotional ‘selves’) hostage. Many of us dissociate, and, in order to try to avoid the triggers, endeavour to live inside our heads, disconnect the four aspects of our ‘selves’ (intellectual, emotional, sensual and intuitive) from each other and from the ‘real’ world, and hide away in a ‘safe’ world of our own making. Except it’s not really our own making: We are really living inside our culturally ‘dis-eased’ mind. This ‘we’ that is doing so is, of course, another fiction — our ego, a cultural construct that exploits a brain that is too smart (and too vulnerable to stress) for its own good. As Gray explains, this ego is just a self-delusion that an inner person is directing our behaviour.

It’s very difficult to shake the delusion that our ego is ‘real’ however, because our culture constantly tells us it is real — and as long as we all believe our egos are ‘real’ we will go on reinforcing that delusion in our every contact with others. The culture tells us that we must take responsibility (as our culture defines responsibility, which in today’s overwrought world is tantamount to self-induced imprisonment and slavery), that we must do what those in power tell us (on threat of punishment), and that we must conform and be like everybody else (or be shunned and ostracized). It also tells most of us that we are sinful, vulnerable and only worth what our culture deems us to be worth.

Inevitably and endlessly our culture fills us with feelings of guilt, fear, shame and self-loathing, and false stories that support these feelings.  When the egoic mind and the ‘pain-body’ (the chronic negative emotions the egoic mind’s stories provoke) churn fast enough, we slide into depression (a form of disengaging from our emotions and thoughts when they become too much to bear), or lash out against others (in personal violence or collective wars), or retreat into paralysis or denial (consumed by fear, or nostalgia, or irrational magical thinking). Our culture knows how to pull the triggers and exploit the ego only too well.

Much has been written about how to ‘realize’ that the egoic mind and pain-body are not real; they are just, as Stewart and Cohen say, ‘figments of reality’ — false models, self-constructed and culturally-reinforced fictions. Even more has been written about how to free ourselves from them.

If we can do so, if we can get rid of the fictional egoic ‘gunk’ that our culture has, throughout our lives, layered on us, our ‘selves’ begin to look more like the ‘present’ self on the right side of the illustration above. With the deception of the ego gone, we are free of the controlling and debilitating effects of culturally-induced triggers. Our senses, instincts, intellects and emotions are reconnected with each other and with the ‘real’ world, and we become healthy and fully functional — that amazing combination of relaxation and awareness that allows us to be fearlessly open to what our instincts, senses, emotions and intellect perceive (not what they conceive, nor what others conceive and urge us to take as ‘true’), and at the same time calm, comfortable and competent to assess what they mean, without bias, judgement or expectation.

In this ‘frame of mind’ we can be both fully present and at peace in the world (the way I believe most wild animals live, most of the time), and able to bring a mindful approach (rather than a reactive one) to each event we face, such as the 7-step process I have tried to use: Sense, self-control, understand, question, imagine, offer, collaborate. The knowledge (instinctive, emotional, sensory and intellectual) we have and can draw on can then be integrated and appropriate actions taken, in the moment.

But if we are just a collection of cells and organs who have evolved a ‘mind’ to create useful (to them) figments (models) of reality, a mind that is, to some extent or other, invaded and controlled by our culture, who, then, is taking these ‘present’ actions?

I would argue that it is our cells and organs, ‘speaking’ to us through our cleared minds. Our senses and instincts are primeval, and the knowledge they convey to us requires no mental model, no ‘figment of reality’. Our minds, when they are as free of cultural baggage as possible, use our instincts’ and senses’ knowledge to decide on actions that are in our cells’ and organs’ interest. These need not be selfish actions — our bodies are ‘smart’ enough (consider e.g. the urge to procreate, to socialize, and to nurture) to act in concert with others in the greater good of all-life-on-Earth, which they (we) instinctively appreciate — our biophilia is innate, an evolutionary prime directive in our genes, at least when this biophilia is not overridden by the nature-fearing stories of our culture.

Our cells and organs prompt us in integrating this knowledge by producing chemicals that evoke strong emotions (in the natural world these are mostly positive, except in fight-or-flight situations) to goad us into appropriate behaviours.

Our culture is of no help at all in this process. In ‘less-civilized’, healthy societies the culture of the people rarely interferes to compel its members to act against their cells’ and organs’ interests. Individuals in such societies are trusted to make their own decisions, without coercion; the purpose of the culture is to provide objective knowledge through stories, not to advise.

So what’s wrong with our ‘civilized’ culture, that it has so overstepped its bounds of helpfulness, and now tries to control ‘us’ to the point we are mostly ill, disconnected, imprisoned, and dysfunctional?

My guess is that our culture became, as a consequence of our own inventiveness, perverted, deranged, cancerous. When our species faced crises that threatened our existence, our response was to invent the arrowhead, and then agriculture, and then settlement — ‘civilization’. Without these inventions we might not have survived the ice ages — earlier rounds of severe climate change.

But these new inventions required a great deal more interdependence and associations much larger than tribes — the bigger the better. We naturally did not take to the constraints such interdependence and scale required — hierarchy, conformity, obedience, settlement, dependence on fragile human systems, and suffering with plagues, famines and violence, all consequences of living in unnaturally large numbers in close quarters. Our culture, which as ‘software’ can evolve must faster than our cells’ and organs’ ‘hardware’, adapted quickly to the need to enforce compliance and uniformity. Language was its most powerful tool. As civilization ratcheted up to 100 million people, and then a billion, and now seven billion, the culture has needed to restrict personal ‘choices’ and freedoms more and more. It had to get inside our heads and control us, from birth, put us in thrall to civilization culture to keep us in line, keep fuelling the culture. And that’s where we are today — like lab rats starved of food, beginning to eat our own young.

The libertarian-anarchist streak in many of us is producing a now-futile yearning to be free from civilization’s control. But our civilization is collapsing, and as it does survival will depend on our ability to reconnect, to be present and at peace — to be nobody-but-ourselves, feral, social in a collaborative and diverse way, not in civilization culture’s coercive and homogeneous way.

I sense that this is what those who have moved past the Second Denial are now trying to do. We are trying to simultaneously unplug from civilization culture’s thrall (freeing ourselves from the egoic mind and pain-body) and reconnect to the larger ‘organ’/society of all-life-on-Earth, whose voice has been all but drowned out by civilization’s noise.

This does not mean moving to neo-survival mode, but rather moving away from civilization culture’s broken, desperate, coercive survival mode. Moving from a society whose worldview is one of scarcity, competition, obedience and sacrifice, to one whose worldview is one of abundance, cooperation, independence and generosity. Moving forward to a natural society. One that trusts the wisdom of each individual’s cells, organs, instincts, senses, emotions, intellect, biophilia, to know just what to do, and to act on that holistic wisdom. One that through its connection to all-life-on-Earth intuitively and collectively and wordlessly manages its numbers and behaviour (as most complex natural species do) to contribute to, not destroy, the complexity and diversity of life on our planet. In our cells, in our organs, in our DNA, this is who we are, and who we always have been, except for a few desperate millennia, when we forgot.

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Postscript: When I wrote the earlier post arguing that we have no identity, that there is no inner person directing our behaviour, a couple of respondents asked me: What about music? If there is no ‘me’, who/what is it that responds so viscerally and rapturously to great music — even if that music has no words?

My tentative answer to this is that music cuts through the ‘gunk’ of our egoic mind and pain-body, kind of like how a dishwashing detergent cuts through grease. It doesn’t get rid of it, it just makes it seem to disappear for a while, gets it out of the way. Music goes right to our emotions, and I think it may short-circuit the vicious cycle that connects our egoic mind (those ghastly fictitious stories) and our pain-body (the negative emotions that these stories evoke). The direct connection temporarily cuts off the stories and stops the vicious cycle. The result can be an amazing feeling of relief, calmness, awareness. When my depression is at its worst, I know when I begin to respond to music that it’s lifting. This is when I cry, and it’s wonderful.

There are other ‘sensations’ that likewise seem to cut through and cut off the egoic-mind/pain-body connection. While I’m sure they are different for everyone, for me they are:

• lights and/or sounds in the darkness — the moon, streetlights, rain, the night calls of birds and animals, fragrant breezes, storms etc.
• falling in love
• poetry — especially brief, powerful, lyrical turns of phrase that directly call up an emotion or paint a picture
• playing with animals
• being in hot water — hot tubs, baths, even showers, seem to liberate my mind from intellectual constraints and stimulate my imagination
• sometimes, movement — being in a gently moving vehicle that I’m not driving

There is something about all these experiences that accentuates the sensual, relaxes and stimulates at the same time. The senses and instincts take over and then appeal directly to the emotions or the intellect. For a short while, I am ‘cured’ of the suffering and dysfunction in the upper left diagram, and able to function in the healthy way depicted in the upper right diagram; freed briefly from the suffocating ‘dis-ease’ of our culture.