how to save the world

In recent weeks I’ve heard laments from several colleagues that their lives are so busy (mostly with the needs of of the moment — family, personal, health, financial and workplace struggles, and keeping their homes and other stuff in working order), that they have no bandwidth left for things they thought they’d have time for by now — activism, writing, volunteerism, beloved hobbies, building community, and just thinking about what they want to be doing next. Some wonder if they will ever have time for these important things — if they will ever have time for themselves. Time when nothing else urgently has to be done.

Our culture does its best to fill up our time so we don’t have any left to question or challenge the status quo. That’s a successful evolutionary strategy for any culture: Keep ’em with their nose to the grindstone, obedient and distracted to death. I tried to capture this when I coined Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour:

Humans have apparently evolved to do what we must (the personal, unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then do what’s easy, and then do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are seen as merely important. Social, political and economic change therefore happens only when the old generation dies and a new generation with different entrained beliefs and imperatives takes over. Humans have, through all of this, evolved to be a collaborative and caring species, and we are all doing our best — we cannot do otherwise.

After I retired, nearly seven years ago, I was looking for a peaceful place and a quiet period of time to take stock of my life, recover from all the then-recent major changes in my life, and start to figure out how to “give back” something in return for my blessed life, good fortune and privilege.

Initially, I plunged into clearing a massive backlog of things that had been waiting for ‘time’ to be done — cultivating new relationships, writing, composing, studying, volunteering, increasing my self-awareness and self-healing, and trying (mostly unsuccessfully — perseverance, focus, and attention to detail are not my forté) to learn some new skills and try some interesting local experiments. In striving to do all this I reached the point where my calendar was nearly as full as it was when I had substantial family and work responsibilities.

But now, I’m starting to say “no” to most requests of my time and energy: It seems there is no limit to the number of demands people will make of your time if they perceive you have a lot of it. And I’m starting to have the same realization about my 7 post-retirement years that I had about my 37 working years: While much of what I’ve done was seemingly important at the time, none of it has really accomplished (or seems likely to achieve) anything particularly enduring.

That’s not to say all these years have been a waste of time: What I’ve done, I’m told, has been helpful, useful, supportive, and instructive to many others. Perhaps that’s enough. But if those people have also accomplished nothing that’s enduring, what exactly is all that ‘helpful’ activity worth? Is our life’s work ultimately just about helping each other make the prison of our exhausting and struggle-filled lives more comfortable? Is there nothing to show for all the bother but a collective “feeling better about ourselves”?

When I first began to wake up some mornings with the magic feeling of having nothing to do, nowhere to go, it didn’t take long before the feelings of guilt over my privilege and “lazy” inactivity arose. And with them came an avalanche of shoulds: I should volunteer to do this. I should contribute to that, and help out with this, too.

But if, as I now believe, we can’t change our culture or prevent its desolating collapse, and if we have no agency, no volition, free will or choice over what ‘we’ seemingly do in any case, then the guilt is ill-conceived and pointless. The activists and humanists — the believers in choice and responsibility and the debt that comes with privilege — can curse me all they want, but I seemingly am doing the only thing I can possibly do, conditioned by my culture’s indoctrination and my innate nature. For the past seven years “the only thing I can possibly do” has been, most often, the shoulds. What will it be now?

When you finally have the rare and extraordinary privilege of not having to do anything, when you move past the guilt of that privilege and the tyranny of shoulds, and when you realize that you have no agency or control or will or responsibility for what you do, what do you do then (not what should you do — what do you do)? What sense can be made of the observation of what one consequently does (or doesn’t do)? If I am not, but still I expect things of myself, and others still expect things of me, what then? And what sense do I make of how it feels to seemingly do nothing, to just be? If all there is, is this — what is to be done?

What are some possible answers to these impossible questions?

Let’s set aside for a moment the desirable but improbable (or impossible) outcome that one’s self will just fall away, leaving the self-less character (that once thought itself to be a separate individual) staring at the world wide-eyed, seeing everything as new, seeing everything as it really is for the first time.

One possibility, that I’ve referred to before, is that the “seen-through” self will be treated as a chronic and likely incurable disease, not unlike any other disease: the “me” will just get used to this newly-apparent affliction and work through and around it as well as possible. The difference is that this incurable disease is one that everyone around us has, too — and most people are completely unaware of having it, and of the terrible consequences of having it. My sense is that more and more people will come to realize they have it, and search for a “cure”. If they are wise they will strongly resist “teachers” and anyone else who proffers a treatment for this disease, since it will be clear to them that as long as the self remains, there is no cure. Most, I suspect, will not be so wise.

Still, there is at least “making the prison of the self more comfortable”. But how comfortable can anyone be knowing that the prison is an illusion, that we are entirely self-confined? It seems likely that the frustration of this knowledge, and the cognitive dissonance of living a life seemingly in denial of our self-confinement, will far outweigh any sense of temporary comfort we can accumulate in our cells. We might even feel we are going insane, if it is possible to be more insane than believing the separate self is actually real.

Tony Parsons describes the feeling that arises when the contraction of energy produces the apparent self as “a sense of loss”. Yet the end of the self is also, apparently, a kind of loss. I wonder whether the meetings that he and other radical non-dualists have are really a kind of grief support group — except that this is a kind of loss (and therefore grief) that endures either until the self vanishes, or the body dies.

My other incurable disease (ulcerative colitis), because it has been in remission for so long, has only given me a dim sense of what it is like to live with a debilitating, chronic and incurable illness. At its worst, I remember it being so all-consuming that there were no emotions or thoughts whatsoever associated with it (they came later) — my entire energy at the time was caught up in the moment-to-moment coping process.

The disease of the self is more like a nagging, phantom, not-yet-identified disease — one that is not recognized or felt as real, even when one has great intellectual clarity that it is. I may understand that this disease underlies all my fears and anxieties and introduces a veil that mutes and muddies everything that is real, but that understanding does not alleviate the symptoms. And it seems not only possible but completely ‘normal’ to just cope with this disease — after all, we all have it, and if we act intelligently and responsibly we seemingly manage to live full and rich and successful lives in spite of it — even though we may know conceptually that ‘we’ are not real and that ‘we’ are in control of nothing.

Some people I know think it would be best for ‘me’ if I’d just “get over my self” — which apparently means behaving as if I didn’t know the terrible truth about it, and entails behaving as if I was responsible and in control, and as if I saw the ‘affliction’ of self as a mere invention, a self-indulgence, untrue and unreal. When I hear the same advice proffered to people suffering from other debilitating, incurable (and often poorly diagnosed) diseases, I can’t help thinking it’s cruel advice.

Although I am sure Patrick McGoohan wasn’t writing about non-duality in his brilliant 1960s series The Prisoner, it’s a brilliant allegory for it: McGoohan awakens one day to find himself in a bizarre prison “village” where the rest of the prisoners seem blithely unaware of their predicament. Throughout the series, he tries unsuccessfully to escape, and to identify who has imprisoned him and why. In the final episode (intriguingly entitled “Fall Out”) he gets a glimpse of his captor — which seems to be himself.

That seems to be where I am and what I am trying to do now — escape my self, despite knowing it’s futile to try to do so. With all my ‘free’ time, it’s the only thing ‘I’ can do.

We are one person,
We are two alone,
We are three together,
We are for each other.
— Stephen Stills, Helplessly Hoping

Some self-proclaimed non-duality ‘teachers’ play a bit fast and loose with the terms ‘I’ and ‘you’, possibly because they don’t want to alienate possible students of any of the wide spectrum of non-duality practices and messages.

As a result of this, when I meet people and tell them I’m exploring non-duality, I often get a “me too” response, followed by an explanation of their “personal journey” to achieve liberation, awakening, presence, enlightenment, transcendence, higher consciousness, pure bliss, oneness-with-all, or some other state (sometimes with a colour like purple as a qualifier to show how far they’ve progressed). When I tell them my sense of radical non-duality’s message is that none of these ‘states’ can be attained by any individual (or teacher!) and that there is no ‘one’ to attain them in any case, I get very confused looks.

“I’m not talking about the false ‘you’ that is disconnected from oneness,” they’ll reply, “I’m talking about the real ‘you’ behind the mask, the authentic ‘you’, the higher ‘you’, the ‘you’ that manifests pure beingness. You know, the I am you.”

“Sorry,” I reply. “There is simply no ‘you’ of any flavour. The minute there’s a ‘you’, that’s duality, something apart from everything else. The minute there’s an ‘awakening’ or ‘consciousness’, that’s an awareness or consciousness of something, something other, subject and object. Time and space are illusions, so there can’t be a journey or ‘progress’ or a ‘now’. In fact ‘you’ are the problem — it’s ‘you’ and your search, your journey, that prevents the full-on realization there is only oneness.” Now the confused looks turn to frowns.

There is then an awkward attempt to find common ground — after all, we have both followed this challenging path and put a lot of time and energy into it, so surely we are looking for the same thing, just using different words, no?

“I’m afraid not,” I say, sadly. “There is no hope for ‘you’, no path or goal or destination. Only when ‘you’ vanish will liberation or enlightenment or whatever ‘you’ call it be realized, and it will be realized by no ‘one’. The same is true for ‘me’.”

At this point they usually think I’m putting them on. They get the same look of anxiety and despair that people get when I tell them that a study of complex systems leads to the inevitable conclusion that our civilization will have completely collapsed by the end of this century, no matter what we try to do. At some point both arguments lead them to say to me: “What’s the point of doing anything if you believe that? You make everything sound hopeless.” And they may imply that such a view is an insult to those who are trying hard to improve themselves, and the world.

At this point I recall that someone told me they were so infuriated and depressed after reading just a chapter of John Gray’s Straw Dogs (the book that had me so giddy I read it cover to cover twice before I could put it down), that they hurled it against the wall.)

And now we are at an impasse. They can’t conceive of anyone who is this ‘hope-less’ being at all joyful, or being motivated to do anything. And nothing I can say can persuade them otherwise.

I admire courageous activists and ‘direct action’ projects. I am a fan of Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti and what they’re doing to “make the prison of the self more comfortable”. They don’t make promises and I have no expectations. We can get along fine.

But if you run into me and want to talk or collaborate about our shared purpose and beliefs, please don’t get your hopes up. It is hopeless — striving to make ourselves, or the world, better. But I will still like, admire and support you for trying. I know we are all doing our best. And this world and this life are amazing.

So let’s spend some time enjoying it together. Let’s play, and celebrate, and wonder. Our earnest differences really don’t matter.

We are one, after all.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
— T S Eliot, East Coker

Until I retired a few years ago I lived my life focused on the external world, and ignored the internal one. This is likely because I was a very reactive person, responding, mostly anxiously and fearfully, and sometimes angrily and shamefully and full of despair, to a world that seemed arbitrary, terrifying, unpredictable and out of any control. I hid for years inside my head, without ever really exploring what was going on inside it. I developed a chronic physical stress-invoked disease (colitis) because of it.

I was never comfortable with the skin of my self. It seemed a messy, ill-fitting and unfathomable fabric. My happiness seemed dependent on others and on serendipity, and because I have always seen my self as “the world’s most blessed agnostic”, I felt guilty for not being more grateful, and for being so unable to control my self to be able to share those blessings more with others. In one sense I was so self-absorbed that I was largely oblivious to others, and in another sense I was so completely ignorant of my self (my rare moments of self-exploration seemed pretty fruitless since they did not seem to change anything) that I pretty much allowed external events and people to direct my life.

With encouragement and time, I have during this decade become modestly more knowledgeable and aware of my self, and while that has enabled me and those I love to, as Tony Parsons puts it, “make the prison of the self more comfortable” (for me and them), it has also, paradoxically, made me aware of the helplessness of the self, made me appreciate, despite my enormous skepticism, that we have no free will or control over what we do or don’t do or believe, and, finally, led to the realization (at least intellectually) that the self is an illusion. No wonder I wasn’t comfortable with it!

My study of evolutionary biology has persuaded me that the instinct for survival was the evolutionary precursor to the emergence of the self and ‘self-consciousness’ in so-called intelligent creatures, those with the brain capacity to imagine their selves as separate from everything else, and to imagine (with reinforcement from others afflicted with this sense of self) that they are their selves and that the self’s limited perception of reality is ‘real’ reality. The entrained and embodied conception and perception of the separate self as real, which is drilled into our pliable brains from birth, is an evolutionary paradox — in the short run, it allowed our intelligent and gullible species to out-survive species not so afflicted, but in the long run, our selves’ alienation seemingly lies behind all human suffering and probably our species’ characteristic violence and the accelerating sixth great extinction of life on Earth.

I should have listened to and trusted my intuition, since childhood, that there was something very wrong with my self. But it has taken me all these years to figure out that what was wrong with it wasn’t something wrong with ‘me’ (since there is no ‘me’), but that my self was just a maladaptive construct of my brain and body, something not real at all. And that the natural state of being for any healthy creature (which I keep ‘remembering’ in brief glimpses in peaceful or enthralling moments when my affliction of self temporarily drops away) is self-less.

That natural state, as Tony asserts, is not accessible or attainable by any ‘one’ afflicted with a sense of self. It is only realized when the self vanishes. Nothing ‘I’ do will make that more likely to happen. So the challenge now, having come to know, be aware of, and even begrudgingly like, my self, is to accept that ‘I’ am stuck with it, and to go on with my life in a way that is, at least, comforting and helpful to other afflicted selves who I love.

But if I acknowledge that I have no free will or choice, that what I conceive and perceive as the decisions made consciously by my self are simply (immediate) after-the-fact rationalizations of what I was inevitably going to do or believe anyway, how can ‘I’ possibly do this?

The answer is that ‘I’ can’t. Whatever ‘I’ do, or don’t do, is the only thing I could possibly have done in the circumstances. That doesn’t mean my future actions are predictable or foreordained, since those circumstances will change. But ‘I’ have no control over either those circumstances or what ‘I’ will do in them.

So I can live in a state of continuous exasperation over that fact, or just accept it. That doesn’t mean behaving recklessly or nihilistically — that would entail having a choice in my behaviours, and I have none. In fact, I have no choice over whether or not to remain exasperated for the rest of my life or to accept this reality. I may, however, be irresistibly driven towards people and practices that encourage its acceptance. Or I may irresistibly be drawn to people and ideas that encourage me to disavow my realization of my lack of free will and choice and move on to some other set of beliefs. It’s not in my control.

In any case, there will always be enormous social pressure on me, from other selves and from my own self, to believe I have free will and control, and to (appear to) exercise choice and responsibility accordingly (and these selves will no doubt reprimand me when they think ‘I’ have chosen badly). And there will always be an enormous cognitive dissonance between what now makes sense to me intellectually and intuitively, and the way our self-inflicted world behaves and what it believes (and what I have been so conditioned to believe that it’s hard to stop, except when those blessed ‘glimpses’ happen).

It will have to be enough to know this. And not to wait and hope, futilely, for ‘liberation’ from my self.

And to trust my instincts, which I sometimes sense are whisperings from outside the veil, when my self isn’t blocking me from hearing them.

~~~~~

Here is another transcript of one of Tony Parsons’ introductions at his radical non-duality ‘meetings’. Originally entitled Longing for Wholeness, it’s no longer on YouTube and I thought it was particularly eloquent (I posted a transcript of another of his introductions, All There Is, Is This, here):

In wholeness arises separation, the idea of being a separate person. It’s a part of wholeness. It just arises. It’s a sudden shift out of everything (wholeness), a contraction of energy within the body of a (suddenly “self-conscious”) person. That moment of separation happens at a very young age. Before that, there just everything, just wholeness. Everything is complete. Suddenly the energy contracts into the idea of being an individual. The tiny child suddenly becomes something within something else. Rather than there being everything, suddenly the child feels as if it is a something, the centre of something separate. A sense of self, of ‘me’ and ‘you’ arises. Everything outside the self seems separate: I’m here, and that’s all out there.

From that moment of separation, it feels like there’s a great loss. There is no longer everything, the wonder of simply beingness, there is this thing in here and the world is out there. Something has been lost. And from that moment on there is a seeking for that which has been lost. But nothing can be done. All the time there’s a sense of being a separate something, the separate something looks for wholeness. Seeking begins. And forever after in that lifetime there is a seeking for oneness.

What we see in the world (war, greed, fear), are expressions of a longing to come home, a longing for wholeness. All desire is the longing to come home. All apparent individuals in the world are seekers, but they seek different things to comfort themselves for the loss of wholeness. They don’t necessarily know that, but they seek to comfort themselves for what they feel is missing.

As soon as the sense of being a separate individual begins (you could call it a misunderstanding or a new, limited way of seeing things “in here” and “out there”), a lot of other ideas come with it. That moment of separation isn’t right or wrong, it’s what’s apparently happening, it’s ‘this*’ happening. And as the child grows in the world, s/he meets other apparently separate people (mother, father etc). And they absolutely believe that they are separate individuals and the ‘world’ is ‘out there’ and that we ‘relate’ to others — I’m something here and you’re over there and I have to learn how to live with you (or kill you, or whatever).

Out of that idea and belief that ‘I’ am now separate come other beliefs, such as that there is such a thing as time and there is such a thing as space — space between me and others — and that there is such a thing as a journey (that ‘I’ am now 5 years old and will live another 70 years or so and am on a journey going somewhere) because there is (apparently) time.

And if ‘I’ am on a journey and feel that I’ve lost something, that journey must have a meaning and a purpose. All of these ideas (time, purpose, meaning) come out of the belief in being separate, and convince us we are on a journey to somewhere.

Most of what we do on this journey is act to feel better about ourselves. The individual seeker totally believes (because we are taught that) that we have free will, and choice, and the ability to act, and that out of the action comes consequence, and that things happen as a result of that individual’s choice to act. And also the seeker is taught that if they want to make their life better, they have to choose between this or that, and act in a certain way. And they grow up and go to school and meet other people who tell them they are individuals with free will and choice. All of that comes out from separation, and all of those ideas are born in that moment of separation.

Of course, life in this world is not easy — there’s a struggle to succeed, and if there’s a failure the seeker is convinced that it is their failure and they have to put it right. The seeker grows up in this world and it can often be unhappy. We’re also absolutely sure that what is happening in the world is happening to us. This is happening to ‘me’. Everyone here is apparently sitting on a chair and ‘you’ probably believe it’s ‘you’ sitting there and that’s what’s happening. That’s how you’ve always seen things.

When seekers are unsatisfied with money, success, popularity etc and want to go deeper, they often look outside (at religion, therapy etc) for an answer. Some also look at something called ‘enlightenment’ because when they read about it it seems it might be the answer to this deep sense of loss, this longing for wholeness.

But, because they believe they are individuals, they find a ‘teacher’ who claims to be able to teach them that it’s their free will and choice to meditate, open their chakras, kill their egos or whatever, and that from that effort there will be a result. That’s how we believe it works.

All these ideas (time, destiny, control, purpose, free will, choice) keep the seeker totally locked in to seeking. Because what the seeker is actually looking for has never been lost, and can’t be known, approached, found, attained or grasped through seeking.

And it can’t be taught. People often say to me “there are many advaita teachers”. But there is no such thing as an advaita teacher. The meaning of advaita is unteachable. Advaita (what I call ‘liberation’) just happens — it is an explosion, a “boom!”a shift out of a contracted way of living and dealing with the world, into boundlessness. But because the seeker is always trying to learn or attain something, always moving and looking for something, it can never see. It’s impossible for the separate individual to see that, already, ‘this’ is wholeness. It’s right here. This is what is sought.

So the seeker goes on and on being taught and trying to learn or attain something the seeker doesn’t and can’t understand. Neither the seeker nor the ‘teacher’ really knows what liberation is because there is no such thing as a liberated or enlightened person. Liberation cannot be attained or known because already there is only liberation.

Few are open to hear that liberation is only realizable by no one. Liberation is about loss, about death, the loss of individuality, of being separate. Suddenly separation is no more, and there is that which is always sought. ‘Liberation’ doesn’t come and fill you — there is only liberation. But (the dream of) separation prevents the seeker from knowing that. Liberation can’t be taught because there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

This is a terrible message you’ve come to hear today. It’s completely without hope. There is no process you can follow, no ‘state’ you can find. No state of awareness. Awareness is, in reality, the process that initiates separation! Awareness of ‘something different over there’ is the beginning of separation. The child lives in beingness and suddenly becomes aware of something (its mother) and then there’s the space of separation. Liberation is not ‘awareness of’ or ‘knowing of’. It’s the end of the seeker, the individual, of everything that can ‘know’ anything. In liberation there is no knowing, simply beingness, simply life full on — that’s all there is. It isn’t happening to anyone.

There never was any ‘one’ to take ownership of or responsibility for anything. Liberation is total poverty and it leaves absolutely nothing, and in that nothing is abundance. But for no one. This is about the loss of you, and your separate life.

We can talk and share concepts together here today, and there could be clarity, but clarity is not liberation. This, what is being shared here, is not about the mind, not about understanding. I know people who could write this down clearly in words, but that won’t bring liberation. Liberation is a shift out of contraction into — “bup!” — you’re walking along and it’s the same old world and same old you and suddenly “Ah!” And it’s realized that no one ever becomes liberated. And thereafter there is simply being in wonder.

There is no expectation of anyone here today, because there isn’t anyone here. The most powerful thing that can happen here is energetically meeting the source of everything (which is nothing). Then the confusion can drop away (about the idea of time, free will, journey, meaning etc) and energetically there’s the sense of this contraction opening up into boundlessness.

———

* ‘This’ is Tony’s replacement for ‘all there is’ and hence for all descriptions of separate people and things (non-all-encompassing nouns and pronouns). When he says “the message that ‘this’ is telling you…” he isn’t self-aggrandizing by using ‘this’ instead of ‘I’, he’s asserting there is no separate individual, no Tony Parsons person. He acknowledges there is (apparently) a character named Tony Parsons, but asserts that there is no ‘one’ there, just what is apparently happening, and that the idea of a separate Tony Parsons person with free will and self-control and choice is an illusion, an idea.

May I introduce Dave’s Mind (DM), left, and Dave’s Body (DB), right. They’re quite adorable, but they fight all the time. If you see someone out walking in mismatched socks of these colours, you’ll know it’s their purported owner.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.  
     — Mary Oliver “Wild Geese”

There is a conversation going on inside me, and it’s been going on for at least a year now. But it’s not in my head. It’s a conversation between “Dave’s Mind” (portrayed recently by the grey creature on the left above) and “Dave’s Body” (the pink creature on the right). If cognitive dissonance with the outside world wasn’t bad enough, now there’s cognitive dissonance on the inside too, created by this incessant conversation between these two creatures.

I ‘know’ that there is, really, no ‘me’, and that, Dave’s Mind’s protestations notwithstanding, neither of these creatures is ‘the real me’. They are duelling (dual-ing?) aspects of the self that believes itself to be a separate me. But the ‘self’ and the ‘me’ are just constructs, constrained energies that have taken up residence trying (foolishly) to protect — what? — its imagined self, apparently. Here is what they’ve been nattering about today:

DM: “Well, that was interesting, this past weekend, when Dave got all limerent and mushy. Whew! Good thing I was here to prevent him from getting out of hand. And all that meditation stuff — booooring! So now he’s back to normal, getting stuff done and behaving responsibly and predictably.”

DB: “He was just ‘letting the soft animal of his body love what it loves’. I thought it was lovely. Freed briefly from the prison of his conceptions. For once, he was real, he was nobody-but-himself. His eyes got that look in them — beautiful!”

DM: “Are you kidding? He was in fantasyland! Seeing what wasn’t there. He could have ended up doing something really terrible, and hurting other people, and getting really badly hurt himself.”

DB: “He needed it. He needed to have his sterile little non-duality thoughts shaken up, exposed for the hermetic fantasy they are. Last weekend came just in time.”

DM: “*sigh* I suppose. It was a useful distraction from the non-duality — or ‘radical holism’ as he’s now pretentiously calling it — circular thinking. It was making me crazy.”

DB: “I’m pleased you’re talking about him in the third person again. You were on that ego trip believing you were him for a while.”

DM: “I’m his guide, his protector. Without me, there probably wouldn’t still be a Dave by now.”

DB: “Phhhh! Yeah, right. He has you to thank for his depression, his colitis, all the stress-related stuff in his life. You make him miserable. And besides, Dave is now clear that there is no ‘him’. Just like there’s no yoooooou!”

DM: “Sure, like you’re looking after him. He’d fall down the first manhole if I weren’t there helping him make decisions. And of course there’s a ‘him’. I wouldn’t exist without ‘him’.”

DB: “I rest my case. You don’t exist. You’re just a figment of ‘his’ imagination, evolved in the ill-conceived notion that any creature needs a ‘self’ to be able to function. There is no self, no Dave, and no yoooooou, mind.”

DM: “And you think there’s a yoooooou, body? Gould and Lewontin have proved that the body is just a construct, that it cannot be analyzed apart from the environment of which it is a part. The skin is just an evolved container for the protection and movement of the infinite complicity of its components; it has no integrity, nothing essential to distinguish the whole ‘it’ from the components ‘within’ it or the environment ‘outside’ it.”

DB: “The difference, mind, is that you can go away, and it won’t make any difference. If I go away, it will certainly be noticed. If I go away, Dave can’t dance.”

DM: “Nonsense. If you, the mistaken belief that you are all of a piece, being born and dying, were to go away, what would be left is the pure creature, or creatures, in oneness. And if both of us were to go away, Dave would cease being attached to his anger, his fears, his sadness, and be a much happier entity (or non-entity, I’m not sure which — Dave’s new ideas are very confusing). And I bet that what was left would dance very well without our interference.”

DB: “OK, let me get this straight. You’re suggesting that I’m as much a part of Dave’s self as you are? Just because I have more neurons in me than you have in that tiny brain that you claim you own, doesn’t mean I’m to blame for Dave’s affliction with his self.”

DM: “You make no sense at all, body. Good thing I’m the brains in this family. If Dave is right, that there is no self, no mind, no Dave, no separate anything, then there is no separate body either. What you conceive in your scattered neurons to be an integral body is just an evolution, a survival mechanism, like me. Most creatures when they look at the world see no creatures separate from them. They see only features of the oneness, what’s happening in the oneness. And even more interestingly, they apparently have no conception of time. They have no need of it. Everything is just ‘eternally perfect’ as it is.”

DB: “OK, let’s suppose for a minute you’re right, or more accurately that Dave is right. What would happen to this creature, and to you and I, if Dave’s self were to disappear?”

DM: “Dave’s self can’t disappear. It doesn’t really exist. It’s just an idea. If the self ceased to appropriate the two of us as if we were expressions or elements of its self, then we would be free to be the oneness again. Ideas would keep happening, sensations would keep happening, emotions would keep happening (though they would no longer be attached to the Dave-self, so they would be purer and rawer, but probably less intense without the feedback loops of the self to keep stirring them up). The character that currently perceives itself to be Dave would go on doing what it does, the only thing, as an expression of oneness, it can do. There just wouldn’t be any Dave. In other words, nothing would change.”

DB: “Well, that’s logically consistent, but it doesn’t resonate with what I know and sense. I have good instincts, you know. I think Dave’s messing with you, mind, and with me, too. Poor suffering fool, he’ll believe anything to feel better about his unnecessarily stressful, seemingly-pointless life.”

DM: “You have instincts? They’re my instincts. I just let them resonate with you when it’s in Dave’s best interest. Bad enough you claim ownership of Dave’s senses, when everything he senses is filtered through me.”

DB: “Not so. Scientists now say that the senses evoke visceral responses more intensely than intellectual ones. And that instincts are “sub-conscious” — my domain not yours. But I’m feeling generous, so I’ll give you most of the credit for Dave’s emotions. That part of his chemistry largely originates from rationalizations of what has happened and why — mostly fictional stories, but they’re yours, not mine. I just have to put up with the consequences when those hormones and chemicals come streaming out as a result.”

DM: “Don’t you go blaming me for Dave’s bizarre bouts of limerence. No thought and no logic or ration involved at all. They’re your doing, and in the context of how Dave lives today, they’re pretty dangerous. But if Dave doesn’t exist and you and I don’t exist, then the issue of what domain of Dave his knowledge and reactions stem from is pretty much moot, don’t you think? Oh, wait, I forgot, you don’t think — hee hee!”

DB: “I have more neurons in my stomach than you have in your whole brain, you ego maniac. You think; I know. So what do we do now, just sit around and wait for Dave’s self to pop off. What will happen to us if that happens?”

DM: “Nothing will change. We’ll still not exist. Dave and his self will still not exist. And since there is no Dave and no self and no time, that’s already the case. But I’ll still listen to you, body. I’ll still care. We’ll have each other. Maybe we’ll just re-energize in some other poor hapless creature, and fuck them up for a while. Sounds like fun, huh?”

DB: “I can’t imagine my self without Dave. I don’t think I could exist without him. I care about him. He’s been my project almost since he was born.”

DM: “We’re pretty pathetic, aren’t we. Arguing all the time — you complaining that I’m a creature of cultural conditioning and me complaining that you’re a product of DNA. We fight over control of Dave’s self, which we know doesn’t really exist, yet we can’t stop. It’s the only life we know, the only life we can imagine. We’re just hanging on to Dave, and to each other, for dear life. And he’s just as helpless, believing he’s his self and knowing that’s not true, that there is no separate Dave, but he can’t stop his self. He’s identified, addicted to it.”

DB: “I can’t do anything about that, and there’s no point brooding over it. You’re the idealist, mind — you want to sit around and wait for his self to die so you can be gone too, be my guest. I’m a pragmatist, a realist. If there’s nothing to be done about this non-duality crap, then I’m going to refocus on what I can do in this moment and this lifetime, illusory as it may be. Dave needs to exercise. I’m going to nag him to get on his treadmill right now…”

DM: “Hah! Now there’s a metaphor for you.”

DB: “Yay, I did it! He’s already feeling better about his self. He’s thinking about those he loves. He’s smiling and thinking about laughing and crying and making love and doing all those self-consuming things that make him forget about his self. In those magic moments, chemically induced as they may be, he is oneness.”

DM: “What crap. He’s ‘one’ with his third leg and his right hand, more like it. I guess it’s cheaper than ayahuasca. Just more illusion. Escapism. It’s not real. I don’t care if the chemical tonic is good for him, flushes out his system and challenges his beliefs in everything. It’s not real. It’s not what he needs, or wants. it’s just what Tony Parsons calls ‘making the prison cell of the self more comfortable’.”

DB: “It’s what I can do. It’s better than nothing. We work together, we can make this prison cell pretty damn interesting for Dave. Until there is no Dave, and no us, anyway. What do you say?”

DM: “Oh well, I haven’t got anything better to do. No other selves asking for my services. What did you have in mind?”

DB: “Shake him up. Force him out of his complacency. Convince him he’s running out of time, and that he has to try something else. Help me take away what he’s holding on to so fiercely. Get him focused on something else besides his self. I don’t know. You’re the brains — you tell me what we should do.”

DM: “Hmmm. That actually might be fun. Let me apply my very rich imagination to this challenge. I’ve got some ideas…”

At a retreat this past weekend I was contemplating the various times in my life (there haven’t been that many, at least that I can recall) when I have had ‘glimpses’ of what life is like without the affliction of the self. In other words, the moments when my ‘self’ dropped away and there was no ‘me’, no time, nothing separate, just the liberating, wondrous realization of all-there-is. I described my last such glimpse, last spring, this way:

• It felt more like a ‘remembering’ than an ‘awakening’. Some memories of very early childhood (some of which had been just a blur until then) and a few memories from more recent, very peaceful times, flooded through my body, which felt ‘flushed’ in the way it feels during a sudden ‘aha’ moment, or during feelings of intense love.
• It felt amazingly free of anxiety or fear, very peaceful and joyful in a ‘boundless’ kind of way. Everything was awesome, more-than-real, unveiled, unfiltered and just perfect, exactly as it was.
• There was no temptation to grasp onto it lest it be quickly lost again. It was clearly always here, everywhere, not ‘going’ anywhere, accessible always. My ‘self’ would have been anxious not to lose it, but my self was, in that moment, not present. Momentarily, I was not my self.
• A silly grin came over me, and stayed for hours.

I thought about these various ‘glimpses’ and asked myself if there was a pattern to them. Was I, as some have reported in moments of ‘awakening’, utterly exhausted, shaken to my core, and therefore ‘open’ to seeing? Was there something about where I was, what mood I was in, what had recently happened to me, that connected these remembrances?

And then it hit me: Every moment of ‘liberation’ from the self, every moment of realization of all-that-is without the veil of separation, occurred in a moment of limerence.

Limerence is an ambiguous term, so let me define it simply as I have experienced it: Limerence is the whole-body experience of time-less euphoria, most often during the early stages of some new love. It is a purely chemical, utterly irrational experience. No one can control its onset or intensity or hope to understand or make sense of it. It has essentially nothing to do with the actual ‘object’ of that new love, when there is one. In the moment, ‘it’ (love, or whatever you want to call it) is all that matters.

I’ve written before about the ‘Chemistry of Love’ and the chemical cocktail, illustrated above, that floods the body from the earliest to the later, less euphoric stages of love. In the earliest stage, some mix of phenylethylamine, dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytocin, testosterone and estrogens might be involved (the state of the ‘science’ is abominable).

The obvious question is what evolutionary purpose this chemical ‘madness’ serves. The obvious (but possibly incorrect) answer is that it advances the procreation of the species, so this chemistry endures from generation to generation.

One of its effects is that, at least initially, it pretty much obliterates the ‘self’ — the focus of attention is wrenched away from one’s self to some combination of the (idealized, fictitious) love ‘object’ and the sheer mad wondrous experience of the feeling itself.

In creatures afflicted with ‘selves’, the mind then fiercely intervenes and tries its damnedest to reassert the appearance of ‘control’, and what follows can be pretty dreadful — obsession, feelings of terror of ‘separation’ or ‘loss’, jealousy, anger, grief, despair — the whole gamut of painful emotions that accompany the mind’s/self’s invention of stories to try to make sense of its misperceived reality.

So when I use the term limerence here I’m referring only to those ‘self-less’ euphoric feelings that precede the re-intervention of the mind/self. In those moments, I think, there is an opening, a possibility, before the affliction of the self reasserts itself, for the self to fall away and for there to be a glimpse of what really is, the ‘natural reality’ that creatures unafflicted with selves ‘experience’ normally.

This may be similar to the ‘opening’ to realization that some psychoactive ‘medicines’ purportedly produce.

The philosophy of radical holism (non-duality) that I’ve tentatively adopted suggests that there is nothing the ‘self’ can do to create such an ‘opening’, since that would be essentially killing ‘its self’. I buy that we have no control over what we do, and that there is no ‘path’ that the seemingly separate person can choose to take to realize the folly of its separateness. And I certainly have had no control over (or during) my moments of limerence.

But I’m really wondering if there’s an involuntary door here, or at least a window, since for ‘me’ a ‘self-less’ moment of limerence has seemingly always been a necessary (if not in itself sufficient) precondition for a glimpse of self-less reality. The paradox is that in those glorious, helpless moments of limerence, nothing else matters but that euphoric feeling.

Not even liberation.

 New Yorker cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti

As reported in a recent New Yorker article, the popular trans model Hari Nef was asked for her “mantra to live by”, and her response was “Take what is yours.”

When I read this, I wondered how I’d respond if I were asked what my mantra was. The term ‘mantra’ is a bit hairy and ambiguous, but let’s assume what we’re looking for is a core or fundamental belief, something succinct that underlies our other beliefs and is less doubted or tenuous than other beliefs. It’s an interesting exercise in the power of constraints to try to hone your belief set down to a single statement.

Over the past dozen years or so, I’ve had many mantras. What I’ve called Pollard’s Laws* are probably the ones that have endured the longest. I no longer believe in them quite so strongly and absolutely, though they still seem to describe what appears to happen in the world, and in that sense they are, I think, still interesting and perhaps useful (which is all you can really ask of a theory or credo).

Likewise a variety of additional ‘Miniature Truths’** I’ve written about over the years since coining my two “laws”: Interesting and perhaps useful, but they are necessarily oversimplifications, and inherently dualistic — they presume we have free will and choice to act on what we know. Sometimes, however, it seems to be helpful to be aware of things we cannot do anything about, and understand why we cannot do anything about them; this seems to offer some clarity, some peace of mind, and some equanimity.

I’ve asked myself the alternative question, about identity rather than belief: “What is the name that is big enough to hold your life?” (and answered, tentatively “I’m the one who helps others imagine possibilities”. That’s a mantra of sorts, I guess.

Last spring, I essentially recanted much of what I’ve believed and espoused over the years, summarizing my Story of Me as follows:

My whole life I have been bewildered, unable to really make sense of anything, just muddling my way through, and I have often been quite fearful and socially anxious as a result. I have put great effort into many things but have nothing much to show for it. I’ve had some interesting insights, but nothing that’s of much practical use to anyone. I have been generous, but only when I could easily afford to be. I’ve been very lucky. I have become more joyful and fun-loving, but more pessimistic, more curious, and more skeptical about everything, even whether we as separate ‘selves’ actually exist.

This statement would seem to rule out any mantra other than one of inherent doubt and tenuousness about everything.

Going through all the candidates, I’m reduced to just four possible mantras:

1. Trust your instincts.
2. We are all doing our best.
3. Nobody knows anything.
4. You are not your ‘self’ (and there is no ‘you’).

What makes these four mantras ‘better’ than Pollard’s 2 laws, 14 miniature truths and 1 big-enough name? For one thing, I think they hold up better to non-dual scrutiny. If the idea of the separate ‘self’ was an accident of evolution, an enhanced (and ultimately maladaptive) version of survival instinct, and the self’s sense of free will, choice and control are all illusory (and hence the source of all suffering), how can a statement about separate, individual selves be useful or meaningful? It can, of course, be helpful in understanding what is (apparently) happening, and what is not happening. That’s why I still find my laws, miniature truths and big-enough name useful — radical non-dualists would say that such understanding makes the prison of the illusory, separate self more comfortable.

My ‘final four’ mantras, on the other hand, while they all contain pronouns, can be reconciled with the view that the separate self with free will and choice is illusory and maladaptive. Let’s look at them one at a time:

1. Trust your instincts. My sense, from ‘glimpses’ I’ve had of ‘self-less-ness’, is that what we perceive of as our instincts lie beyond and before our ‘selves’. If our illusory selves fall away, instincts will remain — the apparent character that is completely un-self-aware will jump out of the way of the runaway bus; there is no separate self needed to direct that evolutionarily adaptive (apparent) behaviour. Perhaps instincts are the way ‘all-that-is’ works around the confounding veil of the afflicted self — for no reason. Maybe we can’t ‘choose’ to trust them, or even listen to them, or not, but if they’re heard, it seems, there’s a connection somehow to some profound and seemingly wise mystery beyond the self.
2. We are all doing our best. If we are all doing the only thing we can possibly do (since ‘we’ have no free will or choice in the matter), then no ‘one’ is to blame for anything, and no one ‘should’ have done or should or could do otherwise. To accept this seems to me the ultimate statement of equanimity (even if the pronouns are inappropriate). From a dualistic perspective it is generous, forgiving and appreciative, and as long as the ‘self’ is stuck in the dual world that seems an ideal perspective to have. Intuitively it just feels right, even when considering seemingly
3. Nobody knows anything. The cartoon above is absolutely right in this ‘self’-effacing declaration, in both the dual and non-dual sense. Complexity and ‘real’ reality beyond the veil of the self are unknowable, and beyond the self, all-there-is cannot ‘know’ anything, since to know something is to know something apart from all-there-is, which is inseparable. What we perceive or conceive is an infinitesimally small and utterly imprecise fragment of what really is — close enough to nothing.
4. You are not your ‘self’. This seems cleverer and easier to swallow than the more radical corollary There is no ‘you’. But that’s too easy. The harder truth that there is no ‘you’ forces abandonment of seeking for some deeper, wiser ‘you’, and requires acknowledging the impossibility of ‘self’ improvement. And without having had a glimpse of self-less-ness, that’s pretty much impossible to buy. So perhaps, for now, You are not your ‘self’ is enough.

Winnowing the four down to one is too tough, especially for a verbose writer like me infatuated with epigram. Best I can do is this concatenation:

Nobody knows anything, and we’re all doing our best. So trust your instincts and be forgiving: You are not your ‘self’.

Editors welcome.

~~~~~

*Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour: We do what we must (our personal, unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are merely important.
Pollard’s Law of Complexity: Things are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something, it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex, success at changing it is unlikely, and adapting to it is probably a better strategy.

** Here are the ones that still resonate for me, paraphrased:
(1) There is no meaning, learning or joy without passion, curiosity, appreciation, partnership and generosity.
(2) Community is born of necessity (Joe Bageant).
(3) Show, don’t tell.
(4) Fight to be nobody-but-yourself (E E Cummings).
(5) Our civilization is inevitably in its final century.
(6) We are all healing; our culture imprisons us and makes us ill, disconnected and inauthentic.
(7) We’re so arrogant we loathe ‘unknowable’ complexity and the implication that no one is in control.
(8) What we see as ‘individuals’ are complicities of their component creatures and the environments of which they are a part (Stewart & Cohen).
(9) Personal ‘property’ is a fiction that exists only because of power inequality and the threat of violence (Matt Bruenig).
(10) We domesticated, infantilized humans live in a world of unprecedented ignorance, helplessness and imaginative poverty.
(11) Frames trump facts, and stories persuade better than data (George Lakoff).
(12) In our ‘learned helplessness’ we fear all the wrong things (Malcolm Gladwell).
(13) The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred (variously cited).
(14) Change occurs as generations with old ideas die off, not from people changing their minds (Max Planck).