how to save the world

Intellectually, the message of radical non-duality, for the most part, resonates with me. I appreciate conceptually these core parts of the message:

• The ‘separate self’ with personal identity, responsibility, self-control, free will and choice is an illusion. I understand how the separate self likely arose since it confers short-term evolutionary advantage, and I see that its pervasiveness in highly intelligent and domesticated creatures also appears to cause horrible suffering and seems to underlie some extremely dysfunctional suffering-provoked behaviours (violence to and abuse of self and others, ‘self’-ishness manifesting as greed, hoarding, overprotectiveness, defensiveness, envy, jealousy, taking things ‘personally’, regret over ‘irresponsibility’ and lack of ‘self’-control, shame or nostalgia about the past, terror or yearnings about the future etc).
• There is no ‘path’ to letting go of the separate self. No practice, behaviour, drug, process, or learning will increase the likelihood of the separate self’s disappearance. Such practices and studies may make the prison of separateness more comfortable, but they will not bring ‘liberation’ from the self.
• The disappearance or ‘death’ of the separate self has no significant impact on the apparent behaviour or functionality of any human or creature (from the perspective of other ‘selves’). We don’t need a separate self to do what we do (in fact we seemingly cannot do otherwise than what we do). The end of the separate self does not mean the now-selfless character becomes nihilistic, incompetent, or indecisive. In fact that apparent character now becomes part of the full-on stream of life, ‘what is happening’, no longer veiled by the pattern-obsessed mind, and may therefore actually become more functional (equanimous), more loving, more compassionate, less ‘selfish’ and more joyful (metta, karuna, mudita, upekkha, the so-called four states after ‘enlightenment’). The person or character does not become ‘enlightened’ by these states (no person can be enlightened); rather, enlightenment is the natural way of being, a way that is only obscured when the separate self intervenes (with the best of intentions, of course). This part of the radical non-duality message is infuriating to many people: To assert that all the stress, anxiety, dread, fear and intense energy that goes into the struggle to be a competent, alert, “responsible” separate self is for nothing, seems outrageous. But intuitively and intellectually it now makes sense to me.
• The sense of separate self that emerges (in most humans, apparently, around the time of birth or shortly thereafter when the mother is first recognized as separate) is not just intellectual — it is an embodied sense, something visceral. It’s very much an emotional and sensual sense, and opens the ‘separate’ creature to emotions that apparently only ‘separate’ selves feel (most of these, like enduring anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, shame and grief aren’t particularly positive emotions). It also opens the ‘separate’ creature up to sensations that apparently only ‘separate’ selves feel (apartness, proximity, distance, the sense of time, ‘otherness’). So the death of the separate self is likely to leave vestiges of separateness behind in the physical creature (trauma, ‘instinctive’ fears, conditioned actions, memories etc). The shift in the behaviour of the character that once imagined itself separate, then, likely occurs gradually and only after the death of the illusion of separateness, not instantaneously. Because the trauma, fears, conditioned actions, memories etc no longer have anything to sustain them or identify with, they apparently also fall away gradually as the entire embodied creature becomes ‘again just’ the one-ness of all-there-is.
• All there is — being, life, everything — is meaningless, without any purpose. This too offends the separate self desperate for meaning in and purpose to everything. But the lack of meaning or purpose to life doesn’t trouble me at all. Ever since I read Stephen J Gould on the randomness of evolution, I’ve let go of the need for any meaning for it. It is just what it is.

I don’t however appreciate the elements of the radical non-dual message that assert that:

• The only creature that has evolved the ‘separate self’ is the human being. This just doesn’t make sense to me. Domesticated creatures can suffer separation anxiety, and that is not just a reflex, intuitive occurrence. Many mammals and birds (at the very least) have been shown to have a ‘theory of mind’ that allows them not only to plan actions but to anticipate the response and behaviour of ‘others’. Acknowledging that the emergence of the enduring separate self (enduring in the sense that it lasts longer than brief, ‘instinctive’ fight/flight/freeze etc moments) is not limited to the human species does not, however, negate the plausibility of the overall radical non-dual message.
• The recognition that comes with the falling away of the self is that everything arises from nothing (or nothing appears as everything), and everything is both real and unreal. I know this aspect of the message is hard to put into words but there must be some better way to articulate it. Yes, the separate self clearly sees the subject-object dual universe ‘it’ perceives as uniquely real, and sees everything else as unreal. And if the self is an illusion, what ‘it’ sees as real is clearly not real, except to itself (and hence what it sees could be said to be both real — to itself — and unreal — in the context of ‘natural reality’). But what does it mean to say everything is both real and unreal? And how can everything (or anything) ‘arise’ out of nothing if there is no time in which it can arise? I can understand that, from a phenomenological perspective, there are likely many phenomena that neither the ‘self’ nor the senses of any creature can perceive (things too small or too far away for example). But to say that it is just ‘a mystery’ how nothing appears as everything, and how everything is both real and unreal, is just unsatisfactory. I don’t claim to be able to understand or ‘see’ or perceive infinity, but I can appreciate what the concept means and that it is possible, and convey what it means to others. But ‘it’s a mystery’ does not explain the concept, and especially since this part of the message is mimicked so precisely by all radical non-dualists, they must therefore have some shared conception of what it means. So tell us, damn it.
• The appearance of seemingly separate selves has no effect on what apparently happens. This is an obvious corollary of the assumption that there is no ‘free will’, but it seems self-contradictory. If the separate self underlies all suffering, then presumably the ‘self-possessed’ character’s actions, while uncontrollable (by the self or anyone), will be different from what they would have been were that character not possessed of a self, no? The delusion of a self, like the delusion of seeing ghosts, for example, is a characteristic of the character that affects how that character behaves, even if that character has no free will or choice about these behaviours. It is the game of life playing itself out. And in that case, it seems to me, the presence or absence of a perceived separate self will affect that character’s behaviour, even though it is uncontrolled. It was the separate selves that believed themselves to be Hitler, Stalin, Mao that led to the most horrific atrocities of the 20th century. Had they been ‘self-less’, it is almost impossible to conceive of them behaving the ways they did.

This is all intellectually fascinating, and intuitively it has great appeal to me. But my seemingly separate self has dug in and is not letting go. It refuses to die. ‘I’ don’t pretend, beyond having had a series of ‘glimpses’ during which my sense of separate self temporarily and briefly disappeared, to appreciate any of this beyond an intellectual and intuitive level. So ‘I’ am not awakened or enlightened (and ‘I’ can never be). Nevertheless, there are, it seems, some major shifts occurring.

Most significantly, acceptance of this message as ‘likely true’ has changed everything ‘I’ perceive and believe; everything I do and think and feel now seems to be seen through an entirely new lens (or rather perhaps without a lens that previously distorted everything). Just as discovering polyamory changed how I reacted to love songs and ‘romantic’ films that celebrate exclusive relationships, radical non-duality has changed how I see all relationships, all human activities, and the world.

My relationship with my self

 Now that I have started to see life-beyond-the-self as perfect, just as it is, timeless, wondrous being, I have developed an unusual relationship with my self (mostly, I would like it to get lost). I’m not impatient with its presence; it’s only doing what it was conditioned and evolved to do. I’m not longing for it to be gone, because my ‘glimpses’ showed that it isn’t real, and that ‘natural reality’ (what really is) is right here, and eternal. ‘I’ don’t have to strive to ‘really’ see it. It is already here, all that is. My self is just currently apparently momentarily standing in the way of seeing it, but that’s fine: there is no time, so there is no hurry. Selves are struggling away doing their best, but unfortunately, they are doing so for nothing, and for no one.

My relationship with others

This new perspective is also affecting my relationships with others. I am starting to appreciate others’ suffering more, as I become more equanimous with my own. I am slowly becoming less prone to anxiety, anger, fear, jealousy, guilt, shame and sadness as a reaction to others’ actions or to their situations or to the state of the world.

I am starting to be more sympathetic, to care about everyone a bit more — doing so seems less of a personal burden than it once did — even as I am less inclined to try to change them or their circumstances. When those I care about are suffering, I am a bit more attentive, but less invested in doing anything other than noticing and acknowledging. I take it all less personally. I know that sometimes they want me to do something that they think will make them feel better. I know that their suffering (though not their pain) is mostly a result of their identification with their selves, but I am not inclined to try to tell them so; this message is not for everyone, and it is essentially hopeless. And I am inclined to do, mostly, what they wish me to do. Why not? What does it cost ‘me’, whether it is effective or not?

I think I am seeing people more as they are, and less as I would wish/hope them to be. Because there is so much suffering in this crowded world of ‘selves’, I see most people as a bit sadder, more tragic, than I used to, but this doesn’t make me care about them less.

My relationship with love

Love is shifting a bit for me. Love is, after all, essentially selfish; it’s all about what we feel, want, and imagine in another.We love who we want the other person to be. At its best, love is a kind of temporary freedom, but that freedom is another illusion, another escape, another hiding from the apparent (to the self) awfulness of what is really real. I’ve never been very good at loving others, and I’ve been worse at being loved (it always seemed like an obligation to me).

I can no longer imagine falling in love again — that crazy rush that obliterates the self along with what is actually real. I know it makes everything else in the world seem, for a while, unimportant, irrelevant, and that’s exactly the problem. It’s a drug (actually a whole set of drugs), and after the high there is always the coming down. That’s no longer worth it to me, and I think I’m seeing my self and other selves a little more clearly now so that I can’t see myself falling again. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t love someone new, but it would be very different from ‘falling’ in love with another ‘self’.

In love I am taking others’ actions less personally. After all, they can’t help them-‘selves’ and neither can I. And they are not their selves, any more than I am. They do what they do because they can’t do otherwise. It’s crazy to take that personally. ‘We’ can’t choose who we love (or hate), or what we do, and once you appreciate the unreal nature of the self, getting upset about a relationship is like getting angry at a character in a play because you don’t like the lines they’re reading.

I think those I currently love understand all this. I am not ‘in love’ with anyone, but those I love I love differently now, more ‘really’ and enduringly and for who they really are rather than for what they do for me. Why do I so profoundly love them rather than any of the other many beautiful/lovable people in my circles and in the world? My sense is that this character that ‘I’ inhabit sees my presence with them to be uniquely useful, that this character gets pleasure doing so, and that those I love see value in my doing so. Maybe that’s what self-transcending love is about. It’s perhaps also what self-transcending friendship is about.

What I do with my time

I am retired now, so you’d think I’d have more time to do what I want or choose to do. But it doesn’t seem to be that way. I visit those I love, I relish my time alone and with friends, I do volunteer work (the local transition initiative, the local arts scene, Group Works, co-housing). I write, compose and explore new music, paint, cook (my newest hobby), and play — somehow there doesn’t seem any real choice in what ‘I’ do each day. I awaken and things get done. The only change that’s come about recently is that I’m more aware of exactly how little ‘choice’ goes into what I do. I’m blessed, though, in that I really enjoy what I am doing, and I don’t wish I was doing, or could be doing, something else.

My worldview

I had already given up belief or hope that civilization could or should be saved, and lost interest in politics, economics and other complex systems we simply cannot change or control. It’s been a long time since I believed in ‘progress’. The radical non-duality message has merely enabled me to be at peace with what I was already (not) doing.

I find Gaia theory — that our planet has evolved and acts as a single self-managing organism in its collective, collaborative best interest, compelling. Radical non-duality would say that what seems like evolution is just a purposeless unfolding, a game or experiment, the universe at play. I find this disheartening — Gaia is so lovely, such an astonishing and affirming model, it is hard to acknowledge that it is just play. The self apparently emerged as an evolutionary advance. Depending on your point of view, that advance was either catastrophic in consequence, or changed nothing. Non-duality tears apart the conceit that self-awareness, consciousness and intelligent tool-making and decision-making differentiate humans positively from other species; if anything, these illusory ‘advances’ actually demonstrate that humans are the most foolish species, living in a dream when most other creatures are fully alive.

I have always found science (the creation of models that are interesting and occasionally useful) arrogant in its assertions of knowledge and potential achievement. Radical non-duality provides some solace for that sentiment, while making it largely moot.

As a long-time misanthrope, my view of basic human nature used to be very negative — we were inherently violent, destructive, selfish and thoughtless. A few years ago my view shifted to a more generous one: that we are all doing our best, even the worst of us. Radical non-duality takes that one step further — ‘we’ are not doing anything, and our selves are not in control of what they apparently do or decide or think or feel. Now I am starting to feel as sorry for our woeful species as for all the creatures whose world and lives we have apparently desolated.

My personal pleasures and recreations

Recently I’ve come to believe that work is unnatural, and so is the compulsion to do it. I have always been a hedonist at heart, though some would call me just lazy and self-indulgent. For much of my life, pleasure-seeking has been an escape, my way of taking my mind off a reality that has always otherwise been wanting. Games and sex and sensuous creature comforts (candlelight, lamplight, warm baths, skilfully-composed music) are my favourite distractions, more intense and endurably engaging than eating or walking in nature, and vastly preferable to reading or watching films (which I find less and less enjoyable, perhaps because most of what is being written and composed these days is execrable).

I can’t see the falling away of the separate self as affecting these preferences much (non-dualists say that was the case for them). I can envision my pleasures becoming more adventurous when my fearful self dissipates, and I expect my interest in escapist entertainments will, if not wane, be at least more balanced by a growing interest in more engaged-with-the-world, less self-ish pursuits.

Creative work, on the other hand, has never been easy for me to do. Composing music, writing, cooking, painting and other recreations are hard work, and while I feel compelled to do them, they are not really pleasurable. Why then do I do them? Essentially, I can’t not. They are, I sense, not so much elements of who ‘I’ am but what all-there-is, is, expressing itself through me. That hasn’t changed, and isn’t likely to as my self gets out of the way, other than perhaps to make these difficult, essential pursuits more joyful, more pleasurable.

Intuition

‘Trust your instincts’ has been a mantra of How to Save the World since it began. The challenge has been explaining to people how you instinctive ‘know’ something, when the self insists on a rational, analytical, intellectual explanation, and views intuition with suspicion. The first instinct, I suspect, was for self-survival, and was the precursor to the emergence of the apparently separate self. My study of complexity suggests that our capacity to know things intellectually is extremely limited, which is perhaps why the self tends to (apparently) decide things based more on emotion than reason. Radical non-duality goes further and asserts that nothing can be known and that nothing is decided, and that there is no one to know or decide (or, for that matter, intuit).

So now I’m wondering if intuition is all-there-is expressing itself through us, quietly whispering the truth in our ear to guide us when the selfish intellect and our equally selfish reactive emotions get it all wrong.

So, in short, my recent study of radical non-duality, and my intellectual and intuitive appreciation of its likely veracity, have seemingly made me more compassionate, less reactive, more observant, less judgemental, more equanimous, less emotional yet somehow more joyful, more sympathetic, less identified with suffering (my own and others’), more flexible, more perceptive, more loving but less inclined to fall in love, more appreciative, less inclined to take things personally, more accepting, less ‘selfish’, more carefree, less misanthropic, even more hedonistic, less fearful, and more intuitive.

How can this be, if I have, in fact, no free will, no choice about anything? If there is no ‘I’, how can I be ‘more’ or ‘less’ of these things? Well, for now, there is an apparent ‘I’, and though it may mean and portend nothing and may be just wishful thinking, it is apparently (to me) what’s been happening. That will have to do.

The path from here to here

I have not been looking for a path to ‘liberation’ from the self for very long — just a couple of years. Radical non-duality claims there is no path, and this makes sense intuitively, though it taxes the patience of the self-weary self. The ‘path from here to here’ is a non-journey, not so much an awakening as a death. But there is no letting go — that would be a path. There is no waiting, no enlightenment, no liberation — there is no such thing as time, not even a ‘Now’, and no where to get to. There is no one. There is only all-there-is, eternal, wondrous, just being. Just this. So close, but nowhere near.

Recently I’ve been writing a lot about non-duality — the idea that the separate, in-control, free-willed self is an illusion and that ‘all-there-is’ is one ‘aliveness’, one ‘beingness’ that is ‘nothing expressed as everything’. It’s a difficult (perhaps impossible) idea to understand, because while our (apparent) thinking, striving selves can come to appreciate it conceptually, they can’t ‘realize’ it, because they are in the way of it. It only becomes apparent (to ‘not-us’) when the self drops away.

This ‘radical non-duality’, which denies that there is any path or process or practice that the self can use to achieve ‘enlightenment’ (because it’s only the seeking self that isn’t already enlightened, liberated, aware of ‘all-there-is’), is probably the most criticized of all so-called non-dual messages. Some people describe it as logically or tautologically self-contradictory or disingenuous. Some claim it is lazy (an excuse to give up trying to ‘become better’). Some insist it is nihilistic and will lead believers to disengagement, insensitivity and depression. Tony Parsons, whose fundamental statement of this message I wrote about in April, has been attacked from all sides, but he just soldiers on, honing and repeating this message patiently for those interested in it. Two slightly different statements of it from Tony, for those who prefer to listen rather than read, are here and here. They are taken from his regular European ‘meetings’ which consist simply of an opening message like the above, followed by a few hours or a few days of Q&A to explore the message and its implications.

He says his reason for holding these meetings is that people have asked him to, and he’s pleased to do so, while warning that they can be frightening or annoying for some, and that they offer no process or other ‘hope’ for the letting go of the illusion of the separate self and hence for any ‘enlightenment’ or ‘liberation’. That will happen or it won’t, he says, regardless of one’s conceptual understanding of it. The meetings appear to offer attendees (and listeners like me) an intellectual appreciation of what underlies our fundamental unhappiness with ourselves and our world, and can, he says, sometimes provoke an ‘energetic shift’ that allows this falling-away (essentially, death) of the separate self to occur. He says that’s what seems to have happened to his former self. Others, like Jim Newman, Andreas Müller and Kenneth Madden, now offer very similar ‘radical’ non-dual messages and meetings.

Of course I’ve been talking with many of the people I know about this message, since I find it so intriguing and intellectually appealing. I get a lot of strange looks, and concerns about my mental health. I realize that my appreciation for it has taken time and required a certain vector of intellectual study, without which I’d probably find it as preposterous as most others do.

What’s missing from the explanation of the messages and the meetings, I think, is an explanation of how (not why) the apparently separate self evolved. So, with some knowledge of complexity but only enough knowledge of evolutionary biology to be dangerous, I thought I’d try one out. Here it is:

Evolution, as Stephen J Gould and Richard Lewontin have explained, is a process that seems to have a set of rules but no particular purpose or goal. There is no ‘progress’, only a continuous, substantially random experimentation, with the ‘successful’ experiments continued and the unsuccessful ones abandoned. The primary ‘rule’ of evolution is that survival of a particular creature or environment depends upon ‘fitting in’ optimally with all other living creatures and environments. If a creature fits in and enhances the quality of life of the complex whole, it will survive and procreate; otherwise it won’t. If an environment leads to a high quality of life for the creatures that co-create it, it will endure; otherwise it will be changed by the creatures to one that does. In this way, for example, the earth’s early atmosphere that was toxic to most forms of life evolved, by trial and error over billions of years, into one that sustains a remarkable diversity of life. Likewise, creatures that were unable to adapt to this evolving environment perished, while those that could thrived, as long as they coexisted in mutual cooperation with other creatures who collectively supported that environment and ecosystem.

There is no ‘reason’ for these rules; they just are. The result on this planet has been delightful, but if it hadn’t been, evolution would have continued regardless, according to these same rules. There may be other places or universes where different rules apply, and the whole thing may just be a game played by no one for no reason; to our great annoyance, that’s all beyond our understanding.

So what has appeared to happen on this planet has been a profusion of complex life and periods of greater complexity intermingled with great extinctions, depending on random variables and how the ‘game’ played out. None of it has required anything that could be called ‘consciousness’.

I’m positing that at some point, an evolutionary experiment occurred in some creatures that might be called ‘instinct’. The evolution of an instinct to fight, flee or freeze at times of great existential threat to the survival of the collectivity of a creature, enabled by the growing complexity of neurons in some of these creatures (whether the evolution of neurons was an accident or conferred some evolutionary advantage and hence was perpetuated we cannot know), turned out to be of at least short-term evolutionary advantage in itself. Hence creatures with such ‘instincts’ survived and thrived.

What is this ‘instinct’? We could argue that it is ‘subconscious’, but it would seem to require a sense that the collectivity of the creature that ‘has’ it is somehow ‘separate’ and ‘threatened’ — that it has, at least subconsciously, a sense of ‘self’.

Or does it? If the instinct evolved and is a ‘successful’ evolution, why should it require any sense of self or separateness or sub-consciousness? Watch the incredibly sophisticated fleeing, freezing and hiding behaviours of a silverfish (an ubiquitous insect that has thrived on the planet for half a billion years) and ask what is driving this creature’s behaviours. Are silverfish conscious of being separate ‘selves’ under threat, or some kind of automatons with enough intelligence or instinct to ‘know’ when and where to go and how to hide so you can’t find them or get at them? Where does this intelligence and instinct reside? How did they ‘learn’ this, especially in the context of your unique house and this specific time and set of circumstances? Whatever your answer, you have to agree that this behaviour is evolutionarily successful and quite complex.

Now consider the fight/flight/freeze behaviours of small mammals and birds. More sophisticated, of course, but does this reflect a sense of separate ‘self’ the insects lack? Biologists agree that crows have a separate sense of self and a ‘theory of mind’ — an awareness of the separateness of others and an ability to speculate on those others’ behaviours. These creatures also exhibit fight/flight/freeze behaviours, but are they substantially different from those of insects? What’s been observed is that after dealing with existential threats mammals and birds “shake off” the threat, and some scientists’ speculation is that they then return to “now time” — a connected, timeless state in which that sense of separateness and self vanishes.

And next, of course, consider our own species. We also have instincts (too often ignored), and there is growing scientific evidence that the separate ‘self’ we conceive of is just that — a concept of the mind that doesn’t ‘reside’ anywhere and the existence of which cannot be scientifically validated. Scientists have also showed that when we believe we are making a decision to do something, the neural activity associated with decision-making actually occurs after the action has begun, suggesting the ‘mind’ or ‘self’ doesn’t make decisions, it simply rationalizes them after the fact. The model of self the mind constructs needs to justify its actions and ‘itself’, so it adjusts the facts to suit the model it has constructed — the model of a separate self ‘inhabiting’ the body with self-control, free will and conscious choice.

Why would the separate ‘self’ have evolved in such a powerful way in humans (and perhaps some other creatures), to the point it convinces ‘itself’ it exists, is in control and has responsibility and free will to make decisions and take actions? And why would it evolve to the point it continues to ‘exist’ at all times except during deep sleep, rather than just during times of existential threat?

I would speculate that this evolved as an exaptation (an unintended consequence of the continuing enlargement of the brain and brain capacity), rather than as an adaptation essential to or highly useful to our evolutionary survival. Evolution is a process of constant random variation (experimentation) to ‘test’ the possibilities of different evolutionary adaptations. That’s how the ‘rules’ of evolution work. Birds evolved feathers, scientists now believe, for light-weight temperature regulation, and only later did the exaptation of flight with those feathers evolve as a very successful experiment that has continued to evolve since.

Flight was an accident. Was the evolution of the ‘enduring self’ and its belief in control, free will, choice, responsibility, and the permanent existence of ‘time’, similarly an accident, an exaptation? I think this is highly plausible. In the short run, the emergence of continuous self-awareness (self-consciousness) might well have been evolutionarily successful — it would allow keener diligence over the safety of the creature, and enable the development of tools (technologies) that benefit that creature over the longer term. Those tools would include settlement (civilization), agriculture, language, self-domestication and weaponry.

In the longer run, however, such an exaptation would likely be severely problematic. While other creatures could shake off the stress of brief ‘self-consciousness’ and return to a peaceful state, the illusion of continuous self-awareness would bring with it continuous stress, a never-ending sense of anxiety and alert for danger (and the imagination to conceive of all kinds of new, non-existent dangers). The body evolves very slowly — could it adapt to this sudden continuous stress?

The illusion of continuous separateness and self-awareness would also bring disconnection from the sense of unity, cooperation and oneness that has been such an evolutionary success since the dawn of life, and hence lead to actions that would harm other creatures, possibly to the extent it would threaten entire species, environments and ecosystems. And with the false sense of control and free will, it would bring a sense of authority, competence, manageability and superiority that would make its actions reckless and even more destructive, and lead to massive conflicts with others with the same sense of superiority.

The problem is that, as it evolved more and more elaborate tools to ‘make sense’ of its apparent sense of separateness, self-control, free will, power, superiority and responsibility, the sense of separateness has become so pervasive that we can no longer imagine it not being real. It’s like a coat we put on to play a role and now cannot take off. It has become ‘us’. It’s a prison that keeps us locked up during our entire illusory time-bookended lives, and causes us endless suffering. Despite all we do (believing our actions to be a result of our free will and choice), things don’t ever seem to get better for any extended period of time, and we struggle ceaselessly with anxiety, fear, anger and grief over things we think we can or ‘should be’ able to control, or things we think are being controlled by others (other people, gods etc). The only escape is to let the illusory separate self ‘die’ — and the self isn’t about to allow that to happen until there is no other choice.

Of course, it’s possible that Tony’s critics are right and this is all just a fanciful, plausible, unprovable, dangerous, hopeless idea. And it’s possible that it’s my laziness, my exhaustion with a lifetime of struggle, making me want to believe it.

But the other possibility is that he’s right. That the emergence of the illusory separate self was an accident of evolution, with short-term advantage but in the longer term disastrous for our suffering selves and our desolated world. That ‘natural reality’ is perfect, wondrous, and free of suffering (though not free of pain). And that, having lost our sense of that natural reality very early in our lives, ‘we’ cannot hope to find it again.

Though I remain the eternal Doubting Thomas, this makes more sense to me, intuitively, than any other explanation for why things seem to be the way they are, that I have heard. Brief glimpses of ‘natural reality’ that have occurred throughout my life (when ‘I’ briefly dropped away), and the sincerity of those offering this message, this explanation, suggest to me that this is, just possibly, what’s really happening. The implications are mind-boggling.

So here I stand, believing, as much as I believe anything, that ‘I’ am an illusion, but that I am powerless to be or do otherwise. It seems a discouraging, tragic message, but still, I’d rather know than continue to believe a lie, even if the truth is, ultimately, a message of hopelessness and grief. Somehow, it fills me with joy, with the exhilaration of knowing that the insanity that is this life and this world is not real. This is not ‘real’ liberation, but it’s liberating knowledge. It will have to do.

It’s not that different, in that sense, from the other two great realizations I have come to in the past decade: that our civilization will end, mostly unpleasantly, in this century, and that there is nothing I can do about that; and that we’re all doing our best, even the apparent despots and tyrants and murderers and inflictors of suffering and misery and trauma, and that ‘our best’ more often than not actually makes things worse.

These three realizations are the terrible knowledge of our species, here and now. And despite them all, life is amazing, wonderful, beautiful, and worth everything.

image: photoshopped image of ‘anonymous’ from pixabay.com (CC0 license — public domain dedication)