So we start as human being right now and we start this question of "what am I?" or similar, perhaps "do I exist?" or "what is the reason I am here?" or, well any number of such enquiries can start.
Now there is a obvious pattern to this. We are somewhere and we want to move forward to somewhere else. This actually maps really well to our vision. We are tree living apes so we have forward facing vision to see in front of us to make decision to move through the tree canopy. Our vision is built around seeing ahead and moving forward. A cow is less concerned with moving forward as it lives on flat grassland and see sideways to scan for predators and its potentially aggressive mates. So quite naturally we look ahead and move forward and this is what we try and do with our question about self.
But we are playing with a tricky thing here because the self by its very nature does not just extend forward in a single journey. When we tried to grasp it we understood at the outset that it applies to us. I mean what is so magical about enquiring about someone else? We are most interested in those other people who can in some way reflect back to us. If they just ignore us and we study them from afar it's not a very interesting journey. But the moment there is a hint that this can return to me suddenly we are all excited. "I love you" we say, is seriously hoping that this is returned. Unrequited love is never complete, it needs that "self" returned. But if we skip other people and just get to the core of this: what about me? This means that while we are looking forward, we are also being looked at by our self! We are not just walking forward we are aware that we are moving forward. This is no ordinary journey, it is one done both as person moving forward and also person not moving forward but standing still watching. We have a problem then: how can I both move forward and not move at the same time?
That is Paulo Coelho "Alchemist" and any number of other stories and pieces of wisdom. We travel forward looking for answers only to be told the answer is inside you, or it is where you started, or be still and stop searching and you will find it. This is because we are not just the person searching, we are the person looking at the person searching. We are both! Often this is split into the ego, the small self who is on the inside of the quest: the Hero, the protagonist. And the large self who is on the outside the quest who looks in on the small self and who does not actually go ion the journey they just watch it.
Now this is bewildering because we are looking for a single closed entity to grasp. Unfortunately look at the small print this is not what you signed up for. You didn't go looking for any random person, you went looking for your self. And that means you are both the person you find and the person who finds it. And what is extraordinary about this search is the person who finds it is already here!
It has been commented on before that hidden in A.A.Milne's stories of Pooh are actually some surprisingly profound ideas. Benjamin Hoff makes a whole book called The Tao of Pooh out of this. One of the most remarkable stories is the one "In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle". I loved this story so much as a kid that my Dad used to call me Woozle (or Wozzle as he pronounced it) and also more commonly Pooh.
Perhaps that suggests an early fascination with the subject matter of thus blog and especially this post. Having wandered around the spinney a few times watching the mounting number of woozle paths it is Christopher Robin in the tree who provides the required perspective. "You are following your own tracks". The moment that Pooh realises that the woozle he is following is the same as himself he gets the sense of "self" and feels very foolish. These two things are the same. This is the aufhebung (to borrow from Hegel) when his system which has self-reference through following tracks embeds the meta perspective provided by the outside system of Christopher Robin the tree. Pooh has a mini enlightenment here. He is now no longer stuck in the path following system, but is now part of the tree looking system. Combining these he can see both that he was following woozles, but see that they are really himself. When Dad called me Woozle whether intentionally or otherwise this is an extraordinary moment of self reference because while I have grasped the Christopher Robin perspective to see that Pooh is a Woozle, but Dad is denoting me as a Woozle and Pooh and so is taking the even bigger perspective of the reader who sees how Christopher Robin's perspective changes Pooh's to make him realise he is not a Woozle. I guess I gained a moment of self-awareness in the moment that where Pooh realises he is a Woozle, I realised that in all the tracks we form in the world hoping to find our self actually our greater self is just watching all this activity from the perspective of a tree at the centre.
Now this fruitless journey is however very important. There might be disbelief that the Self is so intangible. We set out at the top to find our self and now we are empty handed. The thing to note here is that we started off looking for a solid core of self, a fixed thing to get our hands on once and for all. That will get lost eventually. Going around these Hofstadter "strange loops" we start to realise there is no fixed entity. When Pooh realised he was the Woozle he didn't catch a solid entity, he caught himself and felt foolish because he saw that he already had himself. And yet what did he catch? He walked off from a mornings hunting with nothing, and yet in that nothing he had something which was himself. In the same moment when we realise we're not taking anything home from thus search, we gain our greater self who we had already. On the other hand if we try and take anything home we actually lose a part of our self. That in fact is the essence of sin, grasping, reification, objectification and materialism and the cause of suffering.
So self is a loop with no final platform. We go forward only to have our Christopher Robin wake us up to having gone nowhere and attained nothing. But then where are we?
Are we the thing going forward inside the apparent world and system, or are the we Christopher Robin ready to tap us on the shoulder and bring us back to self-reflective awareness from the outside, forcing us to put ourselves down and look with fresh eyes a someone else?
Well that question is: what were we doing before we began the search at the top of the page? We only got into this loop because we got enticed into a "self" question. We thought for a minute we might be able to catch that Woozle and we went on a hunt. And the we got rescued by Christopher Robin who brought us back again out of the loop but with a new perspective outside the world of the hunter.
We are not therefore anywhere. This is the ultimate truth of self. These loops only happen when we try and put a limit and boundary on our self and begin a hunt. It will lead to enlightenment eventually and an ultimately enlightenment where we no longer start any more of these hunts for self.
Buddha concluded at the end of his search that "everything was not self." This is an acknowledgement that even when we realise that all woozles are just our self we have still caught nothing. We are nothing.
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