How to be Self

First off what is a "self"

A plain object is simple. It has an inside which is it, and an outside which is the world.

A self is the same, but it also includes some representation of the object inside the object.

Compare these two sentences:

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

"This sentence is 35 characters long"

The first sentence is just a simple sentence which makes some statement about the world beyond it. The inside says something about the outside.

The second sentence contains a reference to itself. The bit inside quotes says something about the bit inside quotes.

This distinction applies to all selves. And the most pertinent is human selves. 

A human self is a body, but which contains some version of itself.

All selves have two problems.

(1) Where an ordinary object is complete, in that what it is is no more complicated than what it is. A self, since it contains some reference to itself, is unable to be complete. To fully define a self we need to know what the reference resolves too, but since it  resolves to the self that we are typing to define we can never complete the definition. We have never know a self entirely. This is Godel's Incompleteness.

(2) Where an ordinary object has a clear boundary between what is the object and what is the world, a self does not. Since a self is mapped in some way into itself, so is the world. It means a self cannot be separated from the world like an ordinary object. This leads to the "Tat Tvam Asi" (You are That) of Hinduism.

Now both are already most vividly described in this blog by considering a feature of vision. To see something, it must be seen. For things to appear they need to be seen which is an active process. In particular we know that the eye needs light to see. So it means that everything we see has involved light entering our eye. Now when we see something far away from us we tend to think of ourselves like an object as described above. We think of ourselves as having an inside where the seeing is happening, and an outside where the world that we are seeing exists. We even have a little version of ourselves at the centre of the world, like right now sitting down and reading this. The words are on the computer in front of us, and light then heads over here where the seeing is happening. But we just acknowledged that you can't see anything that hasn't been seen. So it means that the words on the computer in front of you have already been seen! The light has already entered your eyes for that computer to even be there. And if the light has already entered your eyes then what is this thing sitting in front of the computer? It is not doing any seeing at all. The seeing already happened over there. So like with the diagram above we suddenly realise that the thing sitting there in front of the computer that for all our life we thought was "me" is actually does an representation of the true me that is doing the seeing.

Buddha calls this the "double arrow" when he describes the practical problem with this set up above. Because we have two selves: our real self involved in the world as it is happening, the one doing the real seeing which is making the world appear, and then this second self which is like a puppet at the centre of the world we are pretending is doing the seeing just as a child pretends to give their doll a drink from a cup, we live our life twice. Once as it is happening, and then again as we act out what is happening to a doll in our mind. The double arrow comes from when a bad thing happens. We get the initial impact say a literal pain when the arrow hits us. But this is not the worst part. We then get a second pain when the doll at the centre gets the arrow. We get to see the arrow from the outside strike us, and this time instead of it just being the pain, it is the pain being inflicted on an object. It gains all kinds of extra significance. The actual experience of pain could be well gone by now, but the perceived injury done to this precious doll will linger for a long time. That is the second arrow.

Because we don't realise that being a self, means we have a reference to ourselves inside, we try to reify this reference and make it into a complete and well defined object. But we forget then that it is only the image inside a real living object. And because it is only the image of the real object, that object can only be made sense of once we make sense of the image, but crucially that image at the centre can only be made sense of when we realise it is just an image being held by a real object. The two are co-dependent, and fundamentally irresolvable into a single object. From this we get the inter-dependency of the Yin-Yang:

The White has a self which is the Black, and the Black has a self which is the White. For a human perhaps I think I am the White and the world is the Black. But I quickly see that where for a straighforward object it would be a simple Black/White distinction, for me as a self I can see myself and the world in my own heart, I am both the white and the black. And this makes the world also both the black and the white.

Now above is just one, and perhaps one of the more vivid ways (as it concerns our most vivid sense and consciousness) to see how we constantly try to simplify our selfhood into a plain object. We are always trying to throw our arms around some identity, call it myself, and try to complete it as a fixed and stable manifestation of our self. But it always fails because to become identical what we hold, we abandon the one who holds it and it falls and smashes on the floor.

As a self we are fundamentally unresolved and incomplete. This is what makes us alive. Yet we are constantly drawn to forget this and become an object which is dead. Yet it just takes the simplest recognition again to see that the object that is dead is being apprehended by one that is alive and we break out again. We can spin like this our whole lives: becoming this, reifying and then stepping out to be that. And endless journey which becomes smoother once we learn to be both holder and held.

In the meantime the ways in which we try to become a definite existing thing are as countless as the stars limited only by our endless desires and our vast creativity for illusion.