The inner accountant

Just fleshing out ideas already mentioned.

On a desert island we live a profoundly simple life of immediacy. There is what is, and what needs to be done and that is it. It is odd that people go mad in this situation. I don't think that is necessary. I suggest that this is just deep expectations playing in their mind and causing stress. It is quite possible to enter a "island cast away" mentality without any injury. Indeed it is a useful, but profoundly difficult, exercise I suggest.

We are not on desert islands. In social contexts we keep a record of the people we meet. This is essential to create meaningful social interactions. And biologists would say it is for survival as knowing who to trust and who to be defensive with are critical to our well being. It is odd that even in a relatively civilised world we nevertheless do have a record of who we can trust and who we need be careful of. That accountant records all kinds of details like who makes us feel good, who has hurt us, who we find difficult, who we owe things to.

Now into this social accountancy obviously there is room for one more. Ourself. It is worth accounting ourself because we need to know who we are stronger and better than and who we are weaker and worse than so we can prepare ourself when we meet. We can account things like who we have hurt so we can behaviour accordingly when we meet again. And so on.

This accountant gets really thorough!

Now in the context of this blog who is this accountant?

Well it must be myself.

So we have a classic logic situation of the accountant also have an entry for themself.

Can't we immediately see that the accountant is not the same as the entry they have for themself? The entry is just a tally on paper, while the accountant is the real thing. So we really think we can replace the accountant with the marks on the page?

Absolutely not. And yet this is what we daily forget.

So within the context of the tally it may be true that someone had cheated on us multiple times and we no longer trust them.

This is fair enough. But the mistake we now make is to say that the "accountant has been cheated on" or more colloquially "I have been cheated on."

Really? Who is this I? Where is it? It is definitely not in the pages of the log book. Only the entries in the log book concern being cheated on.

SO this seems an unnatural direction of discussion because we are so used to thinking about ourself in the same terms as the log book. But even if we do allow this, the log book represents such a tiny part of ourself that it is easier to say there is no connection. Whatever has been recorded in the log book happened to someone else is one way to see it. Or it happened into the Past to someone who is gone now. Or is happened to our little finger but does not affect the rest of us.

The problem and why we always fall back to accountant thinking is that the real me is not tangible. It is not recordable or clearly referenced. I have a name, but the person behind that name is always changing. The current Prada Paradoxe advert has the tagline  "I'm never the same, but I'm always myself," which is part true as long as myself is not a fixed thing. We can be ourself while always being different. But that is a dangerous thought because it breaks down under stress immediately into accountancy mode where we grasp at a fixed version of ourself. Perhaps we have done something wrong, it is recorded in the ledger. We know it was wrong, we will never do it again. That means we have changed. So how do we think about ourself: the one who did wrong, or the one who knows not to do it again? The first is easy to grasp, the second is free unbounded and ungraspable. It is much easier to grasp the self who did wrong and punish them than to open up to the new forward moving self who knows not to do this again.

Christianity is all about this. Our tangible self dies and takes the sin, and we if we transform to let it go and never sin again are freed into new life. It is a interesting reuse of the Jewish scape goat idea. I wonder what the original meaning of that was and whether it involved transformation as part of forgiveness?

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So where does this leave us in the freedom vs determinism debate?

If there is no "centre" to experience and if the events I experience and the things I do all determine themselves without me being in the mix then I have no control over everything and I am pointless. This makes my whole life seem like a machine or film pr recording and I am useless and pointless.

Well yes and no.

The pointless thing is the conception of an extra being stuck on to the world who I think is me. But the not pointless thing is who is having this mistaken conception?

Now the tricky thing that we struggle to get our heads around is that the being who is having the conception is outside that conception, or indeed any conception. That is SRH. When we think about ourself the focus is not what is being thought but that it is being thought. Where we feel depressed is that thought arising by themselves look the same as thoughts being thought by "me." So the "me" is pointless. However once we stop expecting there to be a "me" and we just don't think this any more then thoughts are find again. Nothing is missing, no one is lost, there is nothing to be depressed about. Even better there is no one to be depressed or miss anything... ever! It is liberating.

So "free will" only makes sense when we are using a concept of a separate self to understand the world. We are conceiving this separate entity and then asking how it fits into the picture of the world we have. But if that conception is a mistake at the start then we can just bin all these enquiring. I mean am I free to wonder if there is free will?