I’ve stumbled upon another liberating yet terrifying realization after years of searching and reading and hiking and receiving counseling. And with nearly everything I write, this is my learned non-professional understanding, so who knows how real it really is. So there!
Self is a projection. Self is purely a mental model, a story. Self can change, and of course self, like everything (!) is always undergoing change. Sure “Raymond” has thinning brown hair and is about 1.8 meters tall, but those are just descriptions of current attributes. Raymond isn’t smart or funny or even right-handed. I really identify with all those things of course, but they are just the result of a lot of self-talk about who I am and then diverting the resources necessary to prop up that image and sustain it.
Just having finished a fascinating book titled How to Change Your Mind my actual mind is now very soft and malleable. The book was an account of psychedelic therapy research. The book introduced me to a lot of new metaphors and understandings of how the brain works. Three main themes for me fall into separateness, entropy, and sledding. Let’s unpack these together.
Separateness. Of course, this is an illusion. Everything is connected to everything else. The ancient mystics knew this. Modern scientists know this. I know this. There is so much power and relief and growth and love just on the other side of that illusory door of separation from this “self” to all the other stuff out there, the dogs and trees and background radiation and black holes and near perfect vacuum. It is okay. We are all one. We knew this as a newborn. Our brains at that time didn’t understand “self”. The first five to ten years of life are largely about “learning” this untruth via moving through the ancient parts of the brain into the evolutionarily newer parts as society and maturation mold us. Eventually our default mode network is built, fully functional, and we are live by its rule. We “learn” abstract reasoning, we learn how to tune out 99+% of stimuli, we learn how to think about thinking (metacognition), we learn “our story”, we build our “self”. Experiencing that newborn pre-self, the undifferentiated energy/space/time can be accessed through meditation (turning off the brain) or by certain breathing techniques (as I understand it) and by high dose psychedelics apparently. It is fascinating. The story from all these paths seems to be the same, realizing that there is no self, only love manifesting. There is also no fear. Compassion is the natural state of the brain.
Entropy. I get this one, many years of chemical engineering did teach me a few things. Looking at the brain through the eyes of entropy (disorder or randomness) is useful. At one end of the spectrum is overly ordered (insufficient entropy). This is depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and many other illnesses. At the far other end we have psychosis. I never really thought about the word “psyco,” it is Greek for mental and “sis” suffixes mean inflammation of. Just a completely disorganized brain, too much entropy, or if you prefer a swollen brain. We are born with tons of entropy and we “learn” to organize it. We learn we don’t even have to take in much outside stimuli to test our mental models as we move through our virtual world. Psychedelics can be thought to “shake the snow-globe.” They give the system a massive dose of temporary randomness and then the system is more able to find new patterns, new beliefs, new ways of being.
This leads to the third concept, or really metaphor, sledding. I know from my many years of counseling work that I have physically changed my brain. I have, through lots of work and lots of good help, learned to tune down the neural networks built around unhealthy or undesirable or outdated ways of thinking and believing and living and built or strengthened their healthier counterparts. The brain is plastic and malleable. The self is too. I am not depressed; I have tendencies to fall into “depressive snow ruts or ruminations”. I am separate from my thoughts.
Sledding after a freshly fallen snow. Anything is possible. But by later in the day several dominant paths have been laid down. Now if one goes to the top for a new run, we find we usually end up in one of a few paths leading to one of a few directions or destinations, seemingly without regard to where or how we start. Mine tend to be anxiety paths and a few depressive ones and a whole bunch of distracting meaningless mental game paths. These are so deep as to be nearly down to bare earth through the snow. But if we could get a new big snowfall (psychedelics) or carefully build a few new paths through much effort (therapy) or realize that there is no need to sled and there might not even be a hill (mindfulness) a world of possibilities would be open to us.
Raymond is not sure exactly what he is or why but he has learned that sunny crisp mornings like that evolving out his window right now are to be enjoyed. They offer an opportunity to get out the main worn sled-runs. Raymond is going to do just that. Whatever Raymond is and isn’t will probably still be there later on 😊 .