Recently I’ve been wrestling with the concept of Self and making little headway. I’m hoping that by writing this out I’ll generate some insights – but apologies in advance if there’s rambling along the way. I’m not sure quite where this is headed yet.
I’ll start with an experience I had recently. Years ago I used to suffer from sleep paralysis regularly. I say “suffer” because, back then, I didn’t understand SP, or realise it could be used to generate lucid dreams. I wasn’t frightened – just found it deeply uncomfortable.
Cut forward several years and I became interested in LDs and learnt about the connection between SP and LDs. For a while it was great. SP still hit me spontaneously and I could also purposely induce it and, from there, slip into LDs. Gradually, though, SP became harder and harder to produce – and eventually impossible.
This process started with an increase in false awakenings during LDs. I’d be in the midst of an LD and undergo a false awakening which would end my lucidity. It felt like my mind was literally kicking me out of LDs, as though it/I disapproved of them on some level.
For a while I could almost induce SP; I’d start to experience vibrations and auditory phenomena, but they’d peter out to nothing. For years now I haven’t been able to get even to that stage, either intentionally or unintentionally. I still have semi-lucid dreams on occasion, but they occur randomly, not through any agency on my part. I’ve wondered occasionally why this change should have come about but never gave it too much thought. While I welcome LDs, and while they’ve helped to shape my interpretation of reality, they’ve never been my end goal, so I wasn’t too concerned.
Cut to a fortnight ago. For the first time in a long time I’m on the verge of a spontaneous SP and I use all my old tricks to encourage it along. But the vibrations fade to nothing and I suddenly realise that it’s my fault. There’s an unpleasant sensation associated with the SP this time, which I think can best be described as something like descent. In the past, SP may have been accompanied by an initial feeling of physical heaviness, but there was also a sense of mental lightness – like a part of me was lifting up or being vibrated outwards. This time the feeling of mental heaviness was oppressive.
I’ve never undergone full anaesthesia before, but I think the sensation I was experiencing must be similar, though more unpleasantly drawn out. It was like being unwillingly dragged towards oblivion and a loss of self-awareness. Quite unlike gently drifting into sleep/dreams - or being hurled into them, which is how SP>>LD usually feels to me.
Anyway – even as I was trying to encourage the SP I was simultaneously fighting it because of the dragging sensation, which effectively killed the SP.
So now I’ve been more intensively contemplating this experience, along with the general decline of SP in my life, and it occurs to me that it might all be connected to some of the problems I’ve been wrestling with regarding what Self is.
I know that in this sub /u/mindseal has previously defined mind as a threefold capacity to know, will and experience, which I wouldn’t dispute.
But for me there’s a gap, in that I can’t express how a concept of self in the form of consistent (or inconsistent) personality or character fits into this model.
I suppose what I’m driving at is - in order for the mind to will anything, there has to be an impulse or desire “behind” that will. To attempt a metaphor, if will is a gun, there still has to be a someone who decides what to point it at and when to shoot.
So who is that? How “real” am I/that person? Am I just a habit, like the laws of physics, or am I more intrinsic and essential? How enduring am “I”? How inconstant?
These questions strike me as vital if a person pursues subjective idealism with a view to effecting change. I’ve experienced dreams where this entire lifetime of experiences has been wiped from my memory. I find those dreams disconcerting – but I’d argue that even in those dreams I retain core properties which persist even in the absence of memories of this lifetime. My moral code, my sense of humour, my emotional reactions and – sorry, things are about to get fluffy but I lack words to adequately describe this - a sort of observing self-aware knowingness which seems to sit permanently at the back of my mind. I also feel like these qualities have been with me in this lifetime for as far back as I can remember.
I’m not saying that I haven’t been altered at all by this life, but I think that those properties have, by and large, been central to my existence - to what I will, to how I interpret experience - and they have not changed substantially. Sometimes, as an intellectual exercise, I’ve sat down, played devil’s advocate with myself, and tried to change them, with no success.
But how does any of this connect to the decline of SP/LD in my life? I think the connection lies in my attachment to my concept of my self/my personality, to the me behind the scenes who Knows, Wills and Experiences – and a fear of losing that self.
This may seem counterintuitive. If anything, you are surely more likely to lose sight of yourself in non-lucid dreams. Except that non-lucid dreams perhaps present less of a challenge to a physicalist mindset. And I’ve recently realised that I may be erroneously attaching my concept of Self/personality to the waking world and its qualities. In other words, I've been mentally attaching my personality to the physicalist experience, even though I wouldn’t actually describe myself as a physicalist.
So – if I lucid dream, and if I turn the laws of physics/nature as they appear in the waking world on their head, it’s an indication that this world isn’t real/doesn’t have an immutable existence separate to me.
Well… we all know that. That’s why we’re here, right? But it’s quite one thing to know this and another altogether to really live it.
So what if lucid dreams really force me up against subjective idealism and I feel, by extension, that the Self I identify with is similarly mutable and substanceless? What if, by pursuing this path, I lose my self? I’m not saying I won’t exist – I am emphatically not one of those “there is no self” types. But perhaps I will become changed beyond recognition, just as I hope to change the world beyond recognition.
This is the roadblock I’ve been hitting and, now that I’ve typed it out in black and white, I think it’s wrong-headed. Evidently I like my personality as is (which, hey, is a bonus nice realisation) and I’m not keen on drastic alteration of my self. But I’ve been erroneously linking my self to the "outer" world instead of linking it to… my self.
And I think that the dragging/oblivion feeling I experienced in that aborted SP was a manifestation of that fear, just as the decline in SP/LDing in my life is probably a result of that fear. And I also suspect my regular dreams have been less rich, less far reaching for the same reason – I’ve unconsciously been keeping this grip on a world which, by and large, I detest.
So. Evidently I’ve identified a fear in myself of mental drifting and losing sight of the me who I feel that I am. And to counteract that I’ve been anchoring myself to this substandard existence. What I should have been doing was making my self my anchor – because then the world experience is less important and can flow/change more readily.
And perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter how mutable or permanent your personality/self can be, but how mutable you want it to be.
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I don't agree. If you take this route, then behind that desire there needs to be something else too. Why should that desire be the originating point? You can just keep going backward forever. Then it becomes desires and impulses all the way down and this kind of analysis will leave you in a victim mentality. You'll see yourself as a victim of some deep past if you think like that. That's not a healthy way to think.
On the other hand, if you don't go backward in time, but just rise to higher degrees of abstraction right now, that can be insightful without robbing your sense of agency. So for example, I want a soft chair, but what I really want is bodily comfort. So bodily comfort is a more general, more abstract desire that is "behind" me wanting a soft chair, but this doesn't necessarily come from my past. It's right now. This vertical stack of desire gets produced and satisfied now and of course there is also historicity to it, but it's important not to assign causality to history. At the very least, don't assign too much causality to it. A hefty chunk of causality has to be your will right now if you don't want to be a victim. A very empowering view is that you're constructing your history right now every time you engage in a backward-looking intent. So you're making and remaking history on the go, creating an illusion of it. I'm not saying that's how it is. I'm am only saying, this is one way to think.
From the POV of subjective idealism, varying intents produce varying concomitant experiences. So there is not necessarily a right or a wrong way to think about something like the past or the future, but you have to be prepared that with one style of thinking you get experience A, and with another style of thinking you get experience B. As long as you accept that, and take responsibility, then choose the style that suits you best. Your way doesn't need to be "the only one." It just needs to work for you.
Similarly, there are many many ways to think about the self. Each style of self-thinking produces its own corresponding experiential result, especially when this style is adhered to over many lifetimes, consistently, or to such a deep level that it transcends time altogether.
There are 3 different topics here which are not wise to mix up:
What you are.
What you think you are.
What others think you are.
3 gets in the way of 2 and 1, and 2 gets in the way of 1. 1 is the most important, 2 is less important and 3 is the least important. This is how I rank them. Because I rank them in this way, because this is my style, I get an experience pattern that corresponds to this style. I am satisfied with this experience pattern and I take responsibility, therefore, I can keep going while being satisfied, and nothing can rattle me. My mind is as sturdy as a fortress that occupies an inaccessible private dimension.
In the deepest sense what mind is and what you are, are the same thing.
Mind knows. You know.
Mind wills. You will.
Mind experiences. You experience.
In other words, "you" are this 3-sided capacity of mind. However, that's very abstract and it doesn't have any specific personality. It doesn't even require a body or a normal space-time environmental perception. So of course you'll end up thinking things like, "I am tall" or "I am strong" or "I am fast" or "I love SI" and so on. You'll flesh out your personality with more details. A lot more details than your basic self would require. So it's like having a hook and then hanging a hat on that hook. The self is like a hook onto which you can hang anything or nothing. You can dress yourself up in as many qualities as you want, or in as few qualities as you want. The fact that you have this choice is saying something about you.
Also, the way you know yourself can never be identical to the way others know you. Because you know yourself through a unique perspective, but so do the others. Therefore, whatever the other people say about you, for metaphysical reasons, has to contain serious distortions and it has to represent more the perspectives of others and their reactions to you, than what you really are. A reaction someone is having to you is based on how you are and how they are, both.
In subjective idealism "the other" is a deliberately poorly controlled aspect of your own mind. If you wish, you can control this aspect to an arbitrary degree, but then it will continue to lose its otherness so long as you do that. If you remove otherness from the seemingly "other" people, you'll realize you're completely and totally alone. If you want things to have a seemingly independent life and to offer you some sense of surprise, and if you want to feel as though you live in an environment of some sort, as though something surrounds you, you have to disown an aspect of your own mind and set it loose. Because of this, there is some unavoidable and metaphysically necessitated degree of distortion that you'll be facing when interacting with either the environment or "the others."
But even the way you yourself think about yourself is also a choice you have. But you're not any specific choice, right? If I raise my arm, am I an armupper? If I lower my arm, am I then a downarmer? Am I defined by my choices? Others say "yes" but others are metaphysically committed to distorting my essential character, so their "yes" can be safely deposited into a trash bin. This kind of question is something I have to figure out for myself, by myself. I would suggest the same to you. You have to figure some things out for yourself by yourself. Of course you can talk about them like you've done now, but then you have to figure them out in private anyway. How can I force you to see these words in any specific way? You'll have to decide what's what for yourself, especially with regard to some things that stand beyond convention.
If you like your personality my default stance is to say, bless you, more power to you. There must be a good reason (or a good set of reasons) why you like it. Keep cultivating the things you like. In your next life your personality will be close to what it is now, because all the things you like cannot vanish when the appearance of the body vanishes. Similarly, you might have noticed that when you dream your basic personality doesn't necessarily change all that much, right? Under physicalism the body is the causal origin of personality, but in subjective idealism your own mind, which is to say you in your most essential sense, is the causal origin of your entire experience, including the experience you have of your own body, of this world as you know and experience it, and so forth. Because that's the case, once the body-world pattern becomes incoherent, it will not necessarily damage your commitments, and then in your next life, when a new body-world pattern stabilizes itself, you can continue forward with your commitments and habits. Often times this is not a good thing, because you might also have a habit follow you from life to life that you've grown tired of and want to remove, but there it is, still sticking around long past its expiration date.
Like I've dreamed myself as a dragon and other sorts of beings before, but guess what? Whether I take this or that shape, my attitude is roughly the same. If I am wearing a dragon body and using dragon abilities, there is still some basic mindseal-ness behind it that is uniquely my own. And yet I also know I am not that. I exist, but I am not anything specific. I can define myself, but I am not permanently chained by those self-definitions. I can change my self-definitions. That's the sort of power I have. No one can verify my existence for me, and even if they could, it would only undermine and lower the status of what I actually am.
Also, I know myself, but no one else knows me. To others I am just a shape that talks. To myself I am not just a shape that talks. I don't apprehend myself in the same way others apprehend me. So perspectival thinking is very important for untangling many knots.
Your commitments can be as flexible or as sturdy as you want them to be. If you want to change your personality you can. But if you want to keep it the same, you also can. :) SI is supposed to be like this: empowering. The answer is almost always: you can. Not is or isn't, but can. Almost always.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-10 13:14:23 (dx3x93v)
We're agreed here! It's certainly a bottomless pit and the source of more than one of my headaches.
I don't... know if I agree with that. I suppose it could happen that way but I don't think I'm in danger of it. I mean - I'm not saying that you can/should trace all of your proclivities back to their source until you remember that time you were a maltreated Greek slave in a Roman household and realise that's why you've always had a mysterious fear of chickens, or whatever. I think what I'm driving at is more this:
So this has very much been my experience as well.
I don't have a word for what you describe here as "some basic mindseal-ness behind it" - or none, anyway, that aren't loaded with unwanted connotations and semantic baggage.
But it's what I'm suggesting might be integral to self along with the capacity to know, will and experience, at that most abstract level.
If it isn't then the process you describe, whereby the self is a hook upon which something or nothing is hung, becomes an extremely arbitrary one. So arbitrary that it might as well not happen, or happen in any fashion at all.
That initial decision to hang something on the hook - where'd that come from?
I realise that I'm posing questions which, as you rightly say, can only be answered on an individual level. And they circle concepts that are so abstract that language really does become grossly inadequate. My interest is (mostly) academic.
From a more practical POV I do find SI extremely empowering - and I can also see how it permits different approaches to these questions, if not answers.
Still. The questions assert themselves when you're trying to sleep at 3am.
Originally commented by u/BraverNewerWorld on 2018-04-18 19:52:15 (dxk64nh)
What does capacity mean if it's not exercised at all times? However a capacity that is exercised has to involve itself in some particulars. So I have a capacity to know, but what I actually know right now is specific and from the POV of subjective idealism, ultimately what I know is subject to my own will. I can change the state of my own knowing, if I so choose. It might not be easy, but I can set about it and do it.
So the specifics of personality are subject to commitment. Meaning, they can be essential to me if I commit to them being essential. Or I can change them. It's up to me. But whether I exercise my capacity in this or that way, there is always some specific way that I am conducting myself. This is how I see it happening for myself.
You're assuming there was an initial decision, and you're asking as if it's in the past. You're hanging something on that hook right now. Why are you doing it? You have to ask yourself this question, if you want to ask it at all. If I give you an answer that is right for me, it might be also a good and empowering answer for you as well, or it might not. I am careful with letting others define me and frame me.
Not mine. I have both theoretical and practical interests. I mostly talk about theory here, but I also use what I talk about for myself in ways that are practical. These are mostly private and I don't like talking about the details of those too much.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. It makes your life interesting and possibly worth living. Right? At least, I want to believe that.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-04-20 02:52:14 (dxmttzy)