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.