For about 35 years, during the religious phase of my life, the Eastern philosophy I'd embraced had a sort of mantra: self-realization before God-realization.
Meaning, first we disciples needed to discover our true self as Soul, a drop of the spiritual ocean. Then we could proceed to the next step, becoming one with the ocean of God. Or at least as close to oneness as is possible for a soul-drop.
The basic notion, which is shared with other spiritual approaches and also some psychological theories, was that there's a "real you" hidden inside each of us. Through meditation, prayer, introspection, therapy, or some other means, the veil that prevents us from knowing who we really are can be lifted.
Supposedly that takes quite a bit of work. It could even be the job of a lifetime, and arguably the most important goal we humans can pursue.
Eventually I began to question that assumption. I resonated with a marvelous 2005 piece from The Onion, a satirical web site, called "Search For Self Called Off After 38 Years." Excerpts:
CHICAGO—The longtime search for self conducted by area man Andrew Speth was called off this week, the 38-year-old said Monday.
“I always thought that if I kept searching and exploring, I’d discover who I truly was,” said Speth from his Wrigleyville efficiency. “Well, I looked deep into the innermost recesses of my soul, I plumbed the depths of my subconscious, and you know what I found? An empty, windowless room the size of an aircraft hangar. From now on, if anybody needs me, I’ll be sprawled out on this couch drinking black-cherry soda and watching Law & Order like everybody else.”
“Fuck it,” he added.
...Since calling off the search, Speth has canceled his yoga classes, turned in his organic co-op membership card, and withdrawn plans to go on a sweat-lodge retreat in Saskatchewan. On Tuesday afternoon, he loaded books by such diverse authors as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Meister Eckhart, and George Gurdjieff into a box labeled “free shit,” and left it outside of his apartment beside a trash can.
...Though hardened and haggard from his long search, Speth expressed relief that it was over. Asked if he had any advice for those who are continuing on their own searches, Speth had two words of advice: “Give up.”
“Trust me—there’s nothing out there for you to find,” Speth said. “You’re wasting your life. The sooner you realize you have no self to discover, the sooner you can get on with what’s truly important: celebrity magazines, snack foods, and Internet porn.”
Well, my own calling-off of the search for my self has taken a different direction. I still buy books, but they are about secular Buddhism and neuroscience, each of which is big on there not being a self to find.
But just like the fictional Speth, I find that giving up on the quest to discover the "real you" inside my head is a massive relief. It's hard to believe that I spent so much time looking for my genuine self when, from my current perspective, all along there never was such a self to find.
It's similar to looking for my iPhone, only to discover that it's in my pocket -- the obvious difference being that with my phone, there's something to be found, whereas with my self, the thing doesn't exist.
Here's some passages along this line from my current neuroscience/psychology reading, Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind.
Modularity implies that there isn't one, unified "self" in your head, that there isn't a "real" "you" in there somewhere. The intuition that there is might be useful for various purposes, but if modularity is right, then this intuition is wrong.
...Consider a recent study in which participants were shown pictures of a number of faces, including one picture of themselves, along with a set of pictures of themselves morphed with highly attractive (and unattractive) features that made them look more (or less) attractive. Participants frequently identified one of the faces morphed with the highly attractive features -- the better looking face -- as their own.
Cases like this are called "self-deception" because the subjects seem to believe something they somehow shouldn't, and the thing they shouldn't is, in some way, "good" for them. Here we expect that people see their own faces, not digitally enhanced, every day in the mirror.
Surely we know what we look like. This intuition -- c'mon, you know what you look like -- makes it seem like "we're deceiving ourselves." We really know what we look like, but we're telling ourselves that we're more attractive than we really are.
I want to be clear that I don't know what the italicized words in that last sentence might mean. I don't know what it means to "really" believe something or who or what is doing the telling or the listening. Indeed, without invoking Buzzy or something like him, expressions like "we're telling ourselves" make no sense.
Using phrases like this is just bad psychology because it implies a little Buzzy, with "real" beliefs, who is communicating with some unspecified something.
...In all of this it doesn't seem to me that there's anything plausibly called "self-deception" going on. This labeling problem stems from the insistence in psychology on the word "self," and thinking of a unified "self" instead of a collection of modules.
As we'll see in the next two chapters, almost any time you come across a theory with the word "self" in it, you should check your wallet. Here, I don't see why being wrong in some systematic way suggests that there's any deception of any "self."
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