If you're trying to control your mind, who is the "you" doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that. 

For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality? 

In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself." 

This sort of issue, or problem, pops up frequently in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind. In a chapter I read today, "Ego dissolution," he talks about the epistemic agent model, which typically creates the notion of a knowing self.

I realize that epistemic agent is an unfamiliar term for most people. It certainly is for me. These examples help us understand what Metzinger means by this.

Let us consider a few examples of times when we have an epistemic agent model: the conscious experience of (1) being a thinking self, (2) being a self in the very act of attending, and (3) being a meditator attempting to "have an insight" (e.g., to recognize her true nature).

Let's begin with the first example. Whenever you try to to mentally calculate, to think logically, or to actively form a new concept, you experience yourself as an epistemic agent, as a thinking self that wants to understand something, as an entity that wants to create new knowledge. 

You have a goal, and you act to reach the goal. Mental calculation is effortful, as is forming a new concept or attempting to create a novel philosophical argument. When you do it, you feel like you must control your own mind, and -- if you're successful -- an inner experience of ownership and agency arises.

This experience results from a special form of deliberate, goal-directed mental action, which in turn leads to the transient combination of experiential qualities: a feeling of mental effort, plus a sense of ownership and agency. Perhaps falsely, this combination of experiential qualities can be described as a specific, nonbodily sense of self.

...What about the second example of a context in which we have an epistemic agent model? If you are not thinking at all, but instead carefully attending to the sensations in your feet as you slowly walk, to the sound of a bell vanishing into silence, or to the self-generated sound-shape of a mantra in your mind doing the same, then you have an epistemic agent model.

There is something that you want to perceive and experience as precisely as possible. Again, you try to gently control the dynamics of an inner process, but this time by optimizing for precision. There is also a quality of motivation, maybe even earnestness. In the carefulness of your attuning, there is a sense of effort, which may be more or less subtle.

A goal state has been selected, and the conscious self in the act of attending actively pursues this goal state -- this is our second example of what it means for the self to be an epistemic agent. The self is active, and it wants to know something. It wants to realize the goal state in its own mind. 

And here is the third example. If you are a meditator and have read about fancy theories involving recognition of the "true self" or the effortlessness of spacious awareness, if you're expecting to learn to see your own true nature and "let go" in some profound way, if you intellectually know the difference between dual mindfulness and nondual mindfulness, then you are in serious trouble.

You have become infected with a new kind of goal state, something that can apparently be known and realized. Now it is almost impossible to prevent the birth of a new and particularly clever epistemic agent model in your mind. This time, it purports to want to know pure, nondual awareness -- it is trying to touch the elephant as directly as possible while still cleverly sustaining the blind toucher's own existence.

I realize that the passages I've shared above aren't the easiest reading. But they're important reading. Because what Metzinger has done here -- he's both an experienced meditator and an academic philosopher -- is show that the sense of self or ego is present when thinking logically, when perceiving mindfully, and when seeking one's true nature in meditation.

During the 20 years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, I've been told many times by commenters that I think too much and that's why I haven't succeeded in my meditation. This assumes, of course, that there's a big difference between thinking and meditating successfully.

Metzinger doesn't see that difference. He's focused on what is typically common to thinking, perceiving, and meditating: the presence of a self that seeks to know something.

The closed-eyed meditator sitting motionless in the lotus posture on a cushion may seem to be engaged in a very different activity from a wide-eyed mathematician scribbling equations on a blackboard, but what unites them is a self that seeks to know something. 

There's an alternative, says Metzinger on the chapter's last page. He says that sometimes the experience of pure awareness leads to a state of "ego dissolution."

In many cases, what dissolves is precisely the inner image of the knowing self, the earnest meditator, or the epistemic agent model in your brain. In almost all cases and for almost all human beings, this epistemic agent model functions as the unit of identification. 

Whenever we have one, we automatically experience ourselves as being this thinking self (just as Descartes did), as being the invisible entity that controls the focus of attention, as being the entity that is curious and longs for pleasant surprises, and as being an informavore who always wants to know more.

The phenomenal character of MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience], by contrast, lacks the craving for novelty and the two elements of dynamic knowingness and egoic identification. MPE's frequently seem to break their inner connection, weakening the process of identification with the fictitious knowing self.

If there is knowledge, it is no longer egoic knowledge.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

That's very interesting. And aspirational, in a way.

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I don't suppose it would be at all easy to arrive at some kind of data on this, but it would be super interesting to see how many of those meditators who reach the pure awareness exprience, end up going on to the ego dissolution thing. And also what proportion of those who did reach the ego dissolution state, reached there via the meditational pure-awareness route.

(I guess the only other deliberate causal route, than the meditational, would be by using drugs. I guess it would be cool to have similar figures for that route as well. But again, very difficult to actually get at the actual data, absolutely.)

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Also, would one even want to reach the ego dissolution state? Why?

(In past times, and when done now but strictly within the framework originating in past times, there's lots of implicit assumptions about God and Heaven and Lokas and rebirth and whatnot, which present their own rationale and indeed urgency for arriving at, or at any rate aspiring for, that state. But stripped of all of that baggage, while this makes for a very interesting study, but why would anyone even want to reach that kind of a state, the ego dissolution thing?)

(Said the guy whose own practice is geared towards precisely that! ...But seriously, I find myself asking as I read this piece: Why?)

[sant64]

Whoop de doo. What does it all mean Basil?

It eludes me how this love affair with neuroscientific verbiage is any better (i.e., practical) than singing "My Savior Lives" at Calvary Chapel.

[Ron E.]

Yes, I can see how the self – what Metzinger calls the epistemic agent is a crafty little construct and how it can manifest in any manner of ways. It seems to come down to the question of being aware and honest. Perhaps, even when academically and through research it is seen to have no reality apart from the accumulated brain/mind information (from where the self construct emerges) and which all organisms need to navigate through their environment.

I don’t see the self as a particular mystery; it is my identity; it describes who and what I am. That being said, the self, my identity, has to be a mind-created structure and by mind I understand that to be merely our accumulated experiences and information with its wealth of data from where the self-structure develops.

So yes, Metzinger describes several subtle ways in which our crafty little self continues to maintain itself through our apparent earnest enquiries. He describes the dissolving of this ‘inner image’ and being left with knowledge, but no longer ‘egoic knowledge’. In Zen, Advaita and non-dual teachings, the aim is to bring the mind (or I would say, the aware and observing brain/body/senses) to realise that it is the mind with all its past material that colours and overlays perception preventing being with present moment experience. – expressed in Zen etc as ‘Just this’, or ‘This is it’ etc.

The mind, even the so-called egoic mind I would say still has to exist, the art being to see how it can easily deceive us through its (naturally occurring) mind constructed identities. The ‘thing’ then to dis-solve is not the survival driven mind/ego but to really see its functioning and dissolving its dominance allowing an opening to the awareness of, well, to tritely repeat – ‘just this’, or ‘present moment reality’.

[sant64]

Bankei (1622-93) was a Rinzai master. His path to enlightenment was straightforward, almost easy. He told people that all they had to do was simply stay in the Buddha-mind.

"If everyone just stays in the Buddhamind, that's all they have to do -- that takes care of everything. Why do you want to go and think up other things to do? There's no need to. Just dwell in the Unborn."

I found this in Zen Around the World, a readable history of Zen Buddhism. What Bankei was referring to re "other things to do" might be connected to the turbulence of Zen's history. I had assumed that the path of Zen through the centuries was rather steady and stable from Bodhidharma on. But actually, there was quite a bit of innovation and borrowing and conflict. Quite a bit of revision and reform to get it right.

But whatever the changes, all would agree, if by intuition only, that there is such a thing as the unborn mind. And so I would agree that pursuing this unborn mind is a noble pursuit, whether on the cushion or koan or Metzinger's inquiries.

[um]

@ RON

>> I don’t see the self as a particular mystery; it is my identity; it describes who and what I am. That being said, the self, my identity, has to be a mind-created structure and by mind I understand that to be merely our accumulated experiences and information with its wealth of data from where the self-structure develops.> I came into this world and when I came conscious of my existence, I started my search for that plave of my origin, the place from where i came in this world.<<

[um]

@#$@^%$ ..again something went wrong

[Ron E.]

"I came into this world and when I came conscious of my existence, I started my search for that plave of my origin, the place from where i came in this world."

um. There was no 'I' when you came into this world. What you call 'I', or 'my' only gradually arrived as forms became names and concepts forming the apparent you..

[um]

@ Ron

Something went wrong in my previous message.

These words are from Faqiir Chand speaking about himself, having as far as he could remember that "calling" to know from where he came. As far as I understand he was, using "I" not referring to the ego form by the name of Faqir Chand, conditioned to be who he worldly was seen by others, but what came to life in his mothers womb and born from her.

I have no idea of what happens to what is alive in a mothers womb. Maybe THERE the forming of the "I" starts ...I do remember to have read somewhere that in India, pregnant women, are instructed or adviced to read certain literature to form the mindset of the one to be born ..we are what what we eat ..not only by the body as food but also as what we consume mentally.

But generally spoken it is as you wrote.

We are aware, when alive and how we are aware, and what we are aware of and why is beyond our knowledge, for the simple reason that we had no say in form we are aware in say the apparatus ..nor what we are aware of in what we call the environment.

Maybe Faqir chand was reffering to that awareness as related to aliveness. in its purest form, ... inner PEACE