From Jamie’s Channel: https://youtu.be/F_8hbv3G1Q8
How the World Thinks - global philosophy
Self-realization is the insight into the subjective experience of “who am I” that results in the sudden conclusion of self-image or ego, which are the thoughts we identify with as “who we think we are”. The result of self-realization is an ongoing feeling of peace, the end of compulsively thinking about yourself, and what is described in Buddhism, Hinduism, or Zen as “the end of suffering”, suffering in this context referring to the negative emotional experience in response to our own beliefs about ourselves being damaged, rather than the experience of an event itself. For example, getting rejected by someone you have a crush on might be a bit a letdown, similar to a small bruise, but the ongoing feeling of shame, anxiety, comparison, anger or loss as a result of thinking of yourself as incompetent, unattractive, or that she was into you is referred to as suffering.
While this is not often believed to be the case, Self-realization is not gradual or something you learn, it is a sudden phenomenon like turning a light switch from on to off. It is typically brought about through the result of a meditative practice, enquiry into “who am I?”, temporarily induced through psychedelics as part of a process referred to as “ego-death” or suddenly realized as a result of analysis into the creation of our self-image in the first place – which is the self-knowledge we collect and identify with over our lifetime. The resulting non-egoic state is likened to the “natural state” as it is essentially what we already are and have been our whole life, but for lack of a better word, forgot, as it’s bandaged over by beliefs about who we are that we’ve never actually questioned or understood.
While Buddhist, Hindu, Zen, or spiritual communities get a bit lost in their own sauce by describing self realization as “leaving the stream”, “enlightenment”, “waking up” or “living without time”, that is mostly just slam poetry, and I think it really misleads people to imagining that either it’s all complete nonsense, or that there is some ethereal psychedelic trance like state you can permanently achieve by living in the mountaintops with your legs crossed, sipping fluoride free water, activating your 7 infinity chakras, and meditating to the Last Airbender. You don’t have “stages of spiritual growth” as anime or a YouTube search will lead you to think, that’s all religious or spiritual belief, beliefs being exactly what ego or self-image is itself composed of and is what self-enquiry is examining. Self realization results in the permanent end of your own cognitive neuroticism which derives from the deeply held beliefs you have about who you are, your past, and your future. It is not some kind of religious, drug, or spiritual experience. It is not permanent ecstasy or watching your life play out like a movie. It is a purely secular, physiological phenomenon that has for thousands of years become mythologized and turned into religion or westernized and turned into sexy exercises and mental bodybuilding with cool outfits and Whitelaw.
In my opinion a more practical and plain English description that helps people understand the scope of self-realization is as an insight into the nature of your own self-identity that results in the complete conclusion of all psychological insecurity, which includes things like regret, anxiety, despair, hopelessness, anger at other people’s opinions, hatred, envy, jealousy, lust, greed, ambition, perfectionism, attachment, pity, disappointment, pride, comparison, and any emotional state that comes paired with thinking about yourself, including nightmares and the emotional relationship to dreams. The key point being that this is a complete uprooting, never to return, opposed to our conventional efforts to only reduce our psychological insecurity through gradual self-improvement, achievement, conforming to our self-image, following a life philosophy, controlling people’s behaviours, a routine lifestyle, therapy, coaching, drugs, being liked by others, trying to find unique characteristics in ourself, self-comparison, partner dependency, rationalization, justification, distraction, blame, and emotional avoidance or overcoming. Any psychological security we might achieve through those means also being impermanent and constantly threatened to be torn down by real events like a break-up, passing of a loved one, losing our job or social status, getting old, or even simply being offended, insulted, or rejected by someone.
This phenomenon is the same thing that people like J Krishnamurti tried to communicate intellectually, it is was what Ramana Maharshi tried to communicate as a form of consciousness based monism, it was what Zen tried to teach for centuries with silence, which is to point out that knowledge creates misunderstanding of yourself, not understanding; it was what George Gurdjieff tried to teach by ramming an enormous wedge between your biggest insecurities and your immediate perception of what is happening to try to get you to see that the schism between what you believe and what you perceive are the cause of all internal conflict, cool moustache too; and it was what various religious figures tried to point out dramatically before someone at ancient BuzzFeed said “got it, top ten commandments you won’t believe number 7”; it was what the Tao Te Ching says over and over again on every page, and it is what talk therapy accidentally begins to probe the surface of, which is forcing us to communicate our beliefs about ourselves in order to bring errors in our self- understanding to our own awareness, which fixes the error the moment it is recognized, and then the intentional part which is the enormous corpus of psychological knowledge will try to help us address the emotional and behavioural consequences of how we psychologically experience our life.
The reason this topic is so hard to communicate and is now just associated with religion or smoking weed and playing bongos, is because it’s actually not knowledge, but because the only tool we generally believe exists for understanding something is accumulating and refining our knowledge and then thinking about it with that knowledge we’ve turned it into a bunch of superstitions and activities by the broad cultural belief that it is something you learn, like getting a spiritual PhD or the consequence of gradual improvement like mental bodybuilding. It is not something you learn and get better at it; it is something you realize. Like if you were scrambling to pack up your camping gear for a trip you forgot about, and when your friend pulls up, they say “what are you doing? We’re staying at a hotel” and you’d be like “oooooh, I didn’t realize”. That is what a realization is. What you thought was the case was not the case and now your mood and behaviour instantly change in response. Self- realization is not a philosophy or a new belief, it’s an out of left field, completely secular psychological phenomenon that occurs in relationship to a realization about who you actually are that you had misunderstood up until that point, like having a sort of permanent post nut clarity if the person you were sleeping with was yourself. Which to be fair, is probably the case anyway.
The root of self-enquiry is that as far back as we can remember we are concerned with problems that affect what we call “me”. Our entire lives we endeavour to resolve, avoid, overcome, blame or rationalize the problems that are experienced by “me”. We invent philosophies, rules, behaviours, and coping mechanisms to deal with our own psychological distress whether we’ve been afflicted by something as simple as getting our feelings hurt by someone’s insult, all the way to the goals we have in our life and how we cope with serious trauma or death. Self-enquiry is the examination not of our problems, which is always our usual focus, but what exactly is the entity that we call “me” that we have identified with our entire life, that is affected by our problems? I think it’s important to get a definition across, because when anyone who thoughtfully talks about this stuff refers to self-image or ego, it refers to the entirety of our own self-knowledge. There is a vocabulary problem that exists because the translations of old Buddhist, Zen, or Hindu descriptions use English loan words from historical western psychology that don’t really apply. Self realization is described as the ending of self-image or ego in western language, and your “mind” in historical eastern language, but nowadays because everyone immediately thinks of Freud, Jung or their favourite politician when you say ego, insecure people on social media when you say “self-image” or your whole brain when you say mind, a more modern definition of what is being described is just “who you think you are” psychologically. Self-realization is the conclusion of self-knowledge. It doesn’t conclude because you force it to stop, it concludes because it realizes the answer. When you say “I’m thinking about myself” it is absolutely all the thoughts in that structure that is being referred to. If you are thinking about you, your past, your future, or your life, that is your self-image. Your self- image means exactly that, your self as you imagine it.
I think a good way to introduce the concept is with what are called Koans in Zen, because even though they’re kinda goofy, we’re all familiar with them in more ways than one. A Zen cliché we’ve all heard is the question “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” and while that’s what Chris Rock should have called his last stand up tour, what most people don’t know is the purpose of Zen Koans in the first place, which is to ask an unanswerable question so the questioned person can see the endless cycle of thought and emotions that they themselves generate from their pursuit to find an answer. In essence, it’s a prank. It is sending your kids into the hardware store to pick up some blinker fluid. In the zen context, that final arrival at complete futility, that moment of mental silence when you stop searching entirely and say “wait a minute, you can’t clap with one hand”, that’s the point. Your own thinking created a problem where no problem existed, that you then form beliefs around and become emotionally involved with. To be fair, this was of course many years before rap videos discovered that you can in fact clap with no hands, but that’s another topic. Koans in general are usually comical or very simple in nature, but in a bit of a twist, self-realization is not the Koan, your self-image is. A common cliché a lot of people repeat is “self-realization is realizing there is no self to realize” which they then misinterpret as a sign that says, “you don’t need to explore this cave, there’s nothing in it”, but it is actually a sign that says “you are exploring a cave with nothing in it, come out of the cave”. Our self-image, which is our effort to figure out who we are in the conventional way of gradually accumulating life experience and refining our knowledge of ourselves is the Koan. Who you actually have always been exists underneath, unencumbered and not at all discontent or insecure, but is masked by the effort to rationalize and figure yourself and your life out using your knowledge.
To try to summarize the whole concept, who we think we are is the identifications we have with our own self-image. At our absolute core, every one of us walks around every day believing our whole lives that who we are is an imagined object call “me”. We think about ourselves endlessly and cannot evaluate our lives without doing so. What you call “me” are objects of thought in your imagination that you identify with and mistakenly believe are you. Intelligent, unintelligent, attractive, ugly, successful, unsuccessful, right, wrong, funny, unfunny, cool, uncool, good, bad, old, young, republican, democrat, black, white, Christian, Hindu. These are all categorizations of knowledge we look at and say, “yeah that’s me”. The most prominent of which being “my past, my future, and ‘who I think I am’“. This is what self-realization as a phenomenon is contingent upon. We genuinely believe, not that our imagination of ourselves is accurate or inaccurate, but that our imagination of ourselves is in fact symbolizing something that is actually us. Self-realization is seeing that there is absolutely no connection at all, and that it is not possible to think about yourself because it’s like trying to taste your own tongue. Absolutely everything that you think you are is wrong, because the instrument you are using, which is self-knowledge, is itself the error, and cannot ever make contact with itself. Self- knowledge is an oxymoron because all knowledge must be a symbol of something that is not itself. It is like asking a hologram to show you what it really looks like when it is not taking on the appearance of something else. This realization causes a permanent conclusion to self-knowledge and thinking about yourself because it is seen to not just have no purpose, it has always been impossible. I’m not saying that if you’re black, just kidding you’re actually Michael Jackson, I am talking about a much more primordial and serious question of what your actual existence as a living organism fundamentally is, and what our whole lives we have truly been trying to answer when we say “I’m thinking about myself”, which is impossible, and must be rephrased as “Who or what am I?” in order to permanently resolve the question and the insecurity it itself creates.
And so, let’s start with that, who do we think we are. Fundamentally, who we think we are is our self- image, our self as we imagine it, which is a collection of thoughts that we identify with and use to describe ourselves. For example, when I say, “who is Jimmy?” my brain collects information and facts about my friend Jimmy and stores them as a particular bundle of knowledge so I can recognize, describe, and interact with him. This makes perfect sense because I’m not Jimmy, I don’t have his memories, so I have to create an image of what goes on in his life through his communication and my external observations of him. Similarly, we have the same structure in our brain for what we call “me”. There is a central thought called “me” and then a bunch of thoughts connected to that which we call our self-image, ego, or self-knowledge. Things like how smart am I, how attractive am I, how successful am I, how likeable am I, how good or bad I think my childhood was, what race am I, what religion am I, What political ideals I have, who I want to be in the future, what are my strengths and weaknesses, my big 5 or hexaco personality type, my star sign, my archetypal identifications, what type of people I dislike, what type of people I like, how I should behave etc. And the incessant activity of this thought structure means that you’re constantly thinking whenever you’re not engaged in an activity or concentrating because your self-image is constantly receiving new data from interacting with you and trying to update itself. We are always taking in new information, rehashing it, and trying to constantly improve upon, deny, conform to or change our self-knowledge because we believe by accurately assessing who we are it allows us to act more effectively in the world in relationship to others and navigate from our past to our future.
We experience emotional hurt and distress from other people’s opinions and our own thoughts about ourselves because our thoughts can literally change who we think we are. If I think I am an introvert, and someone says “god, introverts are so awkward and cold. Cringe.” I will experience an emotional and intellectual response because I believe that this person is talking about me. If I think I am an introvert and this person’s assessment of me is wrong, I get angry because I think I am an introvert and they’re totally wrong about me. If I admire this person and think they might be right, I might get hurt because I think I am an introvert, that is an undesirable thing to be, and I will try to change myself in the future so other people won’t dislike me. In reality, I’m not an introvert - an introvert is an abstraction of me. I am the fact of whatever I am, and an introvert is a symbol used to try to describe me. I then recognize myself in the symbol, like a mirror, and mistakenly think that the symbol is me, so I can then be hurt if someone attacks the symbol. This phenomenon of mistaking ourselves for an abstraction and then being hurt or frightened by threats to that abstraction is the basis of the identity we have created in our minds called “me”.
If you read a horoscope, and it says “Scorpio, you must acknowledge that you are a big nerd” we might say “hey, I’m not a big nerd” and it’s like bro, you’re not a Scorpio. This is obvious to anyone who doesn’t believe in astrology, and is observably true because you are not a scorpion, but when the identifications relate to your particular beliefs about yourself, you automatically have a psychological response. If you think you’re pretty smart, then take an IQ test, and it says “please pay 15 dollars for full results” and then when you do that it says “lol, reddit moment” you might feel like you’re a bit of a dumbass, but why does this bother us? Our intelligence has not changed because someone has insulted us, what has been attacked is our belief that we are intelligent, which is our self-image. These are softball examples, but imagine how quickly your attitude to life would change if you lived your whole life, got to the age of 80, said “peace out bitches” and died. Then instantly you woke up in a completely different reality, someone took off your headset, and they said, “that’ll be $70”. You’d be sitting there thinking “holy shit… Fucking inflation dude”.
Self realization has nothing to do with creating a new philosophy or belief, it is entirely the examination of what we currently do believe about ourselves, and the subsequent realization is that trying to think about yourself is like walking through a hall of mirrors. Not a single reflection is actually accurate, which is not that hard to understand, but the crux is realizing that even if you think you’ve averaged them all out and have a pretty good sense of what you actually look like, that entity you are looking at is not you, that is your reflection, but you still are fearful of the mirror being shattered because you believe it represents a past or future event. Self-realization is not a new belief that replaces your old beliefs like philosophy, religion, or self-improvement, all the beliefs about yourself just end, they themselves are errors that are hurting you and causing insecurity.
When someone says, “They hurt my feelings” what that means is “They’ve damaged my beliefs about myself”, and because we believe we are our beliefs about ourself, we genuinely have an emotional response to being insulted because we think who we actually are is being attacked. At a basic level, this is observably false because if someone calls you ugly it does not change your physical appearance. If someone calls you dumb it does not change your intelligence, if someone says, “nice kids shoes, loser” when you’re wearing your favourite light up shoes, you’re probably thinking “they can’t be kids shoes, I’m 37”.
It is important to observe that this process is automatic. You cannot simply come up with a new philosophy or life motto like writing positive affirmations on your mirror or saying, “it’s only a loss when you sell” and have it do much of anything. That’s just thoughts and prayers. As long as this structural belief system that is your self-image continues to operate in your brain because you believe it to be yourself, you cannot stop reacting to your own thoughts about who you are, your past, your future, what you think of other people, and what others think of you, you can only change your reactions and coping mechanisms, or at best change your physical behaviour, have multiple positive experiences in a specific scenario, and then your brain will reduce the neurotic emotion you have in that particular circumstance in the future, which we broadly call “self-improvement”, which is really just changing your beliefs about yourself to match your new capacities. In contrast, Self realization is the actual end of this automatic process. It is not a manual concentrative intervention like mindfulness, “watching your thoughts like clouds” or “put your attention on the negative emotion and realize it’s just a sensation”, it is actually seeing that the automatic process is caused by believing who you are is your self-image, and the moment you examine what that structure is down to its roots and realize it was always just a symbol you recognize yourself in, like a reflection, and you then identify what is actually being reflected in the first place, the process ends automatically and the neuroticism stops arising. It is not reassuring yourself your imagination isn’t real, it is that you don’t get your feelings hurt or become angered by the other person’s comment in the first place. It is not that you are extremely anxious to go to go on a date, but then you remind yourself that girls are like spiders and are just afraid of you as you are of them and then you’re like “wait, no not like that”, it’s that the social anxiety completely stops arising. You don’t need to rationalize or fight something that isn’t there in the first place.
One of the big hints that perhaps our current self-understanding is irrational is that we form images of ourselves the same way we form images of another person, despite having access to our own memories already. It makes sense that I need to create an image in my own mind of who my friend Jimmy is, because I am not him. I take my own memories, recombine them with what we call human intelligence, and use my own thinking to construct an abstraction of Jimmy’s experiences that lives in my own brain. If I could access Jimmy’s memory directly, this step would obviously be unnecessary, so the question is why do I create an image I call “Me” when I already have my own memories? Clearly, I wouldn’t need to speculate about Jimmy’s life if I had immediate access to all of his memories and experiences, so why do I have to try to imagine myself when I already have my own memories and experiences? One answer would be “I need to know what other people think of me”, but that doesn’t make any sense because what other people think of you is in your image of them, not your image of yourself. You don’t actually know what other people think, you can only speculate based on their communication and behaviour. The answer to the question “why do I have to create an image of myself when I have my own memories?” is actually really simple: you don’t. It is redundant. You are always exactly who you are in your entirety every moment you are alive; you don’t ever need to think about yourself unless you’re trying to communicate your experience to another person. That is physiologically why this phenomenon actually exists. It is not a religious or spiritual belief. It is not mental bodybuilding or more knowledge. It is realizing your brain is running two clients called “me” that you have always mistaken for one. If you can discern clearly, exactly who “me” actually is, the unnecessary mini client closes itself and reallocates those resources, because it is a derivative of the other that is caused by mistaking yourself for an imagined other person called “me”.
What is obviously the case for each of us, but largely ignored, is that every single one of us spends our entire lives acting out a desire to manage our psychological self-evaluation, which is our self-image, because our psychological self-evaluation is our mood. It is what we think of ourselves and our circumstances, and one of our deeply held beliefs, like solving our own hunger, is that our emotions are something that has resolution in external objects. It appears this way to us because it’s partially true, but not for the reason we think it is. If you are hungry, and you eat something, you will not be hungry anymore, that is a real, physical reaction. Similarly, but not at all the same, if you are lonely because you don’t have a partner, and then you get a great boyfriend or girlfriend, you will no longer feel lonely. If you are bored and feeling stuck, and then you get an opportunity to go on a great adventure, you will not feel bored and stuck anymore. This is why pretty much every single person, all the time, their whole life, seeks resolution to their emotional problems by finding solutions to their problems in the external world, or if they can’t do anything about them, coping with their problems or trying to rationalize them.
What we don’t ever recognize is that if you are lonely, and get a great partner, your loneliness goes away. But why? There are two beliefs most of us have: one is that you are enjoying the joy and sexual attraction from meeting your partner and that has somehow cancelled out the negative emotions, but that is a positive experience in reaction to this new circumstance, which is its own, standalone thing. Your emotions don’t “cancel each other out” they are sensations in your body that indicate something like a dashboard in a car. The other belief, which is much more important, is that we think our loneliness went away because it appears to us that loneliness is the feeling of isolation of not having an intimate partner or close friends, but if you look really closely, it’s not the fact that you are isolated that causes loneliness, it is the desire for meaningful companionship that is itself loneliness. Your loneliness comes to an end not because you have a cool girlfriend, but because your individual desire for companionship is no longer operating. It is not that social anxiety is causing me to be frightened of talking to people, it is my belief that there is a risk in socialization that is itself social anxiety. It is not that my despair makes me feel like my life is meaningless, it is the belief that my life is meaningless that is itself despair. It is not my ambition that is causing me to be self-critical, is it my belief that my current state of being is insufficient that is itself ambition. It is not that I am angry because I was wronged, it is the belief I was wronged that is itself anger. It is not even that my hopelessness is caused by someone close to me dying, it is my belief that my life is irreversibly in disrepair that is itself hopelessness. The emotion does not cause the belief and the belief does not cause the emotion, they are both the same thing, they are not separate. Take the classic cliche “guys want to solve the problem; girls want to feel understood” which is two sides of exactly the same coin. It does not matter which side you naturally lean towards or what gender you are, they are the same. If you want to solve the problem, it is because you see a problem as something to overcome, if you want to rationalize your emotional state, it is because you see the problem as something to diminish. They both work as a means of addressing our emotion, but they are both only partial, because they are both misunderstandings of the underlying phenomenon causing our suffering, which is our beliefs about an external object that we genuinely perceive as the root of the problem. If we have a terrible day at work, we all say “damn, my boss was a complete ass to me today” and squarely put the blame on our boss, an external object. Your hypothetical girlfriend might say “well, what did you do that caused him to act that way?” which is trying to get you to improve yourself in order to overcome the problem, while I might say “ugh, I just feel only a real dick would be so mean about how I schedule my day if I still get my work done” which is trying to diminish the problem by rationalizing my behaviour and devaluing his criticism, and then your hypothetical girlfriend would point out that you’re self- employed and I’d be like “why are you never on my side”.
What this means is that in our lives, we conventionally believe that contentment and peace of mind lies in solving our problems, but contentment and peace of mind actually arises from creating a circumstance under which we no longer perceive there is a problem. As an extreme example, when you are dreaming, you do not have the same problems as when you are awake. Only when you wake up and think “oh yeah, I forgot that I’m not in university and didn’t study for my finals, and forgot to wear pants for some reason, and my teeth are starting to fall out as I’m trying to run away from a tsunami but I just don’t have any strength in my legs” that was just a dream. Anyway, enough of those stupid problems I thought were real over the last several hours, back to my real problems. You didn’t solve any of your waking problems by falling asleep, and you didn’t solve any of your dreaming problems by waking up, in both cases you just stopped perceiving that there was a problem.
This isn’t to say your unpaid bills are just your imagination, it means that in simple terms, it is correct that food will solve your hunger. It is correct that a great partner can solve your loneliness. It is correct a lack of food will cause hunger. It is not correct that a lack of a partner will cause loneliness. In a similar way a craving is not a lack of food like hunger, it is a desire for specific food. Loneliness is not lack of companionship; it is desire for meaningful companionship, whether it be a romantic partner or certain peers.
The point that can then be addressed is that it’s not the fact that is important, it is our beliefs about the fact that is the cause of our psychological insecurity. If our beliefs can shape our entire psychological experience, can our beliefs be examined directly, instead of trying to always meet or rationalize their demands? I want to point out here that what I’m describing is not the effort to ignore our problems by changing our beliefs. That’s like saying “I just like, don’t give a fuck bro” when you do, in fact, give a fuck. It is not ignoring your bills because they stress you out, it is inquiring into what our beliefs are about our problems in order to see very clearly what they are. You are not looking for an outcome, you’re looking for understanding. If you believe there are monsters in your closet, your neurotic problem solving will tell you to sleep with a baseball bat under your mattress. Conventionally we believe the solution to this problem is checking if there are monsters in the closet, and if that is available it is very easy, albeit unnecessary, but what if you have a fear of losing someone? or going to hell? Or that you are a loser who is never going to get a cute gf? Or that you can’t go back in time and buy bitcoin at $200 dollars? It is also possible to end your fear of monsters being in the closet by realizing that monsters don’t exist, so they can’t be in the closet. Checkmate gay monsters.
A good example of this is humility. Humility is the absence of vanity, which is the desire to be admired and praised by others and an aversion to criticism; however, most of us think humility is a behaviour, because we see competent individuals display an aversion to the spotlight, they then get praised for their humility, and we think “I like people who are humble, I want to be like that” But the desire to be humble is itself vanity. Bragging is a form of vanity, but so is downplaying your achievements in order to appear humble. Dressing up to be the centre of attention is vain, but dressing down to pretend not to care is also vain. Thing is, even choosing to dress in the middle to avoid standing out and being judged is also vain. This is hard to understand at first because we naturally think “That doesn’t make any sense Jamie you said everything I could do is vain”, but that is exactly what I’m saying, vanity is not a behaviour, it is a psychological insecurity. It is a desire for praise and a fear of criticism, which is a form of suffering. Not only is it impossible to discern if someone is actually vain or not if they are subtle enough in their behaviour, there is also absolutely no behaviour or philosophy you can adopt to “become more humble”. You can choose to act in a certain way that other people call humble, but that is deception for the sake of vanity. Humility only exists when vanity completely comes to an end, in which case everything that you do, no matter what anyone else calls it, is humble, because there is no psychological desire for praise, and no psychological aversion to criticism. You are welcome to either and do not mind, as your sole concern is for if your actions have hurt or helped others. When you see that it’s not other people’s opinion of you that is causing you suffering, it is actually your own vanity that is itself suffering, it is obvious that it is something we no longer want to experience, but the only way we conventionally know how to address our vanity is through conforming to it. By improving our own skills or behaviour, we can act in a way to more often experience praise from others, alternatively, we can cope with our vanity, by avoiding situations where others will criticize us. This behaviour of conforming to or coping with our psychological insecurities is fundamentally adhering to our self-image, and what everyone does in their lives in order to feel content. We attempt to build a world of security through overcoming our perceived deficiencies and avoiding things that make us insecure that we can’t control or easily influence.
What we don’t realize is that vanity for example, can completely end, but not through achieving praise or avoiding criticism, which is trying to solve the problems vanity poses to us, but through ending the creation of the problem in the first place, which means probing the beliefs we have that causes vanity to arise. You can modify your behaviour to be treated a certain way by others, which will improve your mood, but that is no different than thinking the solution to anxiety is about 3 vodka cranberries. You are not resolving the problem; you are treating the problem. Only if you see the error in vanity itself can you instantly and permanently change yourself psychologically through realizing the inaccuracy of your own beliefs, and with the realization of our error, our behaviour automatically changes. For example, if you’re a kid who really, really believes in Santa, you are going to be concerned that Santa is omnipotently watching you and judging your behaviour, which causes you immense stress and psychological suffering trying to never make a mistake so Santa doesn’t punish you at Christmas. The moment you realize that the big man with the beard who was kissing mommy under the mistletoe was actually your neighbour Chris, your behaviour will immediately change because it was the belief there was an omniscient fat man always watching you that was causing you to experience distress and behave according to that belief. While almost all of us completely drop the belief and emotional relationship to Santa, many of us never drop the belief and emotional relationship to another bearded man who lives in the sky and watches over us, but the deepest and most visceral belief and emotional relationship that has be dropped is the belief in our self. Self- realization is this phenomenon: the realization that who you think you are is not actually who you are. It is not that you don’t exist, or like God, you can never quite be sure, it is the realization that you cannot and never have been able to think about yourself.
The realization that entirely ends vanity is the same one that ends all forms of psychological insecurity, which is the realization that it is not possible to compare yourself to someone else because what you are comparing is not you. You are comparing your self-image with an image of someone else, mistaking yourself for that image and feeling threatened by absolutely any corresponding belief you have about that image. Not that your imagination isn’t real, it is a real sensory perception, but you are mistaking your reflection for who you actually are, and then are concerned about the mirror getting shattered.
While it varies person by person, generally speaking the realization that ends our self-image is viscerally understanding that you can’t actually imagine yourself because you are yourself. Self- knowledge is just knowledge. Self-image is just imagination. Self-doubt is just doubt. It is impossible to “think about yourself” because you’re the one thinking. The false belief that we’ve had our whole lives and never questioned is that who we are is our knowledge of ourselves. We believe, truly, that who we are is literally who we think we are. If you think you are intelligent and someone says “yeah, maybe for an idiot” you might get annoyed or upset. Why? Because someone is challenging who you think you are. If you think you are attractive and you see someone that you think is more attractive you might feel envious. In both instances we are responding to who we think we are and how something else affects who we think we are. There has been no actual change in our intelligence or attractiveness before or after our beliefs about ourselves were attacked.
The only way to rid yourself of a deeply held belief is not to be convinced that something else is better, that is just changing your belief, and is what we do with our self-image our whole life. “Who I think I am” changes your whole life through, and is why self-realization makes sense conceptually if you are really ensconced in your own knowledge. You have always called yourself “me” but who you think you are now is nothing like when you were 10, all of your beliefs about yourself have changed, but yet you still say “yeah I’m me”. So what is it that you call “me”, that you’ve called yourself your whole life, that has always been there?
The reason the question “who am I?” is so challenging, is because we conventionally do not know of a way to tackle a problem other than thinking about an answer, then reconfirming the validity of that answer through recognition. The most common answer to “who am I?” is simply listing a bunch of characteristics that you identify with or describe your behaviour and interests, for example: “well, I’m a male, I’m a central banker, I’m pretty old, I hope I’m not about to get fired, and I like jazz music and raising interest rates”. This is obviously not who you are because these are just transitory identifications. It is like describing the clothes you are wearing and saying they are you. In a year you might not like raising interest rates anymore, and 30 years ago you weren’t half the stuff on the previous list yet back then you would still say “I’m me”. To put it straightforwardly, you are not a central banker, there are other central bankers, a central banker is an abstraction of you and your social identity, it is your self-image. Another common but more nuanced answer to “who am I?” is “I am who I think I am” or “I am a system of processes” or “I am consciousness”, but all of those are still a belief, a piece of self- knowledge that causes you to say “is that me?” and as you hold the thought in your mind, unable to slice it down any further, you say “yep, can’t break it down any further, that’s me”, and then hold onto it as knowledge to re-use later as your best answer. You have taken your experience, abstracted your experience with thought, and then recognized yourself in it. You have called your reflection yourself. The reason this is not the answer is again, it is just a belief, your self-image, but also because I too recognize that as a human being, I am a system of processes. So if you are a system of processes, and I am a system of processes, we are the same in quality, yet we both know I see through my eyes, and you see through your eyes, we do not have access to each other’s consciousness, so you have not addressed the question “who am I?” you have attempted to objectify yourself with thought and label it as knowledge. I am asking, who are you that is experiencing your consciousness that is separate from me, who is experiencing my own consciousness? Again, you are absolutely, completely certain that you are you, and I am absolutely, completely certain that I am me, who or what is that in its entirety?
To try to point to how our self-image is so deeply entangled with our self concept, if you sincerely engage with self-enquiry and try to figure out “who am I?”, all you’ll find yourself doing is adding new beliefs to yourself or modify existing ones: you will think things like “Am I nothing?” “Am I god?” “Are we all one, physical thing?” “Am I love?” “Am I the soul?” “If I look at some boobs, am I the boobs?” “wait is part of me going to like die or something?” “am I the universe experiencing itself?” “Am I just my thoughts?” “Am I consciousness?” “Am I just memories?” “Think I better look at the boobs one more time just in case” “wait, is it that there is no self in the first place?”, which are all just beliefs and forms of knowledge, which are all wrong because they are again your self-image trying to come to a conclusion of what you imagine yourself to be. You are frantically drawing pictures and saying “who’s the artist? Who’s the artist?” “is this the artist?”, “what about this?“. The answer is that you are the artist, the one doing the drawing, but we are not satisfied with that because that isn’t an image we can recognize ourself in, and so our self-image says “yeah how do I draw that? What do I look like?” but that isn’t you, that’s just what you look like. It is a symbol that tries to represent the thing, but it is not the thing. You are the thing. You can’t imagine yourself. It is not possible. Absolutely every single thing that you can possibly think of is by definition, not you. You are looking through your eyes right now, you can’t see your own eyes you can only see out of your eyes. Thinking is the same, but we go on drawing and drawing, thinking and thinking, worrying and worrying about ourselves our whole lives through, not realizing what we are thinking about is not us.
This is why a great little teaching from this guy, J. Krishnamurti, was saying “the word is not the thing”. And why one of the original means of trying to help people get to self-realization was through negation. One version of that is if I were to ask as a riddle “who are you?” and you answered with “I’m a doctor” I could say “So am I, so that can’t be you”. “I’m a human being”, “so am I so that can’t be you”, “I’m a woman”, “So am I, so that can’t be you”. “Well I’m half African and half Caribbean”, “so am I, so that can’t be you”, and at this point they’re probably thinking “damn, this guy is woke as hell”. But if you get down to the essence of yourself, like a soul, or consciousness, or whatever your self-image thinks it is, and realize there’s still not really anything you can overtly call yourself that I couldn’t also call myself. Only when you realize the answer can’t be based on knowledge or belief does it start to open some possibilities because you definitely are not me, but now you’re not sure what exactly you are.
To temporarily lighten things up a bit, because it’s such an obscure concept currently, if you go into the wild world of the internet, a lot of discussion around psychedelics usually comes up around this topic, so I think it’s worth mentioning that, first of all, obviously I’m not condoning drugs, but if you ever accidentally fall onto a naked druid covered in psychedelic mushrooms mouth first at burning man, after apologizing to who is presumably Elon musk’s girlfriend, you might experience a period where you’re perfectly lucid and think “man, why was I so worried about my past and future and what other people think of me, all I am is what I am now, that’s all I’ve ever been every step of the way” or “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before, there aren’t problems, only circumstances, it’s me who sees the problems in the circumstances”. This is likely a temporary ego-death and is a partial insight into something permanent, but if you go all the way and experience this… then yeah that’s just the drugs. I’ve heard occasionally that “psychedelics are the crash course, meditation is the phd”, and while I get the point, this is ironically pretty snobbish in my opinion and a big misunderstanding of meditation, because on psychedelics you start experiencing things like “oh man, why did I spend my whole life looking at reality when I could have just looked through reality like this. How did I forget, after all, this is how I made all this in the first place”. Then the next day you’ll be nibbling some burnt toast thinking “well…maybe?“. In stark contrast, the PhD dissertation of meditation is after 10 years of sitting with your legs crossed in the Himalayas, suddenly realizing “oh my god what am I doing”, coming down from the mountains, moving to Florida, sitting on the beach with a margarita and saying “ah yes, way warmer here”.
We all indirectly know who “me” is, because it is literally who you are, but it is nearly impossible to pin down what it is exactly because absolutely every single thing we think we are gets in the way. The problem isn’t that we are something else we don’t know yet, the problem is we indirectly know who we are, but we also think we are an indefinite number of identifications that are not ourselves. Self- realization is somewhat of a riddle, but it’s not a pointless riddle with no answer, it is the realization that the solution to the riddle is that it’s not possible to answer the question in the format it presents itself in, thereby causing the self-referential loop it had been stuck in to finally come to an end. The riddle arises out of our self-knowledge desiring to know what it truly is, once and for all, with no uncertainty, and the answer, which is discovering why it cannot know, causes self-knowledge to realize itself to have no purpose, because what is the purpose of self-knowledge if not to know itself? And so our self-knowledge comes to a complete and permanent conclusion automatically. This might sound a bit frightening, but only because of our own misunderstanding. It is not never being able to think about yourself again, it is realizing that what you were thinking about was never you. It’s like an entire office of people trying to guess how many M&M’s are in a jar. Every single day each person gets a guess and if they get it right, they can keep the M&M’s. Eventually, everyone has guessed every possible number and people are starting to go insane about how no one has figured out how many M&M’s there are yet. They start calling in PhD mathematicians, AI learning algorithms, and professional M&M counters to try to figure out just how many goddamn M&M’s are in the fucking jar. At this point, everyone has given up doing their actual job and every waking moment is spent trying to figure out the number of God forsaken M&M’s. Mathematicians start hypothesizing there are fractions of M&M’s, or an irrational number of M&M’s, or that there is an imaginary number of quantum entangled M&M’s that are snapping into W&W’s when their partner is counted, and this manic search for the answer to the mystery of the M&M jar continues for weeks until finally the boss, who has returned from his vacation, waddles into the office and says “Hey guys, working hard or hardly working am I right? oh, skittles! My favourite.” … The realization of course being that it was never about how many M&M’s were in the jar, it was about realizing you have no passion for your job and this meaningless distraction was the most alive you’ve felt in years.
The greatest drama of the entire phenomenon of self-realization is not what comes to an end, because what comes to end is who you think you are and your emotional relationship to your imagination, not your ability to think. You don’t lose anything other than your own psychological insecurity and the suffering that is caused by your beliefs. It’s like alt-tabbing and realizing you accidentally launched the client twice and that’s why the game is lagging. It’s like the classic joke where two cops are at a crime scene and one says to the other “Oh my god, I’ve never seen a massacre like this. They’ve cut off his entire body, all that’s left is his cock.” It’s like going on a lifelong journey to find the all-knowing AI singularity so you can ask it what the meaning of life is and finally when you get there it says “ah geez, I’m just a robot. I don’t know the meaning of life. To be honest I was hopin’, well I was I hopin’ I could ask you”. And you’re like “oh yeah, I am life, I forgot”.
A flower doesn’t need to read it’s Wikipedia page to live its life flawlessly, the Wikipedia page is an abstraction of whatever the flower is, it isn’t the flower. The flower is perfect, the knowledge of the flower is always imperfect. You are exactly the same way; you don’t need any knowledge of yourself because you are yourself every single moment of your life. You only need knowledge to communicate your experience to others because they aren’t you. The metaphor that is often used to explain this is that the acorn is the oak tree, it doesn’t need to figure out how to do it. The acorn is not already the oak tree like in determinism, which is a philosophical belief, it is the simple, plain English observation that the acorn is the oak tree. It is physically impossible for the acorn to not be itself. You don’t plant an acorn and get an apple tree, and if you do, you have to redefine acorns, not say that the acorn was wrong, and your knowledge was right. You are yourself, and inherently cannot fuck up being yourself, everything you do is yourself. There is no meaning of life because you are life. Life is a fact; it isn’t a meaning. You are asking life itself, you, what its meaning is, which is just the question “what do I do?”, it isn’t anything profound, it is confused. In the same way we define an orangutan by what an orangutan does, not by what we have decided an orangutan should do. If you were an orangutan who ate bananas and looked like a coconut, we’d call you a textbook orangutan. If you were an orangutan who said “you know what, I want to fix cars and wear a red tracksuit” then we’d call you chief Ferrari strategist. Whatever you do you’re still an orangutan.
The point of asking the question “who am I?” is in order to figure it out, you have to see that all self- knowledge is completely useless because self-knowledge is itself the error. Anything and everything that it thinks you are is wrong. When your brain finally figures out who you are, exactly, all the time, self-knowledge completely concludes because the problem is solved, and it realizes itself to not have function. The moment your brain, which is you, realizes exactly how knowledge and thinking is limited, it automatically never tries to use it ever again for what it’s not useful for, which is why psychological suffering stops arising, because all insecurity is caused by what we think and believe about ourselves. To give a bit of an analogy for the phenomenon, imagine you had a medieval village where everyone was wielding their knowledge like swords, the youngins would be holding their wooden swords clumsily and haphazardly, the average person in a mediocre way, and the great philosophers and academics with perfect poise and precision, or at least they would convince you that’s what they were doing. That is knowledge, and it is very useful for academia, science, technology, and creativity, because they are all things that are outside of you that you interact with. It is useless for self-understanding. Self-realization is not how well you wield your sword, you could be horrible at it, it is the lightbulb realization that causes your sword to automatically be sheathed when there is not any combat, and that realization is completely unrelated to being a great swordsman. You could be a moron with a sheath or a genius with a sheath, it makes no difference if the sword is put away. If there’s a fight, yeah it doesn’t matter how Zen you are where’s Oppenheimer and Jocko Willink?
In my opinion, one of the biggest hints to help you solve the question of “Who am I?” is to address your relationship with sensory perception. We all know that part of us is that we can see, we can hear, we can touch, we can taste, etc, and as well, we can think. Now imagine someone who has always been blind says “what is seeing like?” I want you to tell me so I can think about it. Imagine someone who has always been deaf says “I want to know what hearing is like, I want you to tell me so I can think about it. By tell me I mean like, write it down” You might sit there for a second trying to come up with how to communicate it, but the reality is that its impossible. It is not possible to imagine what seeing is like if you have never seen anything. It is not possible to imagine what hearing is like if you have never heard anything. The reason why is that thinking is entirely composed of something that we have perceived in the past. Thinking is our human intelligence modulating our memories, and memories are some form of past sensory perception. What must be seen is that thinking is one of our sensory perceptions, and is itself is entirely composed of memory, which is the stored recording of our other sensory perceptions. Then, if thinking is a sensory perception, and is composed of the memory of sensory perceptions, and if seeing, hearing, touching, and everything else we experience is a form of sensory perception, that means all that you have ever experienced in your life or will ever experience is sensory perception. The only thing that exists to you is sensory perception.
The next question is, what is a sensory perception? And if you test it right now, you will see that you can look around, then you can touch the table, then you can listen to the words I am saying, then you can think about what you’re going to eat for dinner, then you can go back to looking at the video. A sensory perception is whatever you are currently aware of, and that is what we call consciousness. This comes with an extremely, extremely important characteristic, and is the crux of the entire phenomenon, which is seeing that all sensory perception, including thinking, and everything that exists within our conscious experience, occurs in the moment of time that we call “now”. You are absolutely incapable of experiencing the past or the future. There is absolutely nothing you have or ever will experience outside of what is occurring to you “now”. Our self-image says “no, I can remember the past and think of the future” but that is just thinking and is a sensory perception occurring to now that has been misunderstood.
I think a good way to visualize this is to imagine a tv screen. There is nothing being projected onto the tv screen like with film, the screen receives a signal, and it modulates itself to form an image. What dictates what appears on the tv is whatever signal it is currently receiving. No matter what the tv is displaying, you would never say “oh, it’s playing the signal from yesterday” or “that’s a future signal that’s going to happen” you know that if the tv is showing it, it is exactly the signal it is receiving now. You, from birth to death, are exactly the same way. The problem is that one of the channels on our tv does not believe this. The seeing channel knows it’s a signal that occurs now, the hearing channel knows, the tasting channel knows, every channel knows it only occurs right now except one channel, which is thinking. The thinking channel says “yes, yes, of course thinking occurs now, but the things I think about can be in the past or the future. For example, right now I am thinking of a nice mountain I displayed last week. I can’t remember it that well, but it looked kinda like this” what the tv is doing is receiving a signal now and is displaying that image now, then saying “this image is the past” which it isn’t. It is an image that the tv is creating right now, that it then mistakenly calls the past because it reminds it of another signal it received in a previous “now”. What the thinking channel on the tv doesn’t realize is what it thinks it is doing is not actually what it is doing. We all know that a tv only displays exactly the signal it is currently receiving, meaning the screen is not contemplating the past, the screen is contemplating a signal that exists in the present. Where this relates to self-realization is if we imagine if the screen was very confused and says, “I’m trying to figure out what I am”, the way the thinking channel would try to figure that out is by cycling different images on the screen and trying to deduce if those images were itself, because that is literally the only thing a screen can do. After cycling through it’s favourite images and movies, the screen says “no, these are just things I like, these aren’t who I am” so then it starts trying to deduce itself down logically and finally says “well, I’m pretty sure this is me” and then displays an image of a tv screen that approximates the tv itself, and a list of hardware specifications that it has concluded it thinks it has. This is analogous to our self-image. The tv screen is displaying an image of a tv screen and says, “this is me, this is who I am”. But that is not what the tv screen is, that is literally just an image of a tv screen that the tv screen is displaying. Because the screen can’t figure out how it could do any better, it spends the rest of its tv life improving and refining its self-understanding to more accurately display an image of who it thinks it is. The reality is that the screen has invented a problem for itself that does not exist. It has created its own self-image, which is a Koan. It cannot ever be correct. It is trying to display an image of itself it is then going to look at and say, “that is me”. The reality is that it is not possible for the screen to ever complete this task successfully because “who it is” is the signal it is displaying, not the objects that appear in that signal. In the same way the modulation of the screen is synonymous with the signal it is currently displaying, that is the same with you. What you call “me” is whatever sensory perception you are consciously experiencing right now, which includes thinking. You cannot think about yourself in the same way a screen cannot display itself because it itself is the display. You cannot think about yourself because what you are thinking about is not you, you’re the one that is aware of the thought.
Your fundamental and only identity is the sensory perception that you are currently aware of.
I AM seeing.
I AM hearing.
I AM feeling.
I AM thinking.
Etc.
Which is so primordial it is the basis of our language itself and all that exists for us. Everything else we mistakenly think we are, which is our self-image, is a derivative of thinking, which is still a subset of sensory perception that occurs to you now.
If this is itself a genuine realization, like twanging a door stop, that all sensory perception happens now, thinking is composed of the memory of sensory perceptions, and is itself a sensory perception, and therefore is also only composed of what has once occurred to you as “now”, what this means is that you, the awareness of sensory perceptions, is just like the screen, and you do not experience the past or the future, they do not exist to you at all, they are misunderstandings of the signal you are processing now. You have never in your life experienced anything other than what is occurring to you now. It’s not “yeah, yeah, I should really live in the present” it’s that no, you don’t have a choice. Everything you have ever called the past or the future is a misunderstanding of what “now” is. Ten years ago, you were “me, now”, today you are “me, now” and in ten years you will be “me, now”. You remember going to the store yesterday, and tomorrow you say you will go to the gym, but those are both thoughts that occurs in the present. Subjectively, you have never experienced the past or the future. You have always been the same thing, which is the awareness of what you are currently perceiving.
Our deep, deep confusion is not realizing that “my past” and “my future” are the belief that our life stretches out over 80 odd years like a long horizontal line, but the entirety of everything we have or will ever experience happens to us in the present, meaning who we are is a vertical line that modulates in characteristics, with absolutely no exceptions, just like the tv screen receiving a signal, and we call our present memory of previous states the past and the present imagination of potential states the future, yet both of those things occur to us as thinking in the present. The invention of our self-image is the belief that if we take this modulating screen, which is us, we can then say, “I’m going to think about how this modulating screen used to be in the past or will be in the future or how it probably looks from a different angle”. We think this is a good idea because it will help us act and prepare for what might happen to us. That is not the error, that is just thinking, the error is that we believe that this illustration is what’s happening. We think we are legitimately imagining things that have or might happen to the screen and what it is now, but what is actually happening is an incorrect understanding of the limitation of thinking, because you can’t go outside the screen, the screen is all you are, everything has to happen on the screen. When you contemplate past and future modulations of the screen, that itself is part of the screen modulating, it isn’t outside of it. Psychological suffering and insecurity is fundamentally caused by a recursion of our sensory perception within our sensory perception. We react emotionally and psychologically to both the overarching structure, the screen, and also to our thoughts and imagination of ourselves that has invented this substructure, which is just part of the screen, but we think it is the past or future of the whole screen. The screen is consciousness, which is whatever signal it is currently aware of, and this sub structure is your self- image. We think both of these structures are us because the substructure is believed to be an abstraction of the superstructure, but it isn’t, it’s just a piece of the superstructure we think is something outside of it. As it currently stands you think you are one human being, but there are two things that you call yourself: Your conscious awareness and your self-knowledge. The belief that you are a self-aware being exists in your self-knowledge and your self-knowledge exists in your conscious awareness when you think about yourself, which creates the recursion. The issue is that these are not one thing, these are two things, and you are not two things. Self-realization is seeing in yourself that self-knowledge has absolutely no function at all because it is literally impossible for it to accomplish what it’s made for. This recursion comes to an end when you realize that what you believe you are doing, which is thinking about and imagining yourself, has never been what you were actually doing because that isn’t possible. This is why self-realization is sometimes called “stepping back” or the metaphor of watching the hurricane instead of being trapped inside of it are used. That sounds grandiose, but it really just means that the screen realizes it isn’t the images on the screen, it is the modulation of itself that creates the images. This ends the screens belief that the images on the screen were itself, so the panic of displaying a volcano on its screen and thinking “oh my god this is bad is something wrong with me?” doesn’t arise.
I think a good way to point to our misunderstanding of our relationship with time is to imagine there’s an alien who wants to experience what it’s like to be a human. The alien takes you and plugs some wires into your brain and says, I’m going to take over your consciousness for a second to download your memory. Ok close your eyes, and in 10 seconds I’m going to take over. Ok 3 2 1 I’m opening my eyes as a human for the first time. Huh, weird. feet huh?” and they swap back having downloaded the data and the alien says thanks, I understand you now. You might say “what, that’s it? How can you know what it’s like to be me, I had to go through years of self-improvement to get where I am now. I was bullied in school and had two terrible relationships before figuring out who I am now” “yeah I know it was in your memory” “what no, it took like half my life to go through that” “yeah dude I was literally you I know” “no but you can’t know what it was like you didn’t experience it you just sat there, what does it feel like for someone to break up with you?” “Feels bad man” “what, but it didn’t happen to you” “bro, I was literally you. I knew exactly what you know now. It’s in your memories” “what, but. You didn’t… you weren’t there”.
We create a false continuity in our life and believe that there is an element of chronological time in our subjective experience, and the only way to navigate that world is to invent an abstraction of ourselves that can exist there in our thoughts. But what we call “my past” exists in the present as memory, what we call “my future” exists in the present as imagination. There has never been a single moment in your life nor will there ever be as a human where you have experienced anything other than “me, now”. What we call our past or future is a misunderstanding of what we are now. Ultimately, self-realization is the physiological conclusion of all beliefs about yourself because they are unnecessary and causing harm to you. You don’t need any beliefs about yourself, you are always yourself in your entirety every moment of your life. The realization there is only ever one thing that is ever occurring in conscious experience, and who you are is your awareness of whatever that is, means there is nothing else you ever have to be concerned about. The point of meditation is to realize this, but the realization itself is “oh, what on earth am I doing. I’m always meditating and always have been. It’s impossible not to be meditating.”
If narcissism is “I just said what I think, you’re the one who got upset”, normal mental health is “I always do my best but often doubt myself”, depression is “my opinion doesn’t matter”, nihilism is “nothing matters”, existentialism is “life is what you make it”, materialism is “it is all the mathematical unfolding of time, space, and matter”, stoicism is “I can deal with whatever happens”, pragmatism is “whatever works!”, realism is “that seems optimistic” simulation theory is “it’s all a virtual reality”, solipsism is “It’s only me anyway”, religion is “god acts through me”, spiritualism is “I am consciousness experiencing god”, and determinism is “my life is destiny”, then self-realization is making sure everyone in the restaurant is enjoying their Wendy’s value meal. In earnest summary, self-realization is a physiological phenomenon triggered by an insight into the nature of what you are that causes the permanent cessation of emotional relationship to the imagination of yourself. That is all that is and all that it ever has been.
I wanted to end with one last tidbit to relate to this which is what is called ‘non-duality’. Non-duality is not actually a concept, it is like if self-realization were heads, non-duality is tails. It sounds pretty esoteric, but all that it addresses is that we conventionally believe that our lives have two components: there’s me, and then there’s the world, and I’m a person who experiences the world. Non duality is essentially pointing out that it is our beliefs that create that division, and that both are misunderstandings of the same thing. This often gets massively misunderstood by spiritualists, theologians, or psychonauts as “we’re all one” or “it’s all god”, or “you are the universe experiencing itself”. It’s not that those phrases are necessarily wrong depending on how you interpret them, it’s that the beliefs of the people who say those things have got it backwards in their own minds. Imagine our lives like this: There is a flower, which is the object, a camera, which is the subject, and the photograph, which is the signal generated between the two. We conventionally believe who we are is the subject, which is our brain and body, and we believe we are the photograph, which is our consciousness, which we think of as a derivative of our brain and body. Then there are objects outside of us that we call “the universe” or “physical reality” that we do not think are us, but we can experience and interact with them. Non-duality is usually just referring to subject and object, but I think it’s more understandable if you expand it to three by calling the signal a third thing. So when people visit the machine elves with Joe Rogan and Terrance McKenna, then tell you “we’re all one bro”, what they are referring to is an experience they had of how these three different things appeared to merge into one thing, and even though it is not what they are currently experiencing, they believe it to be the case that these three things that appear to them as different are actually one thing because they experienced it before. Similarly, “you are the universe experiencing itself” is typically the belief that the universe is one big super organism, and the big bang was effectively the seed, and it has now grown into what it is today, and you are like leaves on the tree that is the entire cosmos, meaning you are part of the whole. Life didn’t begin 4 billion years ago, life began at the big bang, because that’s what the universe is. Even though it’s an attractive narrative, it is ultimately still just a belief, and with this logic you then say, I am not just the camera and photograph, I am also flower. I am all three things. Neither of these things are self-realization or non-duality. One is an emotional and perceptual experience that you then remember and form beliefs around, and one is belief in a story of what the universe is doing and how you relate to it. Non-duality is not the belief that three different things are actually one thing, it is pointing out there isn’t actually three different things in the first place. When you look at a cloud that is raining onto the ocean, it appears that there are three different things there, but there isn’t, there’s only three forms of the same thing.
To use another video game analogy, when you are playing Super Mario, you know you are playing a video game, and even though you are playing as Mario, you know he is just part of the video game, you aren’t actually him, even though you are controlling him. You really know deep down that really what you’re doing is just interacting with the video game. Now imagine instead of playing as Mario, you were Mario. Suddenly you are living in a strange world filled with mushrooms, gold coins, and a giant spiky turtle that your crush seems to spend a lot more time with than you. You would be very confused and try to figure out what the hell is going on and what you should do. Non duality, as an actual realization, not as religious teachings or dogma, is realizing that what you perceive as the subject, which is me - Mario, and object - the game world, is a false separation created by your beliefs. Non-duality isn’t Mario realizing he is in a video game, he doesn’t have access to that information, non-duality is Mario realizing that he and his world are both the same thing, he is not in the video game playing it, he is the video game. Our reality as human beings is the same, not that you’re in a video game, but that you aren’t separate from physical reality. There is no meaning of life because you are life. Life is a fact, not a meaning. It is the false separation we create by believing we are a person in the world who then acts that creates a separation between us and what is perceived as outside of us, when really it is two forms of the same thing. From your perspective on the couch, there is no difference between Mario and Bowser, they are both part of the video game, you just get to play as Mario. Mario realizing he isn’t in a video game playing it, he is the video game, is self-realization, because it necessitates realizing his fundamental identity is not Mario the video game character, his identity has always been his awareness of what Mario the video game character is experiencing, which is entirely a product of the video game, which is exactly what you automatically know if you are an outsider playing as Mario with your controller. It is just extremely, extremely hard to realize when you’re Mario inside the game because it requires breaking down your existing beliefs, not changing or adding to them.
While I think it’s not too hard to intellectually understand that concept, it is another thing to realize it yourself because what I’ve given you so far is an idea. You can then take the idea, think about it, and then agree or disagree with it, which means ultimately you are just adding it or not adding it to yourself as another belief, meaning nothing has changed at all. The concept I described is not self- realization, the conclusion of your self-image is. For the phenomenon to actually occur, you have to leave behind the analogies in order to actually drill into your own psychological experience and realize it not to be an idea, but actually, truly, what you already experience but did not realize, and that means actually engaging in self-enquiry.