Myself, Mistaken Identity

I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, that the most fascinating problem in the world is who am I, do you mean, what do you feel when you say the word I, I myself.

I don't think there can be any more fascinating preoccupation than that, because it's so mysterious, it's so elusive, because what you are in your inmost being escapes your examination in rather the same way that you can't look directly into your own eyes without using a mirror, you can't bite your own teeth,

you can't taste your own tongue, and you can't touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger, and that's why there's always an element of profound mystery in the problem of who we are.

This problem has fascinated me for many years, and I've made many inquiries into what people think they are, what do you mean by the word I, and there is a certain consensus about this, a certain agreement,

especially among people who live in western civilization.

Most of us feel I, ego, myself, my source of consciousness, to be a center of awareness and of a source of action that resides in the middle of a bag of skin.

And so, we have what I have called the conception of ourselves as a skin encapsulated ego.

Now it's very funny how we use the word I, if we just refer to common speech.

We are not accustomed to say, I am a body. We rather say, I have a body.

We don't say, I beat my heart, in the same way as we say, I walk, I think, I talk.

We feel that our heart beats itself, and that has nothing very much to do with I.

In other words, we don't regard I, myself, as identical with our whole physical organisms.

We regard it as something inside it.

And most western people locate their ego inside their heads.

You are somewhere between your eyes, and between your ears, and the rest of you dangled from that point of reference.

It is not so in other cultures.

When a Chinese or Japanese person wants to locate the center of himself, he points here, not here.

Here, to what Japanese call the Kokoro, or Chinese call Shin, the heart, mind.

Some people also locate themselves in the solar plexus.

But by and large, we locate ourselves between, behind the eyes, and somewhere between the ears.

As if, within the dome of the skull, there were some sort of arrangement, such as there is at the SAC headquarters in Denver.

Where there are men in great rooms, surrounded with radar screens and all sorts of things, and earphones on, watching all the movements of planes all over the world.

So in the same way, we have really the idea of ourselves, as a little man inside our heads, who has earphones on, which bring messages from the ears.

And who has a television set in front of him, which brings messages from the eyes.

And all sorts of, uh, electrode things that are all over his body, giving him signals from the hands and so on.

And he has a panel in front of him with buttons and dials and things.

And so, he more or less controls the body.

But he isn't the same as the body, because I am in charge of what are called the voluntary actions.

And what are called involuntary actions of the body, they happen to me.

I am pushed around by them, but to some extent also I can push my body around.

This, I have concluded, is the ordinary, average conception of what is oneself.

And look at the way children, influenced by our cultural environment, ask questions.

Mommy, who would I have been if my father had been someone else?

You see, the child gets the idea from our culture that the father and mother gave him a body into which he was popped at some moment.

Whether it was conception or whether it was parturition is a little bit vague.

But there is, in our whole way of thinking, the idea that we are a soul, a spiritual essence of some kind, imprisoned inside a body.

And that we look out upon a world that is foreign to us.

In the words of the poet, Haussmann,

I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.

And so, therefore, we speak of confronting reality.

Facing the fact, we speak of coming into this world.

And this whole sensation that we are brought up to have.

Of being an island of consciousness, locked up in a bag of skin.

Facing outside us, a world that is profoundly alien to us in the sense that what is outside me is not me.

This sets up a fundamental sensation of hostility and estrangement between ourselves and the so-called external world.

And therefore, we go on to talk about the conquest of nature.

The conquest of space and view ourselves in a kind of battle array towards the world outside us.

I shall have much more to say about that in the second lecture.

But in the first now, I want to examine the strange feeling of being an isolated self.

Now, actually, it is absolutely absurd to say that we came into this world.

We came out of it.

What do you think you are?

Supposing this world is a tree.

Are you leaves on its branches?

Or are you a bunch of birds that settled on a dead old tree from somewhere else?

Surely, everything that we know about living organisms from the standpoint of the sciences shows us that we grow out of this world.

That we, each one of us, are what you might call symptoms of the state of the universe as a whole.

But you see, that is not part of our common sense.

Western man has, for many centuries, been under the influence of two great myths.

When I use the word myth, I don't necessarily mean falsehood.

To me, the word myth signifies a great idea in terms of which man tries to make sense of the world.

It may be an idea, it may be an image.

Now, the two images which have most profoundly influenced Western man are, number one, the image of the world as an artifact.

Like a carpenter's table or a jar made by a potter.

Indeed, in the book of Genesis, there comes the idea that man was originally a clay figurine, made out of the earth by the Lord God, who then breathed into this clay figurine and gave it life.

And the whole of Western thought is profoundly influenced through and through and through by the idea that all things, all events, all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers, all grasshoppers, all worms, everything, are artifacts.

They have been made.

And it is therefore natural for a Western child to say to its mother, how was I made?

That would be quite an unnatural question for a Chinese child, because the Chinese do not think of nature as something made.

They look upon it as something that grows, and the two processes are quite different.

You put it together, you assemble parts, or you carve an image out of wood, working from the outside to the inside.

But when you watch something grow, it works in an entirely different way.

It does not assemble parts.

It expands from within, and gradually complicates itself, expanding outward, like a bud blossoming, like a seed turning into a plant.

But behind our whole thought in the West is the idea that the world is an artifact, that it is put together by a celestial architect, carpenter, and artist, who therefore knows how it was done.

When I was a little boy, and I asked many questions which my mother couldn't answer, she used to resort in desperation to saying,

My dear, there are some things that we are not meant to know.

And I said, well, will we ever find out?

And she said, yes, when we die and we go to heaven, it will all be made clear.

And I used to think that on wet afternoons in heaven, we would all sit around the throne of grace, and say to the Lord God,

Now just why did you do it this way? And how did you manage it that?

And he would explain it and make it all very clear.

All questions would be answered.

Because as we have popularly, in popular theology, understood the Lord God,

He is the master mind who knows everything.

And if you ask the Lord God, exactly how high is Mount Whitney, to the nearest millimeter,

He would know exactly like that, and would tell you.

Any questions?

The Cosmic Encyclopedia Britannica.

Unfortunately, this particular image, or myth, became too much for Western man.

Because it was a presence, to feel that you are known through and through, and watched all the time, by an infinitely just judge.

I have a friend, a very enlightened woman, she's a Catholic convert, but a very enlightened Catholic.

And in her bathroom, she has on the pipe that connects the tank with the toilet seat, a little framed picture of an eye.

And underneath, in Gothic letters, is written, Thou God seest me.

Everywhere is this eye, watching, watching, watching, watching, watching, and judging you.

So that you always feel you are never really by yourself.

But the old gentleman is observing you, and writing notes in his black book.

And this became too much for the West.

It became oppressive.

They had to get rid of it.

And so instead, we got another myth.

The myth of the purely mechanical universe.

This was invented at the end of the 18th century.

It became increasingly fashionable throughout the course of the 19th century,

and well into the 20th century, so that it is today's common sense.

Very few people today really believe in God, in the old sense.

They say they do.

But they really hope there is a God.

They don't really have faith in God.

They fervently wish that there was one, and feel that they ought to believe that there is.

But the idea of the universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman is no longer plausible.

It isn't that anybody has disproved it.

But it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of galaxies,

and the immense lightier distances between them and so on.

So instead, it has become fashionable.

And it is nothing more than a fashion.

To believe that the universe is dumb.

Stupid.

That intelligence, values, love, and fine feelings reside only within the bag of the human epidermis.

And that outside that, the thing is simply a kind of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces.

Courtesy of Dr. Freud, for example, biological light is based on something called libido.

Which was a very, very loaded word.

Blind, ruthless, uncomprehending lust.

That's the foundation of the human unconscious.

And similarly to thinkers like of the 19th century, like Ernst Haeckel, even Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and so on.

There was this notion that at the root of being is an energy.

And this energy is blind.

This energy is just energy.

And it's utterly and totally stupid.

And our intelligence is an unfortunate accident.

By some weird freak of evolution, we came to be these feeling and rational beings.

More or less rational.

And this is a ghastly mistake.

Because here we are in a universe that has nothing in common with us.

It doesn't share our feelings.

Has no real interest in us.

We're just a sort of cosmic fluke.

And therefore, the only hope for mankind is to beat this irrational universe into submission.

Now, all this is perfectly idiotic.

If you would think that the idea of the universe as being the creation of a benevolent old gentleman.

Although he's not so benevolent, he takes a sort of, this hurts me more than it's going to hurt you sort of attitude, I think.

You can have that on the one hand.

And if that becomes uncomfortable, you can exchange it for its opposite.

The idea that the ultimate reality doesn't have any intelligence at all.

At least that gets rid of the old bogey in the sky.

In exchange for a picture of the world that is completely stupid.

Now these ideas don't make any sense.

Especially the last one.

You cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of an unintelligent universe.

The saying in the New Testament that figs do not grow on thistles nor grapes on thorns applies equally to the world.

You do not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment.

Here is a tree in the garden.

And every summer it produces apples.

And we call it an apple tree.

Because the tree apples.

That's what it does.

Alright.

Now here is a solar system inside a galaxy.

And one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet Earth the thing peoples.

In just the same way that an apple tree apples.

Now maybe two million years ago somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at the solar system.

And they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said just a bunch of rocks.

And they went away.

Later on maybe two million years later they came around and they looked at it again.

And they said excuse me.

We thought it was a bunch of rocks but it's peopling.

And it's alive after all.

It has done something intelligent.

Because you see we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.

If evolution means anything it means that.

But you see we curiously twist it.

We say well first of all in the beginning there was nothing but gas and rock.

And then intelligence happened to arise in it.

You know like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing.

But we're thinking in a way you see that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks.

Where there are rocks watch out.

Watch out.

Because the rocks are going eventually to come alive.

And they're going to have people crawling over them.

It's only a matter of time.

Just in the same way as the seed the acorn is eventually going to turn into the oak.

Because it has the potentiality of that within it.

Rocks are not dead.

You see it depends on what kind of attitude you want to take to the world.

If you want to put the world down.

You say oh well fundamentally it's only just a lot of geology.

It's a stupidity.

And it so happens that there's a kind of a freak comes up in it which we call consciousness.

And that's an attitude that you take when you want to prove to people that you're a tough guy.

That you're realistic.

That you face facts.

And that you don't indulge in wishful thinking.

It's just a matter of role playing.

And you must be aware of these things.

There are fashions in the intellectual world.

On the other hand if you feel warm hearted towards the universe.

You put it up instead of putting it down.

And you say about rocks.

They're really conscious but a very primitive form of consciousness.

Because after all when I take even this crystal here which is glass and go.

Well it makes a noise.

And that response that resonance is an extremely primitive form of consciousness.

Our consciousness is much more subtle than that.

But when you hit a bell and it rings.

You touch a crystal and it responds.

Inside itself.

I mean it has a very simple reaction.

It goes jangled inside.

Whereas we go jangled with all sorts of colors and light and intelligence ideas and thoughts.

More complicated.

But both are equally conscious.

But conscious in different degrees.

That's a perfectly acceptable idea.

It's just the opposite of the idea.

See all I'm saying is that minerals are a rudimentary form of consciousness.

Whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.

You see.

And what they want to do is to say everything is kind of bleh.

Whereas what I want to say is hooray.

You know.

Life is a good show.

Now then.

As we study.

Man.

Or any other living organism.

And try and describe it accurately and scientifically.

We find that our normal sensation of ourselves.

Of isolated egos inside a bag of skin.

Is a hallucination.

It really is.

It's absolutely nothing.

Because when you describe human behavior.

Or the behavior of a mouse.

Or a rat.

Or a chicken.

Or anything you want to describe.

You find that as you try to describe its behavior accurately.

You must also describe.

The behavior of its environment.

Supposing.

I walk.

And you want to describe the action of walking.

You can't talk about my walking.

Without also describing the floor.

Because if you don't describe the floor.

And the space in which I am moving.

All you will be describing.

Is somebody swinging his legs in empty space.

So as to describe my walking.

You must describe the space in which you find me.

You know you couldn't see me.

Unless.

You could also see my background.

What stands behind me.

See.

If I myself.

If the boundaries of my skin.

Were coterminous with your whole field of vision.

You wouldn't see me at all.

You would see my bright red.

Vest instead.

That's why I put it on this evening.

To demonstrate this point.

And that would be the thing that filled your field of vision.

That was the thing standing there.

You wouldn't see me.

Because in order to see me.

You have to see not only what is inside the boundary of my skin.

You have to see what is outside it too.

Now that's terribly important.

Really.

The fundamental ultimate mystery.

The only thing you need to know.

To understand the deepest metaphysical secret.

Is this.

That for every outside.

There is an inside.

And for every inside.

There is an outside.

And although they are different.

They go together.

There is in other words.

A secret conspiracy.

Between all insides and all outsides.

And the conspiracy is this.

To look as different as possible.

And yet underneath to be identical.

Because you don't find one without the other.

Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Agreed to have a battle.

Note that.

Agreed.

So there is a secret.

What is esoteric.

What is profound.

And what is deep.

Is what we will call the implicit.

What is obvious.

And on the open.

Is what we will call the explicit.

And I.

And my environment.

You.

And your environment.

Are explicitly.

As different.

As different could be.

But implicitly.

You go together.

And this is discovered.

By the scientist.

When he tries.

As.

The whole art of science.

Is to describe.

What happens exactly.

And when he describes.

Exactly.

What you do.

He finds out.

That you.

Your behavior.

Is not something.

That can be separated.

From the behavior.

Of the world around you.

He realizes then.

That you.

Are something.

That the whole world.

Is doing.

Just as.

When the sea.

Has waves on it.

All right.

The sea.

The ocean.

Is waving.

And so.

Each one of us.

Is a waving.

Of the whole cosmos.

The entire works.

All there is.

And with each one of us.

It's waving and saying.

Yoo hoo.

Here I am.

Only it does it differently.

Each time.

Because.

Variety.

Is the spice of life.

But you see.

The funny thing is.

We haven't been brought up.

To feel that way.

Instead of feeling.

That we.

Each one of us.

We.

Each one of us.

We.

Each one of us.