Agnosticism is out. Polygnosticism is in. Choosing doubt as a system of belief is like choosing immobility as a means of conveyance, as Yann Martel wrote in Life of Pi. Amidst the firehouse of falsehood we’re all exposed to, someone confident in their own discernment can adopt the opposite tack of perpetual, mind-numbing, despair-inducing skepticism: believe everything simultaneously and zoom in and out to the ontological organization level that suits their present predicament. What follows are the Zoom levels of the self available to a Liminal Trickster Mystic.
We’re trying to build a holistic picture from the smallest pieces. We’re not attempting to “learn more and more about less and less,” as is the aim of ever-more-specialist fields of science and philosophy, we’re trying to reconstruct the nameless dao. I hope to offer a cursory introduction to the dragon hoard I’ve collected of well-defined little elements of the unknowably complex nature of Self.
These theories masquerade as discrete and contradictory entities whose quibbles are defined, often, by jargon’s hyper-specific borders.
They aren’t though. Because they’re all describing aspects of the universe, they are all describing the same thing. Words can’t capture that thing. As Lao Tzu wrote, “The Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao.”
So trying to pin it down through synthesis is an impossible task. But all this analytical slicing apart of the known universe isn't worthless. If we adopt a polygnostic view, we can flow from one definition to the next as the situation demands.
By surveying the landscape of definitions of self, we can make important decisions about how to treat ourselves and others with empathy, love, intelligence, and foresight.
The Meat Machine
Show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone’s brain wasn’t affected by any of these preceding factors: by the goings on in the eighty billion neurons surrounding it, by any of the infinite number of combinations of hormone levels percolated that morning, by any of the countless types of childhoods and fetal environments that were experienced, by any of the two to the four millionth power different genomes that neuron contains, multiplied by the nearly as large range of epigenetic orchestrations possible.
All out of your control.
Determined, Robert M Sapolsky
As the title implies, Sapolsky makes a compelling argument against free will in that book.
And he’s right, the meat machine through which our soul expresses—and it does appear to express at the more metaphysical zoom levels—plays a huge role in the way we behave.
Take the case of Phineas Gage for example. Gage’s name always reminds me, somewhat unfortunately, of the ear stretching piercing popular among the Alternative kids I grew up with.
It’s a bad joke I can’t let go of but only infrequently make.
Gage is famous for a different kind of hole in the head, right? He had a piece of railroad blasted through his frontal cortex and became an entirely different person.
His doctor described his new personality like this:
He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible.
The tragedy turned him into, well, kind of a prick. Someone who struggled to hold down a job for the rest of his life.
The Meat Machine that the Soul Field attempted to express through in order to have experiences and manipulate matter in three dimensional reality had a dramatic effect on the way that timeless vibration showed up.
Sapolsky uses this as an argument against Free Will. The assertion is that because the damage to Gage’s brain changed his personality so much, all of us are only able to will ourselves to behaviors and choices that our brains allow.
Of course, there are also examples of extraordinary capacities gained as a result of brain damage. People who learn whole new languages or become piano virtuosos. So it isn’t entirely clear whether the brain exclusively decides what’s possible or whether it actually acts as a limitation to the full force of conscious awareness achieving expression through a human body.
Still, for the Will of a True Self to exist under these conditions, the True Self would have to be outside of time, orchestrating the entire causal chain that influences an incarnation, from my ancestors’ trauma to my own blood sugar levels.
Fortunately, that’s exactly the concept of True Self you find in the writing of New Agers like Charles Eisenstein and Paul Selig. We’ve got a few zoom levels to get to before we get to them however.
The Plural Ego:
Borrowing an idea from Theravada Buddhism transmitted to be my Culadasa in The Mind Illuminated, the next zoom level up from the meat machine is the Plural Ego. This is what Satya Robyn calls IFS style “parts”—subroutines in the brain that collaborate in search of consensus on who gets the stage of consciousness and control of the meat mech.
We can think of these parts as the personifications of the hormonal, chemical, genetic, etc drives of our squishy little blood bags.
These ego selves collaborate to catapult us toward pleasure and survival and as far as possible from pain.
When one takes the wheel, that’s the role we’re playing in that moment. The role of self-protector, or self-sabotager. The role of hunter or politician.
Each Plural Ego is a system. It has semi-permeable boundaries and can self-select what comes in—as the old crescendo goes: read a book, learn a thing, change a habit, change your character, change your fate. Atomic Habits author James Clear says that an identity is simply a story about yourself that you cast votes for any time you engage in a habit or resist it.
However, as Shefali Tsabary articulates in the books Conscious Parenting and The Awakened Family, many of these identities are created as adaptations to circumstances in our early lives, often to create connection with caregivers or peers.
This drive toward connection, There is Nothing to Fix author, Suzanne Jones articulates, basically feels like survival at the time.
So we build a collection of Ego selves to trot out when the situation calls for it in order to create more connection with our parents, because that means they’ll keep feeding us. Any withdrawal of connection by them—whether it's a spanking or a timeout—is a clear sign to us that we need to restrain a natural inclination. Shove it into the Shadow.
The pressure a good parent applies encourages a child to only express the socially approved roles we’re given. That way we fit into society and keep getting fed.
The Relational Self
As my friend and fellow Creekmason, John Baometreus wrote eloquently about recently, there is a zoom level of the self that emerges through the vows and commitments that we make to those with whom we are in relationship.
One step up from the Internal Family System is the external self. “What others know me as.” This Relational Self is who you promise to be in order to uphold commitments to people you know. Husband, mother, teacher, server, employee, customer, best friend forever.
You have a different self that you trot out for each of these relationships.
Part of this is simply that the other person engages primarily with their own fantasy of you. Unless they are a true Yogi, and they have “Stilled the modifications of the mind-stuff” as Patanjali wrote, they are changing what they see by telling mental stories about it.
If your concept of your friend—your internal model—is that they’re a self-aggrandizing striver, when they show up around you they have to contend with that projection.
Many times, we unconsciously sink comfortably into the roles that others prescribe us. The degenerate. The brainiac. We live up to their expectations. Like water, we fill the container we are given.
Other times, we make intentional vows and commitments to the people in our lives. We tell one another we’ll be meditation accountabilibuddies. We promise to come home every year for Christmas. We say “yes” at the altar. Each of these roles comes with a set of behaviors, attitudes, exclusivity levels, and topics of conversation we more or less agree to keep to.
Formed in a similar way to the IFS parts, these roles are all different identities. You’re a different person around your boss than you are around your mom. This is because you’ve agreed to show up in the way they expect you to.
We all have roughly Dunbar’s Number worth of roles we have to keep track of.
So if we’re all plural, at least at this zoom level of the self, why aren’t we all using they/them pronouns?
Selfish Memes
The same way that a gene is the fundamental unit of a biological being, a meme is the fundamental unit of a culture. Thes memes use us in order to propagate and persist. These are your Archetypes and Egregores.
Some people have made Jesus Christ their anchor. Some people anchor themselves in God, or Buddha, or Vishnu. Each of these is as real as Toyota, or Argentina, or Lululemon… they anchor people to principles of social conduct and life meaning and purpose.
In fact, I’d say that Toyota, Argentina and Lululemon serve a very similar purpose to those gods. They help organize us as a society. Thousands of people think of themselves as employees of Toyota. Argentinians have some concept of their identity as a culture that is defined as existing legally within the protected borders of the country. And do I really have to explain that Lululemon is an identity to some people?
All of these are higher order concepts. They’re ideas. And perhaps you could say that these fundamental building blocks of culture hijack our Selves in order to serve their propagation, reification and instantiation into the material plane. Sure. But you could also say that they provide at least a partial answer to anyone looking into the mirror and asking “who am I?”
At a certain zoom level, we are members of a colony. A hive. We are collaborators in the creation and perpetuation of a civilization.
Ultimately, we’re cogs in the murder machine of the military industrial complex, right? Everything we do serves that killing somehow.
Or perhaps we’re agents of change. Heralds of the coming of the aeon. Cogs that are using spirituality, self-development, self-mastery, and radical acceptance to strip ourselves of the teeth that other cogs can get purchase on in order to move us. To move us against our will, in service of the machine. Perhaps when cogs spin wildly, unable to touch an equanimous Adept basking in samadhi, their own teeth fly wildly away. Perhaps in this way we are each participants in the project of immanentizing the Aquarian Age.
Next time…
This feels like a natural place to end yet another essay whose length has gotten out of hand. We’re kind of at the demarcation line between the material and the woo.
Next week, we’ll look at the metaphysical zoom levels of the self: The Higher Self, The Soul Field and Emptiness.
Am I leaving any types of soul out? What do you think?