Fear

Inescapable Fact

With self-awareness came an almost immediate sense that the self is divided. Again there are many expressions of this inescapable fact, but they generally play on the notion of opposites. Humans are divine and animal in their nature, capable of the highest good and the worst evil, driven by the conscious and the unconscious. So thoroughly is the divided self embedded in the rise of Homo sapiens that we possess a higher and lower brain, feeling torn between reason and irrational drives for sex, survival, and perhaps love and hate.

No one needs to be told that life as viewed by humans offers no escape from the divided self except one: discover the undivided self. If the self’s division isn’t innate, if it is a human creation, we should be able to go back and regain the earlier, more primal state of being one and whole.

This quest has held importance for centuries, and at some level it unites the Christian search for Heaven, the Buddhist vision of Nirvana, and the Vedic teaching of liberation or enlightenment. Things haven’t changed that much in modern times. Eventually, if you take an interest in psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, religion, or the vast amorphous domain we call spirituality, you arrive at the self and its mysterious nature. Science cannot solve this mystery for us, although it can provide many clues through neuroscience, for example. But no brain map, however detailed, will ever put us in direct contact with the self, just as the best topographic maps cannot deliver the feeling of grass beneath your feet — the map isn’t the territory, as the saying goes.

What has baffled many explorers of the self, if we lump all of these fields together, is that the answer to the mystery of the self is right before our eyes. Every experience has one thing in common: the sense of the self. No matter what activity you are engaged in, excluding deep dreamless sleep, you have a sense of yourself. This sense has no voice, words, or thoughts to express itself in. “I am” is all there is. Without ‘I am” nothing else can happen, no thought, word, action, or act of imagination.

The reason that “I am” doesn’t seem to offer any answers isn’t just because it stays silent. The bigger reason is that “I am” is the answer. The sense of self in other words is the bottom line of human existence. There is nowhere else to go. The unitary self is inextricably entwined with consciousness and existence and therefore life itself. “I am” as the ultimate answer has little appeal, unfortunately, in the realm of science, which is based on investigating facts, data, and measurements of the physical world. Far from being intrigued by the mystery of the self, science has assiduously avoided the subjective world “in here” and continues to look for self-awareness as a physical function of the brain, or perhaps simply an illusion traceable to the complexity of a hundred billion neurons constantly sending signals in a vast, teeming storm of chemistry and electromagnetism. This is not an absolute statement. Some prominent founders of quantum mechanics, such as Max Planck and Schrödinger, believed in reality beyond what appears to be an external reality.

There’s no use, obviously, in trying to argue with many scientists who still follow a classical physics point of view, which is why the mystery of the self remains, as it has existed for thousands of years, a personal mystery, solved one person at a time. In the historical records we have literally thousands upon thousands of testimonies from explorers of the self, and their declarations about the unitary self — the self that lies beyond the divided self — show many common elements.