who are you?
Vic Shayne
author
The Self is a Belief: the idea that causes suffering
When I wrote the book called The Self is a Belief, my goal was to flesh out the idea of the self, which is also who we refer to when we use the word “me.” On the surface it seems like the self is rather easy to understand, but even after you know what it is, what can you do with the discovery? How does it help to know who you are? And perhaps the bigger question is whether you really know who you are, or is it the same self that you are trying to figure out the one who assumes to know? Huh?
are you only an idea constructed out of thoughts?
The sense of self, the one you call “me,” is an idea about who you think you are, because you have been influenced to accept an identity made of other people’s ideas. When you encounter another person, you do so with an idea about who you are, and this idea is made out of thoughts that are used to appraise the other person. Your concept of self colors your concept of others. This means that there are two images (your image and the image you make of the other person) engaging with two other images (the image the other person has of herself plus the image she has of you). We can readily see that this makes for an impossible relationship.
what is beneath this concept of you?
What lies beneath these images if you were to strip them away? What would you find, and what would you consider to be the real you? Asked another way, Who are you without any thoughts, memory, ideas, influences, preconceptions, conclusions, fears, or identities? And, do you care to know? If you want to know then you have to truly face your self. But most people do not want to know, because even thinking about finding out is a threat to the sense of self. After all, it has dedicated its life to protecting itself from annihilation and pain. What could be more threatening than exposing the self to be a fraud, an illusion, a mirage? Then what?
The self doesn’t mind analyzing itself or going to a psychologist to find out why and when it was injured or abused, BUT it does mind if you go deeper and expose it as a fraud. Okay, the word “fraud” is a bit harsh, so we could instead use the word “illusion” or “mask to the world.”
are you programmed like an AI system?
Now that science has become advanced enough to create artificial intelligence (AI), we can better understand the concept of the self by analogy. To create an AI “person,” a scientist must upload all sorts of information along with associative concepts that act as memory. When the AI says, “Good morning, my name is Sheila and I am a sharp dresser, good-looking, intelligent, and the product of American ingenuity; and I am here to help you,” Sheila is actually revealing that she has been programmed to say and act in manifold ways. We humans have been similarly uploaded: Our parents, teachers, authority figures, religious leaders, culture, and more have infused our brains and minds with all sorts of information that we have ingested and incorporated into a sense of self. The statements “I am Jack,” or “I am Lisa,” or “I am a Christian American filmmaker who is a die-hard Chicago White Sox fan,” are the human equivalents of the AI’s statement, “I am Sheila” in that the statements are the result of an outside agency’s imposition on the “hardware.”
You have been programmed to believe you are the person you think you are.
suffering can lead to waking up
When you suffer, you most likely do not question who it is that suffers, but rather why there is suffering and what you can do about it, because the suffering threatens the self. After all, the self spends most of its time trying to find pleasure and avoid pain. For most people, getting rid of their suffering is far more important than knowing their true selfs.
The self assumes that its suffering is due to a mean person, the nasty government officials, a cruel disease, or a conniving con artist. All of this thinking is objective and the mind is rarely compelled to turn its attention around and find out where the problem is really coming from. If you can get around or through or away, then your suffering may disappear — but only until the next instance that is sure to come just around the corner. And so life goes, around and around from suffering to pleasure to suffering, etc.
To know yourself, which is your self as well as what lies beneath it, is to address suffering from a deeper level. To blame others or your self for your suffering is to remain as the self, which is the supposed or assumed “doer.” But the self isn’t the doer; it is the reactor. It seems like the doer because it cannot see past its own self to realize that the real doer is consciousness, which is the entire movement of life and its expressions. All that happens to the self and with the self is the result of consciousness. To use a metaphor, it is electricity that makes the light bulb turn on and be of use in the living room. However, the bulb is taking all the credit as the light giver, when the fact remains that it is the electricity that really enables the bulb to work.
Do you know who you are? Do you want to know?
If you do not want to know what the self is, then that’s okay. Most people really do not want to know. But if you do want to know who/what you are, there are two ways:
1. by accident or
2. through thought-less observation of the self.
observation is the key, not information or practice
If you observe yourself without using any thought, information, preconceived ideas, your education, study, practice, ritual, or analysis, something quite extraordinary occurs: The sense of self is revealed as something that does not really exist except as a belief system imposed upon you by secondhand information. There is a freedom that comes from seeing what the self is, because you see its formation, its role, its tendencies, its prejudices and biases, and its limitations. In addition, you also become aware that everyone else is constructed in the same way, with the same attributes. And when the self is exposed as an illusion, you suddenly realize that you are that which has always been the doer, which is consciousness on the whole.
Knowing thyself is not for everyone, of course. You have to be motivated by an inkling that the person you think you are may really be more of an idea than a reality.
