Emptiness and Joyful Freedom

by Greg Goode

  To some extent, you can edit and rewrite your story. It is neither infinitely changeable, nor totally frozen. Some story alterations are made in professional circumstances, such as in psychotherapy where you change the story, for example, from helpless victim to active shaper of your destiny.

  It is highly liberating to see the story of our lives as a story rather than some ultimately true report about a pre-existing reality. The narrative-self account helps you realize the emptiness of the self. And realizing the emptiness of the self helps you realize the emptiness of all accounts and stories about the self. You will come to see selves and stories as empty. These realizations take you deeper and deeper into emptiness. They help intensify and spread your realization.

  Meditation – The Narrative Self

  In this meditation, try to first identify the story of yourself. Think about these elements: Where did you grow up? Where do you now live? Where are you going in your life? What kind of person are you? Think about several important events in your life. What do they mean to you? Think about the elements that seem authentic and meaningful.

  As a next step in this meditation, try to find templates or set-pieces that have a prefabricated feel to them, as though they might have been written elsewhere and laid in to your story. Can you find any cultural templates? Spiritual templates? Salvation stories? Any heroic, against all odds stories?

  The final step is to contemplate how the narrative self can be seen to be constructed by these stories rather than being an active author or reporter of these stories. Can you get a strong sense of how your self is being “written”?

  The Socially Constructed Self

  Seeing the self as socially constructed is another way to think about the self. It is compatible with seeing the self as a story. And when we regard the self as socially constructed, we have yet another way to see through the illusion of an inherently existent self.

  As we saw above, we play different roles throughout the day, throughout life. What if all the roles we play are constructed so as to be heavily dependent upon environmental circumstances and social factors? These external elements play a huge part in how we think, behave and act in any given situation. From role to role, hour to hour, and day to day, these interactions of ours need not be consistent. You can be an extrovert at work but introvert and shy in your personal life. As human beings, we are very good at enacting the social roles that are expected from us in the different life contexts we’re in. We can play many roles: lover, parent, boss, worker, party-goer, spiritual seeker, guru, church-goer, funeral attendee, soldier . We can act entirely differently in each role. None of this is surprising, given the importance social acceptance has always had in the lives of human beings. In hunter-gatherer societies, being ostracized from a group could mean certain death.

  Are these roles that we play the “real me” or are they just fake? Some people may not like the idea that our self is constructed at such a deep level by the views and expectations of other people. Usually we like to think that we’re not so impressionable.

  You may say that these roles are not the real you. OK, then where is the real you? Can you find it? Perhaps it’s there only when you’re silently meditating? The time during meditation is such a small slice of your overall life that it can’t really count as the true you. And even more so, it is typically a goal during meditation to let go of all your stories, even the “this is my real self” story. In this case, during meditation or any other time, there is no individual self with essential, definitive properties left.

  So what happens if we subtract all the roles that we play to find our “true self”? When we do this exercise, we remove more and more roles; we strip away more and more layers until we discover that there is nothing left that is truly our self.

  Man is a make-believe animal – he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

  William Hazlitt

  Meditation – The Socially Constructed Self

  Take a few minutes to connect with the sense of inherent existence, as you have done in other meditations. Now, in this meditation, check to see if you have a sense of any stable personality traits that appear to be intrinsic, or to be definitive of who you are. We know that, if you have followed along with this book, you may know that they are not truly intrinsic. That’s OK – it is still worth refuting the intrinsic self from various different angles so that appearances themselves will be more fully permeated with the fragrance of emptiness. So for this meditation, we are only trying to come up with a few traits that may appear to be intrinsic. For example, when someone points to something impressive you did, have you ever wanted to say, “Yes, that’s me – that’s who I am”? That trait would be a good candidate for something that appears to be an intrinsic part of your identity (even though you know that it is not). Take a moment and come up with a list of these traits. Write them down.

  Now, take a few minutes and come up with a varied set of roles that you play during the day, week, month or year – the more varied, the better. Think of yourself at home, at work, at play, at the store, on vacation, while participating in your hobbies, while visiting your relatives, while consulting the doctor, the dentist or tax preparer. Write these roles down as well.

  Next, let’s examine various ways to see how different you can be. You may wish to use the following standard list that psychologists use to broadly classify human personality. Or you can come up with your own list.

  1. Openness inventive/curious vs.

  consistent/cautious

  2. Conscientiousness efficient/organized vs.

  easy-going/careless

  3. Extraversion outgoing/energetic vs.

  solitary/reserved

  4. Agreeableness friendly/compassionate vs.

  cold/unkind

  5. Neuroticism sensitive/nervous vs.

  secure/confident

  Usually a single personality has a coherent or predictable set of measurements along these lines. But if you look at the different roles you play, you might measure differently in each role. It may almost appear that there are multiple personalities. This doesn’t mean anything wrong – quite the contrary. It suggests that the notion of personality is flexible, and responds to environmental and social conditions.

  If your personality traits respond to environmental and social conditions, then it cannot be intrinsically fixed and definitive of your nature.

  And now take this a step further. When you remove all these different roles you play from your self, what’s left? Are you peeling an onion and revealing its true core? Or is there simply nothing much left in terms of a personal self?

  If you were successful at this task, you may be able to see how a limited, constant self simply does not exist.

  We are then under no objective obligation to create a strictly unified self. We can enjoy variety and difference. Some philosophers, like Harry Frankfurt and Christine Korsgard, think we should create such a consistent self. It is more fully a self, they say. Philosopher Galen Strawson is quoted in Julian Baggini’s book The Ego Trick (Baggini 2012) to have some serious suspicions about this stance; he describes it as a “terrible kind of fascist view.” He swiftly recants: “Not fascist, but it’s as if they are trying to control something or regiment it. We should be allowed to be weak-willed and inconsistent. We should be catholic and eclectic.”

  Meditation – The Self as Decider

  We feel pretty sure that the self makes free choices and is able to act on them. Let’s make such a choice right now. Are you are going to read for at least another 10 minutes or put the book down now?

  Let’s assume you chose to continue reading. Was that a free choice? It may seem to you that you willed it and that you’re now executing the choice. But what actually happened? Perhaps a thought came into your mind: “I’ll continue reading.” And you continue reading, and then you have the thought that claims, “I willed the action of continuing to read this chapter.”

  But does this current thought constitut
e proof that you actually did will this action? Is this scenario, the only plausible explanation of what happened? Or is it just one possible explanation among others? In coming up with an account of this event, you really have no idea of the complete set of internal and external causes that went into its production.

  Even if you say that an underlying curiosity explains the freely willed choice, was the curiosity itself freely willed? Or were there other deterministic factors conditioning the curiosity? What if the choice itself is part of a chain of biological or other unconscious processes, and then the thought “I willed it” is simply added on by the same process?

  According to the explanation of Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, the feeling that we freely will something is itself a manufactured, causally inert add-on by our unconscious processes. Why would nature do this? Again, to echo Thomas Metzinger’s theory of the self-model, the notion of free will is a simplifying mechanism that allows more efficient processing of information over time. Having a unified free will concept, Wegner argues, makes it possible to store and retrieve memories of our own actions in a unified way by assigning them to a unique self that willed them.

  Meditation – Intentional Hand Movement

  Relax your hand for a moment. Your task is this: within the next 60 seconds, choose a time to make your hand into a fist.

  When you go through this meditation, try to pay attention to the very moment in which you actually experience the intention to move the hand. How does this show up in experience? Do you first experience a sense of freely deciding to move your hand, and then subsequently move your hand?

  But what if other causal processes are already in motion before you actually consciously make the decision? It may be that it was not your intention that caused the hand to move. Benjamin Libet, a physiology researcher at University of California, San Francisco, in the eighties26 did some very similar experiments to the one you just did. Using brain measurements, he found out that the brain has already been preparing for the hand movement half a second before you actually had the conscious intention of moving it. The conscious intention that we feel to be a cause begins to look like an effect instead. Using more advanced brain imaging techniques than available at Libet’s time, researchers were recently able to detect as much as a seven-second gap in a similar experiment.27

  Libet’s experiments and conclusions became controversial, partly because they seemed to question some aspects of our notion of free will, and partly because of methodological issues. This controversy actually helped launch a whole new field of research, the neuroscience of free will. Contemporary philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, even argue that free will is compatible with a physiological chain of causes. The idea of free will does not have to be discarded, according to these thinkers.

  For our purposes, it is not necessary to investigate or resolve all these issues (although you may find it fun and instructive to do so). All we need from this neuroscience research is to be able to see that there is an alternative explanation for human choice. The very presence of another reasonable possibility actually begins to cast doubt upon the usual idea of an inherent self that acts as the sole and autonomous cause of human choice. We can even retain the notions of free will and self, and come to see them as empty. These are useful but empty notions.

  Reductive Neuroscience and the Self-Illusion

  Neuroscientists are now agreeing that there is no single region in the brain which is responsible for bringing about the self. But how then does the self come about? Finding this out, as we’ll see, provides a very strong argument against something like an inherent unified self. We spoke above about Thomas Metzinger’s idea that the self is the content of a model. We’ll say a little more about it here.

  Metzinger begins his seminal book Being No One in a very forceful way:

  This is a book about consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective. Its main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing but a process – and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model. You are such a system right now as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it. In other, more metaphorical words, the central claim of this book is that as you read these lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain.

  Metzinger (2003) (emphases in the original)

  Let’s unpack this statement. According to Metzinger, we don’t have a self; what we have is a Phenomenal Self Model (PSM), “a conscious model of the organism as a whole.” “Phenomenal” refers here to the way things appear to you subjectively and experientially. What belongs to this PSM? “Your current bodily sensations, your present emotional situation, plus all the contents of your phenomenally experienced cognitive processing... Intuitively, and in a certain metaphorical sense, one could say that you are the content of your PSM.” What is in the PSM is also endowed with a sense of “mineness,” you experience it as belonging to you.

  According to Metzinger, this self-model appeared in evolution to enable complex biological organisms to navigate in the environment and survive. It was integrated into an already existing conscious model of the world as its center. In this way, a perspective and a point of view became available with obvious evolutionary advantages. You can think of the PSM like the red arrow on the shopping mall map. The map of the shopping mall corresponds to the world-model, and the red arrow to the self. The red arrow says, “You’re here,” and that is also the function the self plays within the world-model.

  However, there is one significant difference between your own experience of the self and the map analogy. You easily recognize the map and the arrow as a model. It is obvious to you that they are neither the real shopping mall nor the real you. They are just models. But contrary to that, you don’t have the impression of being a model in your conscious experience! Instead, you are immediately given to yourself as real. As we will see, the trick of it – of how the sense of realness comes about – is the key insight Metzinger’s theory can offer to the emptiness meditator. It accounts for the puzzling fact that the self can appear so real to us although, in fact, it isn’t.

  Models Hiding Themselves

  Here is Metzinger’s explanation: In a nutshell, we take our conscious self-model to be real because it cannot be recognized as a model. All we see is its content but not the medium that is carrying this content. Thus the model is “transparent.” We look through the model to its content just as you might look through a window, seeing only the bird flying by

  On the level of the brain, Metzinger suggests this works as follows. The PSM is created by subpersonal brain processes. However, these processes themselves are not available for introspection, but only their “output” is available on the level of conscious experience. To get a better feel for the idea of the transparency of models let’s look at the analogy of watching a movie on TV. Sometimes you do get fully immersed in the movie and may even identify yourself with a character. We could say at that time you see only the content, not the medium via which the content is transmitted. But if you get closer to the TV screen, you can also see the medium itself, for example, different pixels that are blinking on and off. You easily recognize the movie on TV as a model rather than actual reality. But for our own brain we cannot do that, no matter how close we look. How our self or our world experience has been constructed by the brain is not available to our consciousness. (Of course, this analogy is limited; sitting on your living room couch you always know that it’s only a movie, but you get the idea.)

  Similarly, our brain creates a model that represents the world in a stable way. While you are looking at the book in front of you, the brain creates a r
epresentation of the book in its visual cortex. However, the very fact that this representation of the book is constructed within the brain is hidden from your conscious awareness. Thus our contact with the outside world, in this case with the book, feels direct and immediate.

  Part of the way in which these models function in our mind is to obscure the fact that they are models. We seem to see the world directly, without realizing that we are seeing through a model. We seem to intuit our self directly, without thinking that we are seeing through a model. For our ancestors, this was entirely sufficient for survival. The brain simply reports a predator standing in front of you. The brain doesn’t say, “According to your model of the world, there is a representation of a predator active in your brain.” The latter would add layers of complexity that are not required for biological survival or could even be harmful if they overwhelm the brain with irrelevant information.

  In summary, we can say that the brain creates a virtual reality and an avatar within that virtual reality which becomes our self. To us, this reality-cum-self doesn’t look virtual but thoroughly real.

  Why is the PSM not a self? Even machines and robots can carry within them a system model, For example, a state of the art printing press will use a system model to help it diagnose and remedy any errors occurring within itself. Those system models are obviously not selves. Second, the PSM is a highly complex process, and not the single entity that we take the self to be. Third, the self, as experienced, can be fully explained through the subpersonal brain processes that bring it about. It is not any entity above and beyond them. Metzinger states quite unambiguously, “For all scientific and philosophical purposes, the notion of a self – as a theoretical entity – can be safely eliminated,” and “[It] is not necessary (or rational) to assume the existence of selves, because as theoretical entities they fulfill no indispensable explanatory function.”