#natureofself

you forget. how you are a garden. you look in the mirror. and only see weeds.

but even weeds. are just flowers. that no one bothered. to name.

Do you ever genuinely relate to other individuals, or only to your projections of them?

What does it mean to genuinely relate to others? Think about that for a second and tell me that it does not absolutely blow your mind. To even describe what it is like to genuinely relate to others itself is such a hard thing to do, so how is it that people can actually claim that they do?

The world is so chaotic, just step back and think about it for a moment. Close your eyes and picture it for a second. Looking down at a city center, seeing all of these people walk past each other, sometimes glancing, the occasional smile here and there. Couples and friends sitting on the sidewalks at café’s drinking coffee and having a chat about their plans and goals in life, exchanging ideas. At this moment, you don’t see anything wrong with this image, but once we zoom into one mind then zoom back out you will begin to see what I mean by chaos.

We’ll zoom into one individual, 34-year-old Jake, A corporate lawyer in New York. He has brown hair, slight stubble, wearing a navy Tom Ford suit probably worth more than all my belongings put together. Let’s zoom in further to the more interesting part, Jake’s brain and ultimately his mind. A network of neural connections that fire away in different parts of the brain, fueling this seemingly ethereal voice in his mind that he refers to as “I”, his consciousness. Now this voice in his mind is the voice of 34-year-old Jake, the one of the corporate lawyer. It is important now to take it back in time and track the progress from 0-year-old Jake to now, and you’ll see why soon.

0-year-old Jake, a clean slate. An almost pure consciousness and this here is the key. Although Jake most likely cannot say the word “I” or even think of the word “I” the consciousness behind that is still there and at this moment it is at its most pure form. As Jake grows older he starts to see things around him. Whenever his mother hides her face behind her hands it momentarily pops out of existence but reappears again when the hands move out of the way. Slowly Jake begins to make connections because after seeing this almost a thousand times he starts to realise that maybe things don’t pop out of existence when they don’t appear to the senses, they simply are just not appearing to the senses. Now this thought process here is what I am trying to highlight. As Jake grows older, he sees more and more of the world around him and make more and more of these links in different ways than others do until eventually at the age of 34 there is layer upon layer of events, thoughts, ideas, assumptions and values (this is not an exhaustive list by any means) that cover that pure consciousness that Jake possessed at the age of zero. Now whatever Jake experiences he filters through those many layers, and at the same time those many layers’ project themselves on what he perceives with his five senses. It’s this infinite loop of projecting your mind onto what you perceive and then perceiving and filtering that information through the layers that constitute what you project onto the things around you.

Now how can it be possible that Jake, so lost in his own mind and his own layers of information can truly understand somebody else? Another person who is just as lost in their own paradigm of life. All we can do is project what we know and filter what we see through what we know and it baffles me that we walk around and say that we genuinely relate to others. When communicating with someone all you do is filter their emotions, their stories, their ideas and their consciousness through your own. That is not understanding that other being but understanding who they are from your perspective after you’re done filtering them through all those layers.

The only way to truly every understand anybody is to either remove all layers that cover your consciousness and perceive the world an untainted one or to completely lose the idea of self, and lose whatever remains of “you” in the mind of who you want to understand. I call this complete access. Complete access to every single neural connection in their mind, to every single layer which lays on top of that pure and objective consciousness. Once each layer is explored, its origin found, the thought process that was behind it broken down, then at that moment it is possible to say that that person is fully understood. At that moment you can know what it is like to genuinely relate to someone because you can see the world from their viewpoint. However, there is this paradox evident because once you truly see the world from another person’s viewpoint in the way I am describing it would mean that that person’s consciousness is now yours and you would lose your own, it would be impossible to remain yourself yet have that level of understanding that you need to genuinely relate to others.