Me: Creature, Self & Awareness
There are three parts of me that I’m aware of. There’s Me-the-creature, Me-the-self and Me-the-awareness.
Me-the-creature
Me-the-creature is the instinctive side of me that flinches at loud noises, salivates at the smell of baked goods and thinks the lines in the optical illusion are the same length even when they are demonstrably not equal. It’s not certain how much of this creature I have control over; whatever the amount, it’s less than I want to admit. Most of it acts without any conscious awareness. Often what’s operating below my conscious awareness is a boon — thanks Me-the-creature for not adding digesting food or pumping blood to my list of to-do’s — but that unawareness also causes its share of challenges like under-thought stereotyping and irrational anxieties.
I like to think its choices are my choices, but that’s mostly Me-the-self talking. Me-the-self is quick to interpret Me-the-creature’s reactions like a lawyer whose job it is to rationalize and justify my preordained reactions at all costs rather than to inquire into, or even be curious about, what is really true.
Sitting in the dark recesses of my brain with nothing to go off of but the inputs it receives, Me-the-creature is incredibly gullible. It believes wholeheartedly whatever Me-the-self does or says. I can make the muscles around my lips flex into a smile and Me-the-creature will assume there is actually something humorous going on so it will release chemicals that make me feel happy. Me-the-self can also take deliberate rapid breaths and Me-the-creature will release stress hormones; breathe slowly and those hormones will subside making me feel calmed down. It can also be trained to form habits as if you were training a dog, following the cue, craving, response, and reward process.
Me-the-creature scares Me-the-self with its stubborn fallibility and powerlessness. Me-the-creature is ultimately humiliating, worthy of utter denial by Me-the-self. While Me-the-self projects itself into infinity with immortality symbols, Me-the-creature has to take a shit.
The Müller-Lyer illusion. Me-the-creature sees the lines as unequal and even though they aren’t, there is no amount of understanding that will change that.
Me-the-self
I first recognized Me-the-self as the voice in my head. The voice that has been conditioned by my past history as well as by the collective cultural mind-set I inherited. It is my harshest critic. The voice comments, predicts, judges, compares, complains, doubts and tells me what I should be doing. The voice of Me-the-self is rarely relevant to the situation I find myself in at the time; it dredges up old memories or rehearses possible future situations at the least opportune times. For the longest time I felt powerless to stop the involuntary thought processes of Me-the-self. This part of me loves the continuous inner monologues because it keeps the attention focused on itself.
If Me-the-creature is a gullible know-nothing, Me-the-self is a conspiratorial know-it-all. It perceives a sensation of increased heart rate from Me-the-creature and immediately jumps to conclusions: “Oh, that feeling is a result of knowing that everyone thinks I’m bad at my job.” If a half-second of more introspection were afforded, it would be obvious that there’s nothing to panic about; the elevated heart rate is just the caffeine in the coffee I drank thirty minutes ago. Me-the-self lives for conspiracy theories — exclusively the ones that put me at the beginning and ending of everything.
Me-the-self is similar to a bouncer at the door to Me-the-awareness. This bouncer is fiercely loyal to what he thinks is best for me, denying entry to information that goes against my self’s manufactured identity. When initial discomfort from cognitive dissonance occurs it goes on high alert. The bouncer sees the discomfort as an emergency to be solved at all costs, including denying, ignoring, rationalizing or creating a wholly different version of reality. Taken to the extreme, Me-the-self-as-bouncer can become determined to enforce more order than is good for me. While trying to control everything by enforcing rigid habits of thought and behavior, it causes uncontrollable and endlessly repeating loops of rumination. When Me-the-self abuses its power and becomes excessively rigid or fixed, depression, anxiety, obsession and the cravings of addiction follow.
Why such overbearance on the part of Me-the-self to maintain psychological equilibrium at all costs? It’s Me-the-creature’s fault. Me-the-self’s intentions are sincere. “Sure,” Me-the-self says, “you think I’m an overbearing dictator? Try fully embracing the meaninglessness of Me-the-creature’s mortality. Then we’ll see who's better off.” Ernest Becker calls Me-the-self “the prison of one’s character” — a prison we happily lock ourselves in to protect ourselves from the terror of existence. Becker elaborates: “The prison of one's character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one's creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man's anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax.... What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food?” Me-the-self wholeheartedly agrees—it will have nothing to do with death.
Hank Schmidt in der Beek / Fabian Schubert Und im Sommer tu ich malen. You don’t see reality not as it is, but as you are.
Me-the-awareness
I’ve taken up the task of managing Me-the-self ever since I realized I had one. For the longest time I thought Me-the-self was me. Not so. This self has been pruned, trained and down right hammered into its current form to meet the obligations and expectations of my family and culture. Just like Me-the-creature, the amount of Me-the-self that I’m personally responsible for is not totally clear but it’s malleability is an order of magnitude greater than Me-the-creature. The amygdala—the inseparable portion of Me-the-creature in the brain concerned with emotions—signals threats to Me-the-self who interprets them in a multitude of ways that, with effort, can be changed by Me-the-awareness.
Liberty is an external state of being that isn’t always in our control. Oppressive situations are always threatening the level of physical liberty we have. Freedom, on the other hand, is internal and is completely within our control at all times. Psychologist Viktor Frankl famously realized his freedom while in a Nazi concentration camp. In Man’s Search For Meaning, he says: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Freedom starts with watching Me-the-self. Put another way, I listen to the voice in my head from the perspective of a third-party-witnessing-presence. After some dedicated effort it becomes clear: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it. My overbearing Me-the-self loses its power over me because I’m no longer giving it energy through identification with it. As I work on observing Me-the-self, it in turn trains Me-the-creature to act in ways that are more in accord with my wellbeing.
Once I identified Me-the-self, responsibility for my actions became more salient. Instead of getting mad, I recognized that I was letting Me-the-self become mad. From the perspective of Me-the-awareness, all emotions displayed by Me-the-self take on a kind of performance. This is the perspective I imagine Epictetus having when he said: “Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a kind as the author pleases to make it. If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one. If it is his pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor, or a private person, see that you act it naturally. For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another's.” (Endichirion 17)
Me-the-awareness is not threatened by Me-the-creature like Me-the-self is. Me-the-awareness is part of the ineffable mystery; part of “God”. It is some kind of consciousness which exists in a pure state prior to identifying with any other form. This sense of my own presence is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind where there isn’t any fear. Instead of the fear that Me-the-creature instills in Me-the-self, Me-the-awareness is curious and fascinated by the strange competing factions of Me-the-self chattering away.
Ideally, Me-the-self can be reformatted as an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, it can be laid down. It is a lie, but, as Becker rightfully identifies, it is a vital lie: “a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation” (Denial of Death p55). Necessary because death is in direct opposition to Me-the-self. And for most people Me-the-self is believed to be the self and to lower it’s defenses would, as quoted above, “invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you.”
When Becker says, “It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours,” I don’t think he meant everyone is always doomed; he meant that for those who become aware of their creatureliness, and are unable to move from Me-the-self to Me-the-awareness, are doomed. (I’m being pretty presumptuous here in saying what Becker meant. He could very well have meant doomed. However, all stories are false; some are helpful, some are not — and I’ll take the more helpful one.) Later he says, “Neurosis is another word for describing a complicated technique for avoiding misery, but reality is the misery.” Neurosis is Me-the-self, and reality, as we know it, is the subjective stuff that Me-the-self trades in. Reality is true/false, light/dark, poverty/wealth. My deeper self is behind or underneath the duality of reality; Me-the-awareness is a oneness with being. Therefore, in the moments when I can embody Me-the-awareness, the vital lie is not just a tool for navigating a man-made environment, but a play-thing that allows me to experience the great things this world has to offer. When I’m able to grasp this idea it provides me an opportunity to step back and select the best tool — the best lie — to suit my interest in the moment.
Today, a lot of effort is put into defining one’s identity or discovering one’s “True Self.” This effort has resulted in some passionate calls for cultural reform from those who have defined their True Self as one that is marginalized within their culture. Positioning your accepted identity in a better light culturally is important work in service of us all. But it shouldn’t be done at the cost of making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. As inventor Paul Graham says, “Keep your identity small.” As Graham explains it, the reason certain topics, like politics and religion, always erode into unfruitful arguments is because those topics involve people’s identity. “If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity,” he says, “then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible...there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”
Defining my identity is Me-the-self talking. The voice in my head has given me so much shit that the last thing I’d want to do is give it the authority to decide who I am and what I’ll do. It’s a lie and so is reality. I’m Me-the-awareness. My identity/self is a play-thing that I made up in this made up world. How would I like to play today?