How We Perceive The World

This is Amanda Kimball reading from Resting in the Waves by Doug Kraft.

Sprinkled throughout this book are suggested exercises that bring the subject more deeply into direct experience.

As you listen,

You may want to hit pause and engage these contemplations,

Or you may wish to take them lightly and come back to them later,

Or not at all.

Please use them in ways that support you best.

Chapter 1,

Fluidity of Self.

My computer had a meltdown.

My email accounts flickered,

The contents of my calendar disappeared,

My backup drive sputtered,

I spent hours on the phone with Apple support trying to sort it out.

I was not a happy camper.

If you had asked me who I was in the middle of that,

My answer would have been very different from the one I'd give if you had asked me in the middle of the night while I was meditating with my cat.

And those two selves are different from the me hanging out with my grandson on the beach,

And those selves are different from the one bicycling along the American River,

Or choosing cereal in the grocery store,

Or delivering a Dama Talk.

I do not have a self.

I have many selves,

And so do you.

So do all of us.

Suggested exercise.

Ask lightly,

Who am I?

What do I experience directly in this moment that I label me?

Who and what am I really?

Weather.

We usually think of mind and self as solid entities,

But the mind is a process,

Not a thing.

Self is a verb,

Not a noun.

The mind and self are less like entities and more like the weather.

Ever-changing,

Uncontrollable,

And impersonal.

When we lived in New England,

The weather could shift dramatically from day to day.

If you don't like the weather,

We'd say,

Just wait a few hours.

Now we live in Northern California,

Where the changes are usually gradual.

Still,

The weather is fluid,

Even if the rate of flux is slower,

And we have little influence on what the weather will be.

We can hope,

Wish,

Complain,

Pout,

Demand,

Or pray to the weather gods,

But the weather is indifferent to our preferences.

It obeys natural laws over which we have no dominion.

Nevertheless,

Climate change is real.

While we have no control over today's weather,

How we relate to nature has significant influence in the long run.

When we oppose natural laws,

The cumulative effects are not pretty.

Similarly,

We have little control over dominion,

But how we relate to it has a powerful influence as time goes by.

If we try to control the mind or try to fix it,

Oppose it,

Or condemn it,

The results,

Likewise,

Are not pretty.

But if we relate to it with wisdom,

Kindness,

And respect,

It becomes more peaceful,

Content,

And wise.

Since most of us identify with the mind and its perceptions,

Our sense of self is also fluid,

Beyond our direct control,

And impersonal.

The suffering mind gets stuck on things.

The awakened mind heart rests comfortably in the ever-shifting flux of experience,

Like the little duck riding the ocean.

Welcoming fluidity is about cultivating an open and caring attitude toward our ever-changing sense of self and ever-fluid mind.

It can deepen,

Open,

And enrich our lives.

Multiple selves.

The thought of having multiple selves can be disconcerting,

But having many selves is normal.

The difference between most of us and someone with clinical multiple personalities is the amnesia.

Someone with multiple personality disorder can't remember what happened when they were identified with a different persona.

Most of us can remember.

We may not have the same personality at work that we have when playing with our kids or hiking in the mountains,

But we remember those experiences.

Self-identity can be strongly influenced by circumstances.

There was a period in my life when I had two starkly different jobs.

I had left the ministry to become a psychotherapist.

It would take a few years to develop a full-time counseling practice.

Meanwhile,

I had bills to manage,

So I took a part-time job as a software engineer in a large computer company.

On Mondays,

Wednesdays,

And Thursdays,

I drove to an industrial park,

Walked into a catacomb of office cubbies,

And spent the day interacting with high-speed computers and high-tech folks.

On Tuesdays and Fridays,

I went into my home office and spent the day listening to clients and their struggles as we sorted out their selves and the meaning in their lives.

I enjoyed both jobs.

When I recognized how differently I experienced myself in each job,

I mused,

Am I crazy?

Yet when I was engaged in either job,

I felt perfectly normal.

The various circumstances in your life may not be so starkly disparate,

But they probably are not homogenous either.

Suggested exercise.

Close your eyes and imagine the various situations you move through each day.

Note the attitudes,

Perspectives,

Thoughts,

Feelings,

Joys,

Stresses,

And views of life that feel natural in each situation.

Whom do you experience yourself to be when you are with a close friend?

At work?

Playing with children?

Listening to the evening news?

Walking in nature?

Sitting in class or in other settings?

Persona therapy is a school of psychology developed by Carl Jung,

Eric Byrne,

And others that works intentionally with all our various selves.

It helps name the numerous personalities and identify their needs.

Then as we flow in and out of them,

We can take better care of them all.

This can deepen well-being,

Contentment,

And joy.

Persona therapy suggests that becoming aware of and having a good relationship with all of ourselves helps us to have a good relationship with life.

Authentic self?

This question,

Is one of these personas our authentic self or is there another truer self essence,

Our soul if you will,

Hidden behind all of these fluid selves?

Suggested exercise.

When you ask,

Who am I?

Note your answer and follow up with who or what experiences this self.

Note that answer and follow up again.

Who experiences that self?

Most of the world's religious traditions say we have a soul essence.

Vedanta,

Hinduism,

Judaism,

Taoism,

Christianity,

Islam,

And others say the purpose of the spiritual journey is to discover our real higher selves as our bodily death to enter another life or another realm.

Through meditation,

The Buddha came to a radically different conclusion.

He said that none of our personas is carved in stone.

They grow,

Change,

And evolve.

Ultimately there is no fixed self essence,

Just fluctuating self identities.

Self is an ephemeral fluid process,

Not a tangible entity.

It might better be labeled selfing in action rather than a self,

A thing.

If the Buddha was right,

The near universal belief in a soul essence may be an evolutionary distortion.

Ancient ancestors who believed they had a self essence to protect were more likely to survive and reproduce than those who were convinced they eventually dissolved like mist in the morning sunlight.

The belief in an eternal soul or self motivates us to survive and reproduce.

Suggested exercise.

What if there is no experiencer apart from experiencing?

What if selfing is real and self is a distortion?

What if selfing is primary and self is a secondary byproduct?

Sense the implications.

In the end,

The Buddha was not interested in a philosophical debate.

He felt it was more important to explore the phenomena and see what they revealed.

He encouraged us to drop all concepts and notice directly the experience we call mind or self,

Minding or selfing.

So let's do that.

Let's take a step closer to what's going on inside and explore our experience.

In this chapter we'll consider two related topics.

One,

What is self-sense?

That is,

What sensory impressions give rise to a sense of self?

While many factors shape our various selves,

There are a few key elements without which ourselves would seem radically different.

What are they?

Two,

What is the function of self-identity?

Rather than go down the rabbit hole of speculating who am I or what am I,

We'll explore our various selves as coping mechanisms for dealing with life's variety.

The following chapter brings the Buddha's practice into this exploration and looks at his insights into these issues.

Subsequent chapters will reflect on the practical implications of welcoming the fluidity of the mind,

Awareness and spiritual practice.

Sense of self.

But first,

What gives rise to a sense of self?

Many experiences affect our self-sense,

But there are two elements without which self-identity would not arise at all.

Neural binding and a specific type of neural suppression.

Neural binding has to do with several sensory experiences merging into one mental event.

This helps simplify the vast complexity of the world into manageable objects.

A bird lands on a branch outside my window and chirps.

My subjective experience is of a single bird that flies,

Lands and sings.

I don't perceive this as separate objects,

One that flies,

One that sits and one that chirps.

Neural binding is how the brain combines several phenomena into one subjective object or cohesive story.

Neural binding also plays a key role in our sense of self.

Here's an example.

I'm sitting in a chair giving a talk.

Sometimes I use hand gestures,

Other times my hands rest on my lap,

One hand on the other.

I'm not conscious of my hands because I'm busy attending to what I'm saying,

Yet my hands are not numb.

If I purposely put my attention there,

I feel them well enough,

But mostly I don't notice my hands.

Now you come up quietly behind my hand,

I notice your touch instantly.

I might even stop mid-sentence and turn to you to see what you want.

This scenario seems ordinary,

But when we think about it,

It's curious.

The touch of your hand on mine is similar to the sensation of me touching my own hand,

Yet your touch grabs my attention while my own touch flies below the radar.

How come?

The explanation is complex.

The motor cortex sends signals to muscles in the arm telling them how to move in such a way that one hand lands on the other.

As this signal travels down a nerve,

It bifurcates before leaving the skull.

One branch goes back into the brain,

The second branch leaves the skull and goes to the appropriate muscles.

Then as the muscles move,

They create sensory signals that are sent back to the brain.

Meanwhile,

The first branch that goes back to the brain searches memory for sensations that have been produced by those muscle movements in the past.

These expectations are sent to the sensory centers of the brain.

So when I move my arm,

The sensory centers receive two sets of signals,

One from the brain telling it what to expect and the other from the muscles telling it what is actually happening.

When the sensation of movement neurally binds with the expectation of movement,

It's as if the brain understands I touched my hand.

If there is no expectation to bind with the actual movement,

The brain understands I didn't touch my hand,

Something else must have touched it.

The brain responds differently to these two situations.

If the actual sensations are close enough to the expectations,

Reflexes that could be triggered are ignored or suppressed.

I barely notice that one hand has touched the other.

This is neural suppression.

Tickling.

The poster child for neural binding and neural suppression is tickling.

If I'm ticklish and you rub my sides or underarm in a particular way,

I giggle and squirm.

I don't want to be tickled.

I don't want to giggle and squirm,

But I can't help it.

It's a biological reflex.

However,

If I rub my side or get a reflex whatsoever,

I'm rubbing.

But now those sensations are neurally bound with the expectation of those sensations.

The tickle reflex is completely suppressed.

I can't tickle myself even if I want to.

Worm.

The neural binding and suppression occur on a very basic level.

They are precognitive.

We see them in very simple organisms.

If I poke an earthworm with a stick,

It pulls away.

I doubt it cogitates before moving.

Its brain is hardly any larger than a single ganglion.

It doesn't have enough neurons to ruminate.

Its withdrawal is reflexive.

However,

If an earthworm bumps into a stick,

The pressure on its skin from the collision is nearly identical to the poke from my stick,

Yet it doesn't pull away.

If the worm withdrew every time it touched something,

It would never get anywhere.

Its survival depends on avoiding some sensations and ignoring those same sensations when they're generated internally.

Without eyes or ears,

It relies on touch to navigate.

How does it distinguish between it touching something and something touching it?

The answer is neural binding.

Like us,

The worm generates an internal signal of what its body movement should feel like.

If there is no neural signal to expect those sensations,

The withdrawal reflex is triggered.

If the expected sensations are neurally bound with the actual touch,

The withdrawal reflex is suppressed.

This combining of the two signals is so important that it is highly automated.

This is neural binding and neural suppression,

And it is the beginning of a sense of self and other.

The worm can make some simple distinctions between itself and the environment.

I doubt it ponders,

Plans,

Or fantasizes about itself.

It hardly has enough brains for that,

But it can make the rudimentary distinction between me and not me.

The worm withdraws in response to something touching it,

But it doesn't withdraw in response to it touching something.

Suggested exercise.

Where does your sense of self seem to reside?

Does it center in your head behind the eyes from where you look out at the world down to the body and up to the top of the head,

Or does it center in the chest from where you look sideways to the arms and up to the head,

Or is it dispersed throughout the body?

If it seems to center more in one place than another,

Let your awareness go into that place.

What do you notice?

If there is any tension in that place,

Let it relax.

Surrender.

What happens?