Are you a high risk, medium risk, or low risk biohacker?

A high risk biohacker is someone whose biohacking is pioneering.  They are using supplements and procedures which are new and exciting.  Though well-studied recently, the long-term, and sometimes even shorter-term effects and side effects of these substances are not well known.  These side effects can lead to mild, moderate, or severe side effects and even death.  Some bio-hackers have died, presumably as a result of some of their biohacking practices.  Therefore, the high-risk biohacker has to know what things he is doing which is high risk, take measures to mitigate the possibility of bad outcomes, and accept the risk that he is taking on.  What he should not do: try to convince himself and others that what he is doing is perfectly safe.  That is delusional thinking which will hurt him or her, others, and the biohacking movement in general.

The high risk biohacker has to answer these questions:

How long have humans encountered this or similar substances?  In other words, have animals co-evolved with this substance?

Plants, animals, and fungi co-evolve.  For example, plants use nicotine to kill pests, but they also use it to get humans addicted so that we spread their seed all over the planet.  Tobacco plants are a successful species.  Plants often makes substances that kill small insects while making larger animals high so they spread the seed.  Plants like marijuana has long traditional use, thousands of years of known use.  There are side effect, but they are well known, so there is a low risk of unknown side effects if the plant is used in traditional ways.  Therefore, there has been human exposure in a certain traditional form.  But opium and heroin are different entities so that leads to another question:

How much has the substance been altered from a natural form?  How synthetic is the substance?

A more synthetic substance will be more foreign to an animal body and therefore there is higher risk of unforeseen consequences.  This includes for example, genetically modified organisms.  From what we know, nature has had little interaction with genes modified by humans, like frog genes in a tomato.  There is no telling how that will interact with the environment.  Therefore gene therapies are high risk at the moment as there is more uncertainty as to the effects.  Next is recent human experience with the substance.

How long has it been on the market?  Are post-clinical reports in yet?

If the substance is completely new, for a medication, even though they have done studies, they do not know the long-term effects of the substance because the substance has never been used for decades yet.  We will find out.  If you are the guinea pig, that puts you in the high-risk category.  Bodybuilders of the past were in the high risk category because they did not know the long-term effects of using testosterone.  They discovered it shrinks your testicals and can shut down natural production.  Today, SARMS are being used which are marketed as safer but in reality, we do not know the long-term effects.  Hopefully they will be safer but using them is high risk at this point.  We can infer a little from the chemical the SARM was created from, for example if it was made from an estrogen inhibitor, we can infer that it may desensitize the androgen receptors similarly to how much the parent compound did so to the estrogen receptor but there is no convincing yourself that you are not high risk biohacking, which, congratulations is fine.  You are a pioneer, just be aware of that.  Also, if one wants to do high risk biohacking with a doctor, it is usually very expensive because doctors won’t take insurance for that.  Perhaps you can draw up a contract, even to do low risk biohacking with just mild medications for mild conditions with a goal to produce improvement in other functions as well, many doctors won’t do.  It would be good if you could contract with your doctor to work with you, instead of trying to weld authority over you.

Medium risk biohacking:  Medium risk biohacking we reserve for substances which have been on the market for decades and we generally know what the side effects are.  This could be a substance like dextromethorphan.  It’s an nmda antagonist, it has been used as OTC cough syrup for decades but has been in research for myriad uses. 

Low risk biohacking:  You are optimizing sleep, diet, exercise.  This is low risk.  The benefits are many, the side effects are few.  If you are healthy, this is where you should be, especially if you are young.  You can’t get any better, but you can get worse, so don’t use any substances.  If you do, know that you are taking on risk that will not improve things overall but you are being a pioneer.  Substance use are for people who have dis-ease, they are not easy.  To the point that they need to use something and take on the side effects to feel better and they are better off even with the side effects.  If you are completely healthy and satisfied with life, stick to low risk.  You can use substances which have been in use for at least a thousand years.  Coffee, wine, many fruits, veggies, herbs, mushrooms.  I mean, there is still a lot of things you can experiment with.  Especially things that come from the lands of your genetic background because your genes have co-evolved with them.  Alcohol has been in use in western lands for thousands of years, it is very dangerous but the risk is known, and it can be used safely.

So, what kind of biohacker are you?  Be honest with yourself.  Be a man, or a woman, and admit what risk you are taking on and be proud of it.  Don’t be delusional, sticking all kinds of things in your body and claiming it’s safe.  We will try our best to be safe but we gotta man up and take on the risks and benefits.

I am personally in the high risk category, but I wouldn’t call myself a biohacker or a pioneer.  I have medical conditions which I am trying to improve or cure while at the same time getting some nootropic benefits.  But the substances I am using puts me in the high risk category.  A person using a lot of high risk substances can expect some side effects, short-term and long-term.  The higher the risk, the less time till a severe error may occur.  But the benefits may be worth it.  Many people suffered and many people prevailed to produce our current understanding of steroids which did not all come from doctors or researchers.  Doctors were even saying in recent memory they don’t make you stronger, they just make you mad and break stuff.  That was not true, they definitely improve recovery ability which equals strength if you work out.  So, the researchers and muscle men of yesteryear gave us our current knowledge of steroids through high risk trial and error.  Some of them paid a heavy price for it, liver failure, kidney failure, heart failure, and the early death rate of those guys was incredible.  But some of them lived long lives.

Daryl Frank Seldon, MS, copy-writer, knowflow1@gmail.com

The New Man Epistemology

The New Man: Using this stance in your dealings will make you powerful.  It will make you love yourself and intelligent.  Had to dangle a carrot, sorry guys, we're human after all.

Epistemology

In order to build a new society (an ingroup), we have to have educated and reasonable people who are on the same page epistemologically.  We all have different belief systems and theories, but when we deal with each other, let's try to avoid operating from absolutism: the delusion that you have things absolutely right.

I've decided from responses that this viewpoint is better used as an agreement across belief systems that we will agree to operate from this viewpoint in dealing with each other.  It will allow a fundamentalist christian and muslim to at at least get some work done.  My personal preference is to trial collaboration groups of people who have no use for beliefs, but that shuts out too many people, and I can do that on my own time.  Apparently, it's an experiment since belief has been in vogue for a least a few thousand years who knows.  

Edit: 3/17/2019 I've written this lofty sounding at first, but know that my smallest goal for it, is just to uses if for online discussions, have everyone agree to skepticism in argumentation, else they misinterpret everything I say cuz they take it in an absolute way.  So, anything beyond that, take with a grain of salt, and please do not believe any of it.  That would be the opposite of the goal.  Only, operate under these assumptions.  It is my core assumptions but doesn't have to be yours, just use it in dealing with others otherwise, you're being a bit of a self-righteous a-hole, which is fine, but keep it to yourself.

1.  Agreement to operate from Skepticism.

The first principle of our epistemology is skepticism.  I know this is basic, but it gets more narrowed down if you read on.  Therefore, we use this epistemology because we are testing it and experimenting to see if it will work better than previous systems.  We reserve the right to fall back on older systems.  Skepticism means that you never have the whole picture, you never think you are absolutely right, or that anyone else is.  You judge information according to usefulness, truth value, predictive value, and other values, but never as absolutely right.  Even physics equations are just provisional info that we will use, until we have better info.  At no point do we believe it.  We use strategies to deal with uncertainty, rather than attempting or claiming absolute certainty.

Information resolution

We look at information as a hierachy of low resolution to high resolution systems and then the info in those systems have high and low resolution.  The higher the resolution, the higher the truth value.  Therefore, when someone claims for example that the Bible is the absolute truth, that is rather silly because human language narrativees have pretty low resolution.  That’s like a child saying, “my brother is absolutely a doo doohead”.  Doodoo head is too low resolution a concept to be called true and certainly not absolutely true.  The hierarchy of info goes something like this.  It needs to be understood also that our perspective cannot be divorced from the concepts we make about these system, so even the putting together of the system itself is tainted by our perspective.  We can never see the thing in itself because if you can’t see, you can’t understand anything.

High resolution

Physics:  Quantum phyics: high resolution,  Newtonian physics: low resolution

Chemistry

Biology

Human language, humanities

Low resolution

A goal:  Theory of Everything?  Algorithm, heuristic Web of Everything

We have a goal of integrating these systems, creating a computerized algorithmic theory of everything that is not a theory really, but a web of loose connections.  For example, “love” is low resolution, we connect it with oxytocin, oxytocin is connected with carbon.  Therefore carbon is connected to love.  And the computer program will then be able to find connections we never could and produce novel solutions and predictions.

Then you have the epistemology and senses you use to understand these systems.  E=MC2 is piece of language, a concept.  So is ‘doodoo head’.  Which has the higher truth value?  Neither is the absolute truth but they refer to things.  If her brother is behaving badly, is she speaking the absolute truth by calling him a doodoo head?  Being gay is wrong is low resolution, not similar to a physics equation but some claim it is absolute truth.

2.  Anti Logocentrism:  Language literalism is stupidity.  Deconstruct language, ask how a concept developed.  What is it were just invented?  What if I were the first person to say 'choice', 'want', 'desire'?  What new advantage did it convey?  A new concept should be better than the old one.

The second principle is anti-logocentrism.  Language does not perfectly describe the universe.  Nor do numbers.  They are just tools that we use to get work done.  See Wittgenstein, Jerome Bruner.  For example, to many people a 'choice' is a very real thing, but in essence, it’s just a word that describes a group of very different experiences (see Nietzsche).  Choosing what to eat cuz you’re hungry is not very similar to choosing a wife in a dream state.  Different drives, different circumstances.  They just have something quite small in common so we use a word like choice and now we think we’ve got magical powers called free will.  WE do an analysis of the language people use to see what concepts, algorithms, heuristics, assumptions are beneath their use of language. 

For an example, If someone says in a philosophy group, “How many years does it take to reach enlightenment?”

What are the assumptions behind that?

Language literalism - He thinks enlightenment is something very real and defined, when it’s not.

Personhood literalism - He thinks a person is a special thing to the universe.  In fact a person is a piece of the earth’s upper crust that comes and goes.  That we give it a name doesn’t change the fact.  When a person is dead, they are literally no body, it’s somewhat delusional that we even speak of a dead person.  That’s over for good.  There’s no heaven, no resurrection, most likely, because a piece of earth crust isn’t important enough for any powerful being to recreate.  All they did was eat and poop the first time around, no need to bring them back.  Plus there’s a billion just like them still eating and pooping.

So, we look at the basic, underlying assumptions, if we have to engage such a person but we generally avoid talking to those who are ignorant and not interested in learning.

3.  Anti Free will as a good description of experience or physical theory (see Nietzsche)

WE do not believe in free will, we do not disbelieve in freewill.  Like doodoo head, its too childish a concept to do what people want it to do.  But we still use intentional language (choice, belief, desire, free will) just for communication.  Most likely all we experience, all that happens is determined, and if not, then indeterminate, or something else.  It is most likely not caused by our beliefs and desires or will power.  It is surprising that people take these things so literally.  Literalism is stupidity.  With any concept, we should ask, what does that concept do?  How did the concept come about?

Our epistemology assumes that what we experience is not the ‘real world’, or the ‘thing-in-itself’ (see Kant).  As we interact with things, what we are and what the object is determines how we experience it.  It’s possible also that all matter, all physical properties are the same as experience and that when many particles work together, such as in a human body, they can produce unitary properties, therefore unitary experiences.  An example is a magnet.  When metal has domains which are not in alignment, it is just a piece of metal.  Put those domains in alignment, it becomes a magnet.  The whole metal now reacts to an opposing force.  A human is similar, our cells work together to make us a singular being.  It is also connected through electromagnetism, in fact we might just be a giant, complex magnet, or electromagnetic phenomenon.  A computer is of course the same thing.  Your computer just might already have quite a complex type of experience (see panpsychism).

A magnet is probably having a very basic experience, and experience could be based on electromagnetism since that speed might be what creates a human type of experience.

We do not use the algorithm of belief

We don’t believe in gods or any kinds of myths.  We have no need also to deny them.  We only use the term belief because we inherited it.  But it is unreasonable to claim to know something for sure when you don’t know it for sure and that’s what belief is.  We’ve no use for it, except to communicate with others who believe in it or use it.

We do not believe in IQ or any similar constructs.  It’s just a tool of discrimination.

Our goal is to create a new man who is peaceful, powerful, and intelligent to fight the degeneration which we see happening.  But we want to do this only among ourselves, not the society at large.  We have to insulate ourselves from the idiocy of society.

4.  Bias for freedom and options
We do not believe such things as marriage are anything but a convenience.  We try to keep options open and we champion freedom and options in all things.  We only let those in who understand and accept our epistemology and goals of freedom, beauty, intelligence.

5.  Concepts are little computer programs/biases in the brain

Concepts are algorithms, heuristics, little computer programs in the brain.  They are not something ultimately real in the universe.  For example, ‘love’ is not a thing.  It is a word that refers us to some feelings we have had, there are a limited number of humans and a limited number of people who have or will feel that way.  It’s not something that’s all over the universe.  Other animals may have no such experience they would describe that way or even we may have not experienced things that way in the past or will in the future.

6.  Perceptual Psychology, Phenomenology:  Understand behavior by intuiting experiences of others

We try to deduce from a person’s behavior, what they are experiencing.  For example, if a child runs away from grandma, we understand that she saw a scary face, even though we only see grandma.  

7.  Moral stance

We only use a moral judgement to change behavior, we don’t believe it is something real.  Blame, responsibility, these things do not well describe what we know physically or even what we experience.  They are just algorithms which have been successful.  Therefore, we don’t believe people are in full control of themselves and are worthy of absolute blame.  We blame only to identify the source of the problem, then we need to calm down to find a way to fix the problem.  We don’t get stuck in morality loops.

8.  Bias for useful education the person can use in life

Once a person has the right epistemology, we need then a general education and then a specialty education.

The general education should cover extensively fields which increase personal happiness, health, and success.  There’s isn’t time to waste on trifles, we want info the person can use.  We focus then on information literacy, technology, health, and happiness.  We want every single person to be able to learn expert:

Philosophy

Computers

Mechanics

Biology

Health - Biohacking

Physics

Programming

Must be expert at reading comprehension and quickly accessing and using information with computers, calculators.  Stuff like Beowulf, learn that in your own time if you want, it’s not for basic school.  There is a hierarchy.  A person who doesn’t know how to stay healthy doesn’t need to be learning Beowulf yet, there are more important things for them.

It is our goal to start a school that teaches only applied ways of using all of these.  We learn nothing in school which cannot be used by a single person to complete an important task.

8.  Listing heuristics and algorithms to use to deconstruct language and build a Unified Web of Things Theory that go from experiences like light all the way to quantum physics theories about light

Nassim taleb has a good list of heurstics in his work.  We want to collect algorithms, heuristics.  Also computerize some of them, see what AI can do with them.  Also, we learn to deconstruct the algorithms and heuristics that others are using.  It provides predictive value.  It mostly predicts what they will say however, not what they will do because they don’t do what they say.

Here we can start a list:

1. Nothing goes as planned.  All intelligent people know this, but most people don’t.  They make plans and deadlines.  They say things like “I always keep my promises.”  That’s a delusional person.

Some recommending reading to our viewpoint include:

Nietzsche

Nassim Taleb

Jerome Bruner - Show you how language, stories work

Immanuel Kant - epistemology, thing in itself is not knowable

Paul Feyerbrand

Mathematics without numbers: Geofrey hellman - this helps break the spell of those who think numbers compose the universe

Wittgenstein - shows us how language games work, language doesn’t describe experience or reality, they just do a job

Game Theory

Daniel Dennett:  The Intentional Stance
Psychological and neurobiological experiments on choosing, freewill

A New Look at the Original Serpent

I have received messages about the serpent of the bible and the circumstances surrounding the fall of Adam and Eve.  As I write this, I am skeptical of the existence of any such beings, yet, I received the message none-the-less.  I can only hope that it helps someone.

The serpent of the bible was an actual serpent, or rather many actual serpents.  It describes a period in evolution when self-consciousness was developing in humans.  This link explores the whole subject, it has been studied scientifically: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/10/did-snakes-help-build-primate-brain

I received this message during an unintentional, massive DXM trip.  I was living in a violent area of Columbus, GA, in E. Canty Homes.  Drug peddlers and thugs had taken up operations on my porch.  I clashed with them, I threatened them, I recorded them.  They threatened to kill me.  Then, one day, Someone was shot on my porch.  My anxiety was intense.  I thought, I would take a few dxm pills to calm down, but they didn't work.  So, I took more.  Still nothing.  Then, by nighttime, I was at 900 mg.  That's a massive hallucinogenic plateau, and I started receiving messages.

The first thing was an awareness of an interface.  A grid of geometric figures each containing a complete childhood memory or past memory.  I then experienced extreme dissociation.  My liver was talking, had taken over the language center of the brain and was saying it was uncomfortable with how I was laying, so I shifted positions.  Internal organs would hijack the language center and lodge complaints.  Individuals cells and maybe individual electrons got a chance to be displayed in consciousness.  But that is just an exploration of delirium.  What it taught me is that a natural state might be dissociation.  Animals are mostly dissociated.  Their cells are doing their own thing, they have not come together to be one person.  That's why a cow eats grass while it's about to be shot in the head.  There's no one person there who cares.  So, how did humans get that way.

Part of the answer is, snakes.  Snakes are the number one killer of humans in their natural environment.  When a primate encounters a snake, say a chimpanzee, it does something strange.  It focuses.  It may even stand on two legs to avoid it's hand being bitten.  It becomes humanlike, for a few seconds, all the cells are working together to avoid danger.

So basically, the snake scared the human into integrated consciousness.  But, that effect became so useful, that, the human started to evolved into a constant state of snake-charmed fear, what we call consciousness.

The original sin was self-consciousness.  When God found out what had happened he said, "Who told you you were naked?"  They had become self-conscious of their sexual parts.  That was the original sin.  Not because they might lose it, but because the snake might bite it.  Clothes are to hide the genitals from the snake, not from the woman or man. 

And, it has led to the misery we live in today.  How do we get out of it is the question?

The Self and Drug Addiction

The problem with being selved all the time is that since the self is a way of thinking, our perspective invents the self with imagination, then it invents the ever-presence of threats to the self with imagination. It becomes the case with some of us then, that anytime we are selved, we are worrying about the things that threaten the self. Life becomes a misery with few breaks except brief moments of being unselved, during sleep, or drug use. The self program stops us from sleeping, so we rely on drugs or some other perversion.

The self program is like the zoom out feature of the - person shooter video game. Our consciousness learns to zoom in and out. When a threat is right before us, we can just run from or attack it. But if it might be way behind us, we have to zoom out, and then, we don't really see it so we have to invent the threat and ourselves and imagine it. Sometimes, we get to the point that we are always zoomed out to imagined threats, and always super stressed.

The problem with being unselved all the time is that then you cannot anticipate threats.

There is here an insight into why people do drugs. They have constant traumas that menace the self. It is close to paranoid schizophrenia, except that they have some conscious control over their perception of the realness of those threats.

Anyway, we often wonder why some people will do drugs which are not pleasant. It makes them mad, or sleepy, or some other state that isn't pleasant to them or anyone around them. Might they be doing it simply to be unselved. Anything that deranges the mind a bit will give you a break from constantly worrying about your life. People even abuse benadryl. There's not much of a high to be had, but there is dissociation, it will stupefy your ability to worry about yourself. One of the mechanisms of action of antidepressants are blunted memory and depersonalization, both of which simply decrease one's ability to worry about onself.

Also See:

http://dysautobot.blogspot.com/2017/09/what-does-it-really-mean-to-lose-self.html
http://dysautobot.blogspot.com/2017/09/bipolar-disorder-and-self.html

Bipolar Disorder and The Self

In our last blog, I wrote about losing the self.  I have subsequently wondered if it may be helpful in bipolar disorder.  For background on what it means to lose self, click here: What does it mean to lose self?

The Self Progam

There is little doubt that the self program can wreak havoc in bipolar disorder.  Metabolically, we react with things in our environment, and also with things in our minds.  The mind is able to dream up endless horrors to menace us.  When our moods are up and down and we have a lot of anxiety and depression, we will tend to ruminate, which means to think about these things that threaten us, over and over again.  We may even do it when we are asleep and hence have nightmares each night.

The things that threaten us, threaten the self, which is a memetic program that organizes our conscious experience, especially to help us anticipate and avoid threats.  The self is often hypothetical, just as the threats it faces are hypothetical, anticipated.  Those threats may never come to pass.  And the more frightened, manic, or depressed we get, the more we dream up unlikely threats.

Getting Control of the Self

Can dissolving the self help us to avoid this suffering?  I suggest we test it.  Here are ways to dissolve the self:

1.  Through flow activities, activities where you focus so fully, you are no longer aware of yourself, like sports and video games.
2.  Through meditation.
3.  Through outwardly getting rid of your reliance on reputation.  That can mean moving to a job that doesn't require reputation, such as online website building, coding, or writing.  Many online jobs only require you be able to do the job, from project to project.
4.  Using the self program while recognizing it is an illusion.

Let's examine reputation.

Reputation

Reputation can be especially difficult for those with bipolar disorder.  We have episodes where we may do things way out of our usual character.  We may become sexually promiscuous during mania, spend too much, do too many drugs, or hurt people's feelings.

The Birth of Reputation

How did reputation come to be?  Well, here's a just-so history.  In the past, we needed a way to predict how others might behave toward us.  Might they beat us, or love us?  This is probably way back before humans were humans.  Gorillas appear to be able to recognize individuals and remember their habits.  So this ability reached it's furthest evolution in humans with our ability to talk about reputation.

Reputation is a part of identity, which is a part of the self-program.  Identity and reputation are social creations, and creations of the brain.  We could for example, have no past reputation.  No one talks about what they or other's did in the the past, no one keeps a tab.  In our pre-history it could possibly have been that way, but we learned to use reputation->identity->self, because it is useful.  It helps you predict how people will act based on how they acted in the past.

But our management of our own reputation is crazy-making.  Can we use it to our advantage, but not to our detriment?  Take the good without taking the bad.  I think we can.  Once we learn how to dissolve the self, eradicate reputation, then we can turn it on and off, use it when we like, and not use it when we don't want to.

Decrease psychological reliance on reputation

The first step is to decrease our reliance on reputation inwardly.  It must be done inwardly before it can be done outwardly.  Inwardly, we can see the arbitrariness of how we create reputation.  We look at what people have done in the past, and judge them based on that.  That is an okay thing to do.  However, we get crazy worrying about and trying to manage our reputation.  We are fragile to criticism and full of shame about things we did as kids.  Once we realize that this is just a pattern of thinking evolved over thousands of years, that we inherited but don't have to always use, then we realize that with ourselves, we don't have to judge.  We are what we are.

Decrease reliance on reputation outwardly

 After losing the baggage of reputation inwardly, we may try, if we can, to do it outwardly, in the world.  Find a job that depends less on reputation.  Don't go to award shows to be honored because if getting the award feels good, not getting it will hurt.  Also, award shows are generally incredibly uncomfortable.  So, kindly decline unless you do it not for praise, but for practical reasons of advancing in your career or other reasons.  When you are called a bad name, or people say that you are stupid, or a whore, or ugly, don't defend yourself.  If you get upset, let the emotions come and go, without giving them persistence by fighting them or rationalizing.  Your past, your self, doesn't matter.  You are a living, breathing being, right now, that's all that matters.  So, don't think positive things about yourself, and you won't have to defend yourself when people suggest to the contrary.  Also, don't think negative things about yourself.  Then, the things people say cannot hurt you for long.  You may have an immediate reaction, but you will stop that reaction from continuing.  As long as you are alive, you are on your own side, no matter what you do and how your-self or other selves judge it.

Conclusion

Once you learn to use the self program for practical effect, while not believing it is the only way to think, then you will have the option of choosing when to be selved or not.  You will not care about your reputation, but you will instead us it for practical purposes.  However, you can not be actually offended by threats to your reputation.  Eventually, that kind of grace builds trust in others.  When they finally figure out that you have allowed them to think bad things about you, because you are not protecting the self, they will learn that asking you is the only way to get the truth about things, because if they don't ask, you are perfectly willing to allow them to believe that which is false about you.

In bipolar disorder, our reputation is sometimes in tatters.  What we are saying is, stop caring about it on the inside.  You may need to protect it for practical purposes, for making a living.  But you don't care about people's assessment of your past self.  You are a present person.  Take care of you.  Once you learn not to protect the self, you biological swings will no longer be triggered by selfish thinking.  It may still be triggered by environment, temperature, and diet, but it will no longer be intensified by self-judgments.

Let me know that you think.  Thanks for reading.

Thank you,

Daryl Seldon, MS

Contact me at knowflow1@gmail.com to talk about any issue that affects your quality of life.  Confidentiality is taken very seriously.
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So, we have 3 goals:
1.  Using self with the knowledge that it is an illusion.
2.  Dissolving self through meditation and flow activities.
3.  Losing identity by failing to protect reputation.
If you see someone acting with freedom, you can expect they either have no reputation or a bad reputation, so they have nothing to lose by acting as they please.

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What does it really mean to lose self?

What is a self?

We often hear that the self is the root of all problems, all conflict.  We are told that we have to dissolve the self, become self-less, and unselfish.  This is a central imperative of Buddhism and many other religions and spiritual practices, but what does it really mean to lose the self?  Does it mean to just be unconscious or is it a total transformation of consciousness that some of us are not capable of.  Let’s examine these questions with a few thought experiments.

Imagine you are just now born.  Your mind is new.  You have a field of vision but you’re like a running camera that just records and broadcasts to a screen that shows the scenes of your life.  You are that screen.  You have no distinction between the world and you.  You have no extrapolated perspective.  Many animals appear to be this way.  The cat will attack your hand if you form it into a spider and walk with your fingers because the cat has no enduring concept that the hand remains connected to you and cannot morph into a spider.  Sometimes in pathological states like sleep paralysis, stroke, and drug intoxication, we go back to this perspective of just viewing the world with no self.

So how does the self develop?  Well, first off, you begin to see as a baby that your arms and legs are doing things.  You see that you can directly feel things that touch your arms and legs.  People keep saying a word at the tv screen which is your experience.  This word is your name.  The arms and legs from which you can feel direct stimuli, this is your body.  And this body is in the world.  The world is inherently dangerous and you receive stimuli you want to avoid.  So now, on your tv screen of experience, there isn’t just the screen receiving anymore, but there is a person on the screen trying to avoid danger, and that person is you, yourself.  This is how the self developed.  It is how it develops in infants and possibly how it developed in humans.  Just like walking, it took a period of time for humans to learn to walk upright, and as a microcosm of that, it takes time for a baby to learn to walk.  Some animals’ babies are born already knowing how to walk.  Not so with humans.  So also, we are not born already having a self, we learn it over development.

Self-Consciousness

In our example, consciousness is the TV screen, self-consciousness is the TV screen with our bodies in it, seen in third person.  It’s the difference between a first person shooter game and a third person shooter game.  In first person, your body is not on the screen, you are just a perspective you shoot from.  In a third person shooter, you see the character you are controlling.  So consciousness is like the first person shooter, self-consciousness is like the third person shooter.

So, what’s wrong with being self-conscious?  It is this.  The first person perspective must merely deal with what is before it.  Once a threat is out of site, it is out of mind.  However, the first person perspective has to dream up the self.  It gives it characteristics.  It persists over time, it has a personality.  Further, socially we learn to keep a running tab of our behavior, so we feel guilty about things in the past.  Eventually, our third person shooter is carrying lots of weapons and he is weighed down.  Threats to the self are infinite, because they are imagined, just like the self is imagined.  The first person perspective just deals with what happens, the self deals with what might happen, based on the past.  So the threats in the past, the self stretches out to infinity, and there is not a second where one should not be in fear over what might happen because one never knows.  The self becomes obsessed with past traumas and reputation.  It becomes afraid of dissolving, drifting, meditation, flow, becoming aloof.  It wants to be on at all times.

"Threats to the self are infinite, because they are imagined, just like the self is imagined."

So this self-consciousness is of tremendous importance in our present social and physical lives.  Indeed it does help you preserve your physical body and navigate social politics.  But there are parts of the self that lead to constant pain, and there are times the self needs to be forgotten.  Isn’t it amazing that it is possible to forget the self?  We all do it, we become so engaged in some activity, we forget we exist.  What has happened is that we have reverted back to the first person perspective in order to focus all of our hardware on the task at hand.  This is proof that the self is a creation of the mind, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to forget oneself.

Pathological self

Identity 

Identity becomes part of the baggage of the self.  I am a lawyer.  I have to dress this way, act that way.  I am not to be seen with street-walkers.  I have to eat a vegan diet because those in my social group do.  One’s identity results in a lack of freedom and constant struggle and conflict.  I am a black man.  I have bought into all the baggage of slavery and oppression and I am destroyed mentally by it.  It is identity that becomes pathological.  Identity requires a regularity that becomes a prison.  I have to be nice, so when I’m not nice I have to feel guilty and make excuses, I can’t just leave it alone.

Can we merely use identity for practical purposes?  We need a name to function in the world, but surely one name is as good as another.  We have had online avatars or alter-egos become another self online, so we can see how easily selves are created by the mind, given identities.  We know how to drop the identity of our online characters.  We can either erase the account, or we can stop caring what happens to the avatar.  Many people become so selved in a pathological way, they find it impossible to ever forget themselves.  They may turn to drugs and alcohol which force the mind to forget.  That one becomes both forgetful and out of control on these drugs are not side effects, they are a primary effect the user is seeking.  The user wants to forget.  He is menaced by constants threats to the self.  The self is partly memetic, a piece of software running on the hardware of the brain, so being fragile, it is ever in danger of being harmed.  It is harmed by information questioning the desirability of its qualities, suggesting it is stupid or ugly.  It is threatened by physical harm to its hardware.  It is threatened merely with daydreaming and moments of drifting off into forgetfulness.  It is threatened by antidepressants that causes depressed persons to focus outward rather than ruminating in the self.  Antidepressants affect memory and they can cause depersonalization, an uncomfortable sense of not being a self.  This is no coincidence.  When they are effective, they interrupt the self-obsessive program.  The self says “focus, remember your self, remember your problems, don’t drift off into forgetfulness.”  So, it is always on, constantly activating the stress drives and hormones.  When the self becomes overburdened, it needs to shed some baggage.

 Ways to shed the baggage of the self

Since the self is very important, what we want is to be able to use the self when it is helpful and forget it when it is not.  The self is a program on the brain that contains many apps associated with worry and fear, and it can eat up all the resources of the system.  So, we need to be able to sometimes close the program.

First, we must learn not to cling to identity.  If someone says you have been rude, don’t take it as a threat to your self, merely try to fix it and move on.  Don’t think, ‘I am not rude, she is wrong.’ Nor, “I have been rude, I’m a bad person.”  Identity is for practical use, just like an online avatar, we should not take what happens to our avatar personally.  Do not become consumed with trying to defend yourself against stereotypes or the negative judgments of others.  There is no success in that, the more you fight, the more miserable you are.

                                                               

So I can understand the desire to shed the baggage outwardly, but it really should be done mostly inwardly. If you do it outwardly without having done it inwardly, that is the definition of not being ready for it. If you haven't shed the baggage of identity inwardly, to for example quit one's job outwardly would be a very dangerous thing to do. Once it is done inwardly, it's obvious what to do outwardly. And it can be done without pain.

"Shed your baggage inwardly before you do it outwardly. Once you have done it inwardly, it will be obvious what to do outwardly an it can be done without pain."

Flee from the prison of reputation

Ever been somewhere where no one in the whole country knows you?  Don’t you discover that a lot of what seemed like such hard fast identity was indeed just a way of thinking.  Because here you are now and your identity is totally different; you are nobody.  You could act most out of character and no one would notice because they have no beliefs about you.  Identity can be a trap that makes it impossible for us to be free.

The great thing about the past, is that it is gone.  It is no longer real.  It exists in the present.  When you are free from the past, you can see more clearly how to act in the moment.  You can stop clinging to reputation in the mind, so that you are not touched by it, but can still use reputation in order to function in the world and make a living.  Or, you can actually find work that does not depend on reputation.

"The great thing about the past, is that it is gone.  It is no longer real."

A job like teacher, depends highly on reputation without also paying much monetarily, so it may not be for a person who does not enjoy it enough to trade freedom from reputation for the job.  Being a doctor can at least pay well, but the reputation is fragile.  Out of character behavior in personal life or work life can derail a doctor, as can malpractice suits.  So, for someone who doesn’t love the job, or doesn’t need the pay, it may not be worth it.  Some may choose ways of working which do not at all depend on reputation.  For example, programming, and many online jobs only require you to be able to do the job.  There is no delving into your personal life or identity at all.  Lucky is the person who can make a good living at a job that is not fragile to reputation.

Forget Yourself

 Meditation is often the practice of forgetting yourself.  Forgetting yourself is rejuvenating to the mind and body.  You can forget yourself when engaged in flow activities, like sports or video games.  You can also forget yourself each day.  Die each night, be born again each morning.  That means put all self baggage, all identity to rest each night.  Awake as a rebirth to full-freedom.  If you need a reminder, it may be helpful to say a small prayer each night and each morning, to remind yourself to die each night and be reborn each morning.  The self does not persist through time without breaks.  The mind activates and deactivates the self-program by the second.  But as it is activated, especially if there are past trauma’s, it is stimulating the body to pump out stress hormones and adrenaline.  So, for some of us, only when that program is off, can we experience growth and repair.  It is off most often during sleep, but sometimes we have stressful lucid dreams where the self is in tact and activating fear drives.  This happens often when there is trauma from PTSD.  Treatment can address this issue as well as meditation, and other means of weakening identity.  The  soldier with PTSD must cease to be a soldier as his identity.  Immerse himself in new, rejuvenating flow activities, and forget the self.  Let the past die.  When asked who you are, answer honestly, ‘I’m a person.  I like to go hiking,’ rather than, ‘I’m a soldier.’  We have to let it be over.

"The persistence of the self is a lie, it comes and goes, but when it picks back up it goes, “I’ve been here the whole time.”

What does this mean?

Well, if the identity and self are creations of the mind, they should work for you.  If they are causing you undue pain, they are not working.  They can be re-calibrate by reducing your dependence on identity and reputation, both mentally and outwardly.  I may for example be a writer, but when I meet people, I don’t identify myself by my occupation, because I want neither praise nor condemnation.  When someone calls me stupid, I don’t respond; I’m unconcerned emotionally with what their self says about my self.  I am no longer protecting my self, my avatar.

You may find when you are reducing your dependence on identity, that you hate your job and was keeping it only because it makes a good identity.  So, you might now decide to do something more in line with what you do well, puts you in flow, allows you to forget yourself, provides for your needs, and makes you happy, rather than what gives you a good reputation.

You may be with someone you don’t love because you need to look like you have a good family.  You only get one life, you spend it controlled by the slightest opinions by others when you are controlled by identity.  In fact, no one cares a whole lot about your marriage but you, they have but small opinion of it, and you are not close to them anyway.  Yet you stay in a bad marriage for their sake.  Once you leave dependence on identity, you may or may not decide to change your life but you will have better reasons in either case.

Becoming selved is necessary for us to have the complicated perspective we need to function in today’s world, but when we realize the self is just a creation of the mind, we can learn not to take the self so seriously.  And we can learn when it is safe to let go of the self, and drift off into pure awareness, flow, and meditation.

Thank you,

Daryl Seldon, MS

Contact me at knowflow1@gmail.com to talk about any issue that affects your quality of life.  Confidentiality is taken very seriously.
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Addendum:
Discussion with a member of the Alan Watts and Buddhism Facebook group clarified that another aim is not to get rid of self, but merely to use the self program with the knowledge that it is an illusion.  Thus, not being fooled by it means it's no longer an illusion for you.

So, we have 3 goals:
1.  Using self with the knowledge that it is an illusion.
2.  Dissolving self through meditation and flow activities.
3.  Losing identity by failing to protect reputation.
If you see someone acting with freedom, you can expect they either have no reputation or a bad reputation, so they have nothing to lose by acting as they please.

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