“Myself”: The Fortification of Mind

How Identity Cuts Us Off From the World - Dialogue.

“I don’t care about my body or my mind,” she said casually in reply, as she sat at the kitchen table.

My heart felt like it was being pulled through hyperspace, lurching across the galaxy. An elongated sadness drew through me as love recognised a hole in time where it wasn’t thriving.

I empathised, I tuned into her resonance without losing my own footing.

“But you are your body and your mind” I said with a slightly confused tone, setting down the wooden spoon.

“Yes, and I don’t like it.” she replied frankly.

“But all the joy and love and happiness that you ever have is your experience of your body and your mind. I see you enjoying your body and mind every day.”

“Yes but it also causes me suffering. I suffer because of my body and my mind.” she said.

Compassionately and understandingly, we passed the ink back and forth for a few more minutes, each adding a little more detail to the map of our own understanding of self.

As we went on, it became increasingly clear that we were standing in slightly different places. But I also saw something she perhaps wasn’t seeing. I saw that, as William James put it,

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

I saw the deep.

In truth, I had been watching ‘the deep’ for years. I had watched it in every relationship I had witnessed or been a part of. My eyes had adjusted to the water, my organs to the pressure; I had grown gills. It would now be more effort to live in the arbitrary delineations of land masses.

I saw in her what I had seen in myself that brought me to these rich, navy depths. But it has taken me time to adjust to life here. I can’t drag someone down here out of nowhere, nor expect them, all the way from the surface, to see what I see. Still, I knew there was also a very real possibility that she can see something from the surface that I cannot see from the deep. The only way to proceed, was to ask what she sees.

“Can I ask,” I began, “you say ‘my mind’ and ‘my body’ in the same way you say ‘my phone’ or ‘my drawings’. You’re separate from and own the phone, you are separate from and own the drawings. So, who is it that is separate from and owns your body and your mind to say ‘my mind’ and ‘my body’?”

… a contemplative silence.

Patience.

“It’s not really a person.” She said insightfully. “It’s more like me as a child, back when I liked myself.”

“Is it this that doesn’t care?” I asked.

“No,” she said thoughtfully, “my childhood self doesn’t really know about that. The not-caring is a way to protect my childhood self from other people.”

I was astonished by the level of self-awareness, openness, and vulnerability for someone in the dusk of their fifteenth year.

“So the attitude of not caring is your defence mechanism?” I framed.

“Yes. If I don’t care, I can’t be hurt.”

“How does it feel to not care?” I asked, radiating love towards her, hoping she wouldn’t pull down the shutters here, at such a vital moment of self-acceptance.

But, as I looked into her eyes, I saw that she too had spent time in the deep. Her lungs are stronger than I realised, her organs are adapting, and her eyes are coming into much sharper focus much more quickly than I’d have imagined. She felt there was truth here and she comes regularly. It seems from her self-criticism that she keeps going back to the surface to check if those who have never been down here, understand life the way that she does. No, she realises, again and again, they don’t.

Not only do they not understand, but she doesn’t trust herself enough to stand in the authority of what she is discovering about herself. She still thinks that ‘up’ means ‘better’ and ‘down’ means ‘worse’. That’s the story of the land-dwellers she lives with; enamoured with fragments, captivated by division, defined by comparison and crowned by differences.

We have no story down here in the deep. We are neither better nor worse for we see we are all the same. Connected in the deep.

My question lingered only for a second or two, as she was all too familiar with how it felt to not care.

“Not good.” she said honestly.

“How do you feel about that?” I asked.

“It’s really sad actually.”

I watched her reconcile that with herself.

We took a moment…

“It sounds like you’re making yourself feel consistently bad, just so you don’t get surprised by it.”

“Yes, because at least I’m in control.”

We exchanged a look between us that said more than could be said with words. We both knew the folly of what she was doing and in a twinkling eye, we both realised that we loved her all the same.

Then she reflected, true and honest, and found something:

“I think that, actually, I really do care. I’m just trying to protect myself.”

“If you’ve seen that in yourself, that’s a marvellous insight.” I said earnestly.

We let this breathe for a while.

I wanted to add another point of view to increase the dimensions in which we were perceiving this moment. There are deeper waters…

“Is the self who doesn’t care like someone sitting in the audience of a war film, watching the activity of not caring; or is the self you feel you are, the one ‘at war,’ more like being in the film?”

“It feels like I’m in the audience, but empathising very strongly with the characters in the film.” she replied.

“And this film is your memories of your experiences and what people have told you about yourself etc.?”

She nodded gently. “Yeh like things mean people have said or standards that society has for me, or what I think I should be.”

“If I can summarise, just to make it clear if I understand…” I began, leaving space for her permission.

“You pretend not to care about yourself or the world in order to protect yourself who really cares very deeply. This self you’re pretending to be, isn’t you, it’s a character whose only purpose is to protect you from the distressing thoughts and expectations of the world as you see it. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“So the person you don’t like, is that you or is it the person you’re pretending to be?”

“It’s the person I’m pretending to be. My childhood self that I like, that’s not a person.”

We had arrived somewhere special and all that was left was to dust off the sand and let the radiance of this shine. I have taken many people to this jewel in the depths in my time, some have seen it’s glory and some haven’t had the time to adapt to the pressure to really witness the brilliance of this proverbial Arkenstone of psychological understanding. Many years ago now I took my partner here through a different route, and when she saw this secret in the deep, her life on the surface was lighter than air. She positively floated through her days, laughing with what used to upset her, accepting what used to deny her, loving what used to irk her.

I wanted to make sure that I didn’t impose anything on her at this point, but I also wanted to make sure that this made lasting sense. By pointing to the origin of the division between the pretence and the reality, this dichotomy within her of caring and not caring can be reconciled and understood. In this understanding she can have access to a deep peace within herself that relies on no external ‘other’ for validation.

“You say you’re experiencing the feeling of not caring, but you are not the feeling. It’s part of the movie you’re watching. From what you’ve said, what you don’t like about yourself seems to be what you’ve been told you are, and who you feel you have to be to be accepted.” I summarised. “This person you’re pretending to be is your defence mechanism for the love and care and beauty that you are.”

“You know, no therapist has ever seen that. I keep trying to tell them, but they just ask me about so many other things, so I just end up talking about the books I like.”

“When I hear that,” I said with a small sigh, “I feel disappointment. You’re going for help and you’re not getting what you need, you’re getting what they think you need. In my view,” I broke, “many may disagree, but although therapy is very useful in many regards, it seems to be mostly about trying to give you a healthier ego, they’re not trying to help you transcend it.

“How do you mean?”

“Who you pretend to be — whenever you feel you aren’t being authentic and true to yourself, or when you’re edifying yourself to please another or prevent them from hurting you — we’ve seen that that’s your defence mechanism. This defence mechanism is what the ego is. It is the body-mind’s defence of the non-personal love and care that is the truth of yourself. The ego is itself the fear response, the ego doesn’t have fear responses, and it’s in that defence that you feel worse about yourself.

“Having a healthier ego is like bringing the limit up on your self-love, but transcending it is like taking the limit off completely.

“You said it yourself,” I reiterated, “that inner care, it isn’t a person, and a person is a persona, a character, a pretence, an act. An act of self-preservation.

“There is no one who owns or has a body or a mind. Don’t you think it’s funny that, only when you’re pretending not to care does the possessor and hater of the body and mind come into your experience? That’s the speech of the defence. It’s self-preservation by self-flagellation, which as you’ve already told me, isn’t as protective as you initially thought it was. It’s making you feel bad on a consistent basis. It’s hurting you.”

“Yes! When I’m alone I’m happy. I run around, I sing, I have a great time!”

“This is you! This love and wonder, this joy and fun. This is you!”

“Yeh!” she said, beaming.

“You can just be you!” I said, “I don’t need you to guess what pleases me and contort yourself. Be different to me if you’re different, be similar if you’re similar. But you really don’t need to pretend. I will love you if you disagree with me just as much as you if you agree; I just want you to feel that you’re being honest and true to yourself.”

She lit the room up from that little corner she sat in. Her energy was lighter, more free. She was glowing!

Her vibration had changed.

She was herself.

Content, relaxed, and relieved.

What a wonderful embrace.