Fear is a Good Teacher, So Listen Carefully
A frightening experience leads to a new understanding of personal identity
A Question About Personal Identity
Is our experience of a separate self real? Multiple texts, both sacred and secular, by theologians, poets, philosophers, quantum theorists, and biophysicists have consistently claimed that our experience as singular selves is nothing more than a persistent illusion. And yet, the “bag of skin” that sits here typing this article seems real enough to me.
Is perceiving the self differently a question of poetry? Myth? Science? Is there something obvious that you and I keep ignoring or forgetting? I have wondered what I could add (my formal training is in psychology and linguistics), but as someone, somewhere must have said once, the questions choose you, not the reverse.
An Enigmatic Quote
Early in 2020, my husband and I moved from Minnesota to the mountains of southern California. Despite all the possessions we dumped or gave away, a printed-out quote I had found two or three years earlier made it from one refrigerator door to the next. It reads:
Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.
― Wei Wu Wei, in Ask the Awakened (2002)
Even for someone like me who enjoys reading eastern philosophy, the message is jarring. It seems to say that unhappiness hinges on an illusion and that illusion is you. Each time I saw the quote, I had a gut feeling for its wisdom, but I could never explain it.
Woman Meets Dog
Then one day, a few months ago, I was out taking a walk in our rural mountain neighborhood, exploring a new street and feeling at peace in the quiet sunshine amid the pines. At a distance, I spotted a German Shepherd loping toward me. I’m comfortable with dogs, even large ones, but certain breeds make me nervous, including Shepherds.
As the distance between us closed, it became clear that the dog was not feral, but neither was he friendly. I was surprised by the situation and had no previous experience to use for guidance. No one was around. When there were about five feet remaining between us, I tried to say hello in my calmest voice, but my new street companion was unmoved. He began to bark, loudly, insistently.
After several seconds of this, I felt frightened and stumped. I spoke in the calmest voice I could manage. Okay, okay, no problem, I’ll turn around, which I did carefully and began walking slowly the way I came. To my dismay, he continued to bark and follow me for several paces, as if to make double sure that he was running me off. At last, to my utter relief, he stopped following and let me go.
I was trembling. Within two minutes, I had gone from feeling peaceful and relaxed to shaken, vulnerable, and of all things, mildly ashamed. I told myself that someone less fearful and more self-assured would have connected with the dog, that he had sensed fear and weakness in me and had sized me up quickly as an easy mark. In short, the story-making machinery in my mind hatched a rapid progression of bad narratives that popped out like soap bubbles blown from a wand.
Later at home, I glanced at Wei Wu Wei’s quote on the fridge and it rankled me. Oh, “there isn’t one.” Interesting. Then what the hell was shaking and ashamed out there on a deserted street half an hour ago? My active imagination?
At that moment, I grew a strong desire to understand this alleged non-existent self with greater specificity. What did it mean? How could a clear grasp of it help in everyday life? Any wisdom that seems sound in moments of ease but fails to feel true when it matters isn’t worth much.
The time it took me to think deeply about the idea supports what the spiritual teachers tell us time and again. However much we might wish to recognize the illusion of ego, we will resist because our identity — or our life — depends on it.
The quote kept its place in the kitchen, and the inner wheels were turning. And then, of course, I forgot about it.
And that’s one thing that’s becoming clear: we keep forgetting.
The Emptiness of the Trees
My close call with the Shepherd kept me away from the street where we met but not from daily walks, fortunately. Most days, what I notice most of all are trees, which is not surprising in a national forest. I marvel at their differences and deformities. Some are majestic, while others, like snags (the forest service’s term for dead trees), are drab and homely. Regardless of appearance, they all seem to belong in that environment, and walking among them makes me feel as if I belong there, too.
Have you ever felt that the things you notice most in your daily life are there to remind you of something? The Shepherd approached me that day to remind me of fear and other truths hidden in the shadows associated with that fear. I’m not suggesting the encounter was destined, but it restimulated things I already knew and had forgotten — my vulnerability, how situations can turn on a dime, and a certain quote that I had been pretending to understand for nearly three years.
And so it was with the trees. With the Shepherd incident still fresh in mind and the conundrum of the illusory self that came in its wake, I remembered what I understood about trees.
A Cloud in a Sheet of Paper
I recalled my understanding of the illusion of a separate self from reading a text some years before discovering Wei Wu Wei’s quote. It came from a teaching story told by Thich Nhat Hanh to explain the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. The story begins this way:
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.
From this sentence alone, you might see where the teaching is headed. Clouds give rain needed to grow trees. Soil and sunshine play their roles, as do the loggers who harvest mature trees to make paper from the wood pulp.
The point is that paper is not an independent artifact but the result of multiple conditions — or dependencies — that make its existence possible. For this reason, Buddhists see a sheet of paper as “empty” of an independent identity as paper. In other words, it is full of non-paper elements (clouds, rain, soil, sun, and so on).
The same is true of any artifact, be it a building, a work of art, or a cell phone. It is neither realistic nor accurate to view any object as having a completely independent identity. Nothing comes into being from thin air.
Nhat Hanh’s view of a cloud in a sheet of paper is more than a poetic vision of cause and effect, i.e., relationships between events that happen earlier and later. Having read and listened to many of his teachings for years, I believe he sees the cloud and the paper — and the rain, soil, sunshine, tree, loggers, paper mill, and all the rest — as arising mutually. That is, they are all there, in the paper, now. Or if you prefer, he regards poetic vision as a way of referring to objects as they exist in a space-time continuum.
Empty Paper, Empty People
With Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching story in mind, I circled back to the quote on my fridge and recognized it as another expression of emptiness, except that it applies to a person.
Consider yourself. What you perceive as a self at this moment is a confluence of non-you elements (clouds, sunshine, food, parents, teachers, on into infinity). Thus, we could say of this self called you that “there isn’t one.” Without the non-you elements that converge in an experience you call yourself, there would be no you.
We may now glimpse a truth we are willing to consider but find impossible to perceive in ordinary experience. In other words, we may understand the idea of a space-time continuum and how it points to infinite interdependencies as the reality of any object.
But the problem remains that this so-called reality does not align with our experience. We still perceive ourselves as separate individuals, bags of skin, that could suffer pain and injury if attacked by another separate entity, such as a dog.
So which is it? Am I truthfully empty of individual existence and just unable to perceive this, or is all this talk about clouds in paper and everything it implies a bunch of useless sophistry?
Before embracing the latter option, recall that at this moment, your body is moving through space at a speed of about 1,000 miles per hour. We don’t feel this because everything around us is moving at the same speed. Our inability to perceive this fact does not change its reality.
Stereograms provide another example of how tricky seemingly crystal clear perceptions can be. These also involve seeing something unexpected in a sheet of paper, but in a less abstract and more immediate, and dramatic way. If you have experienced the magic moment of seeing a three-dimensional image hidden in a stereogram, you understand how just a slight shift in focus provides visual access to a new world you would have sworn was not there seconds earlier. (In case you are unable to see the hidden images in the linked stereograms, you are not alone. Check out this brief article.)
Ways of Seeing
In 1966, theologian and philosopher Alan Watts set out to answer the very question asked at the start of this article: Is our experience of a separate self real? On page 1 of The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, he declares it is not:
[T]he prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East — in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism.
Sounds very much like Wei Wu Wei’s message, does it not?
Watts’ treatise is too complex and nuanced to present in detail here, but two key insights from The Book are worth mentioning: (1) the universal and misguided view of the world as made up of separate things, and (2) his notion of correlative vision as a tool for finding our way back. I will also share my own insight related to language.
Binary Opposites “Arise Mutually”
First, Watts argues at length that the impression we have of binary opposites as separable is mistaken. Life consists of an infinite number of such oppositions, e.g., cold-hot, up-down, silence-sound, dark-light, easy-difficult, and so on.
Because of how we function neurologically and our social conditioning, we tend to view opposites as independent of each other, but they are not. (Watts presents myriad evidence supporting this claim from diverse disciplines, including quantum theory, biophysics, neurology, and psychology.)
There can be no understanding of cold without hot, up without down, and so on for every opposition. Opposites are never separable because each depends on the other for its existence.
The point is that because binary opposites are normally seen as existing independently, they enter into different sorts of relationships based on the personal narrative of the perceiver. For example, one pole is judged more desirable or valuable than its opposite.
As Watts points out, problems ensue when people see themselves as separate from the context that makes their lives possible. (The binary opposition operating here is figure-ground.) For example, such a perspective supports an attitude toward the environment as something subordinate to people and therefore ripe to be used, often to exhaustion, at the pleasure of those who “dominate” it. “[T]he universe,” muses Watts, “is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game…there is no separate ‘you’ to get something out of it as if life were a bank to be robbed” (130).
Watts emphasizes that this view of the world as made up of separate things hypnotizes us into believing in a “disjointed vision of the universe” (34). This distortion is reinforced daily by the limitations of our biology and perceptual apparatus. That is, focused attention is essential for survival but continually creates a false impression of the world. Watts puts it this way:
Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together — as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam…Attention is, therefore, something like a scanning mechanism…But a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits, and these he calls separate things or events (31).
The Role of Language in Breaking the World Into Separate Things
Watts also touches on the hypnotic power of language to trick us into believing that all named things are separate. We need language to formulate and share ideas, but language also forces us to chop reality up into pieces. After years of thinking in words, these symbolic divisions become real for us, and our mental abstractions create the world of separate things we perceive. As he observes:
The difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature (94).
He challenges readers to experiment with perceiving self and context as processes rather than discrete entities, as do speakers of Amerindian Nootka, a language that features verbs and adverbs, and does not use nouns and adjectives.
[I]n the Nootka language, a church is “housing religiously,” and a home is “housing homely.” Yet we are habituated to ask, “Who or what is housing?…
Does it really explain running to say that “A man is running?” On the contrary, the only explanation would be a description of the field or situation in which “a manning goeswith running” as distinct from one in which “a manning goeswith sitting.”…Furthermore, running is not something other than myself, which I (the organism) do. For the organism is sometimes a running process, sometimes a standing process, sometimes a sleeping process…and in each instance, the cause of the behavior is the situation as a whole, the organism/environment (95).
Watts’ point is that nature is not made of things (nouns), but rather, is an ongoing process moving in different patterns. Forcing selected bits of these patterns into abstract containers called nouns is only an artifice and an arbitrary one at that.
The Example of Helen Keller
The remarkable story of a moment of confusion Helen Keller experienced before beginning to acquire language at the age of seven offers intriguing evidence for what Watts explains.
In the Story of My Life, Keller recalls what it was like not to understand the physical sensation of water as a separate thing of the world — a noun — only hours before her epiphany at the well with her teacher, Ann Sullivan. As Keller explains:
Earlier in the day, we had had a tussle over the words ‘m-u-g’ and ‘w-a-t-e-r.’ Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that ‘m-u-g’ is mug and that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ is water, but I persisted in confounding the two” (emphasis added). (Story of My Life, 1903).
In other words, before understanding hand signs as symbols for the things in the world, i.e., naming the world through language, Keller was interpreting the physical experience of water-in-a-mug as patterns forming one continuous process. Sullivan tried quite sensibly to chop this process into two parts, water and mug. This made no sense to Keller, who had yet to learn the arbitrary linguistic system of “nouning.”
As a child of seven without language, Keller stands as an intriguing example of a person who was, in fact, not required (or able) to break the world into separate bits through the use of language. As a result, she was, apparently, unable to perceive and interpret two very different materials as distinct.
Correlative Vision: Living Life on the Razor’s Edge
Watts’ second and most important insight is correlative vision. This describes an attitude
whereby one sees that all explicit opposites are implicit allies — correlative in the sense that they “gowith” each other and cannot exist apart. This, rather than any…absorption of differences into a continuum of ultimate goo, is the metaphysical unity underlying the world (The Book, 148).
As Watts explains, the notion of correlative vision comes directly from Advaita Vedanta (one of the oldest schools of Hindu philosophy in the Upanishads). It describes a way of seeing that walks “the path of the razor’s edge, a balancing act on the sharpest and thinnest of lines” between our everyday experience of things in the world as separate and a broader understanding of the inherent wholeness of life.
Significantly, Advaita means “non-duality”, not “unity.” In other words, it acknowledges and honors the ordinary perception of things as separate while pointing to a dimension “in which explicit differences have implicit unity” (The Book, 148)
Thich Nhat Hanh’s cloud floating in a sheet of paper describes correlative vision, but Watts’ text takes great pains to render this truth more relevant to the stresses of daily life:
[To] ordinary vision…[l]ife is a series of urgent choices demanding firm commitment to this or that…Any common dimension between them seems inconceivable…Yet with a slight shift of viewpoint, nothing is more obvious than the interdependence of opposites” (The Book, 149)
Another way of stating this, as Watts points out, is to say that
The universe implies the organism, and each single organism implies the universe — only the single glance of our spotlight, narrowed attention, which has been taught to confuse its glimpses with separate ‘things,’ must somehow be opened to the full vision…(The Book, 107)
To feel the force of this truth, try seeing those with opposite political views as necessary people in your life. Without them, your perspective would have no meaning. The point is not that people should abandon their values and beliefs. Rather, the invitation is to consider engaging with opposing views in a spirit of play instead of a fight to the death. As Watts observes:
The morality that goes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of your dependence upon enemies,…and indeed, upon all other forms of life whatsoever. Involved as you may be in the conflicts and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to indulge in the illusion that the “offensive other” is all in the wrong, and could or should be wiped out (The Book, 131).
Correlative Vision Is Key
When I turned to The Book for the “lowdown” on Wei Wu Wei’s quote, I hoped for a revelation of some kind, like the magic moment of seeing the hidden image in a stereogram.
A single moment of revelation never happened. Instead, I now see that correlative vision, or lucid vision for simplicity, is a promising aid for revisioning personal challenges, such as fear. It may also help with collective challenges, such as divisiveness, that plague our world politically, economically, and culturally. In a word, lucid vision makes clear the interconnections between any supposed single thing and the elements that make its existence possible.
For lucid vision to have its full transformative effect on the mind, its view of interconnections needs to go deeper than intellectual understanding. One needs to develop an intuitive grasp, the ability to see the clouds in the sheet of paper immediately and instinctively, as a fact of existence.
This way of seeing the world takes practice because it contradicts much of what we are taught from childhood about the nature of reality. Fortunately, opportunities to practice exist across multiple perspectives — sensory, scientific, verbal, poetic, and ethical — a good sign that it may one day go viral if an attitude or state of mind can do that.
Lucid vision is sensory. When you can see a stereogram, you are using lucid vision in its most basic, physical sense. To see the hidden image in a stereogram, the viewer must shift from narrow to wide focus. (The latter is what we use when we gaze off into the distance while looking at nothing in particular.) Peripheral vision also exemplifies lucid vision. When we spot something in our peripheral vision, we see it, but not directly. It is no less clear for this, but the sighting is different.
Lucid vision is scientific. Quantum theory and biophysics both point to the illusory nature of the world as a collection of separate things. To learn more, begin with The Book, pp. 105–108. You may also be interested in watching the classic video Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, an unforgettable 9-minute journey that describes our place in the cosmos.
Lucid vision is verbal. Metaphor and paradox are both verbal equivalents of lucid vision because they require the mind to abide two concepts simultaneously without focusing exclusively on either one. For an accessible yet in-depth introduction to the pervasiveness of metaphor in everyday thought and speech, check out Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Lucid vision is poetic. Poetic imagination derives its force from opening a corridor of understanding between immediate experience and ultimate understanding — everyday life and what it means to be human. Since taste in poetry is diverse and personal, try visiting poetryfoundation.org or poets.org to get started on your poetic journey, if you feel so inclined.
Lucid vision is ethical. In her book The Places That Scare You, the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön uses stories to illustrate the value of learning to tolerate uncertainty and discomfort without resistance. Our natural inclination as human beings is to tense up when we encounter difficult emotions such as fear, anger, or sadness.
Chödrön tells the story of her teacher Chögyam Trungpa’s response to a student who had acted aggressively towards other students because of emotional difficulty. This troublesome behavior continued for some time until one day, Joe crossed the line and slapped one of the other students. Chödrön continues:
Rinpoche yelled, “Out! I want you out of here now! I don’t want to see your face again!” Joe left in shock. The other students gathered around Rinpoche saying, “We’re so glad you got rid of Joe. He did this terrible thing yesterday and that awful thing this morning…Thank you for sending him away.” Rinpoche drew himself up firmly and said: “I think you do not understand — Joe and I are the best of friends” (116).
Trungpa saw the immediate problem and responded appropriately in that context. His perspective also recognized the truth of Joe as a precious human being worthy of understanding. We can only imagine what Joe’s experience was, but suffice it to say that everyone is capable of cultivating lucid vision and finding freedom in the wider perspective and wholeness it affords.
Chödrön tells this story in a chapter entitled “The Spiritual Friend” which she opens with a quote by Trungpa: “The real function of a spiritual friend is to insult you.”
Parting Thoughts
And so it was with the German Shepherd, a spiritual friend, perhaps, whose function it was to frighten me. Our encounter conjured up a vigilant resistance in me that made my body feel like a prison of intense personal separateness. It was an awakening and a call to look more deeply into a quote I thought I understood.
Wu Wei’s quote is worded to be provocative, and it succeeds. Still, I would add a few words to make it clearer, at least for now:
Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one…that exists separately from all else that makes your life possible.
When we focus on ourselves, we tend to forget that every aspect of our existence depends on everything and everyone else.