Chapter 1:

Deconstructing the Self

You cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created the problem.  Albert Einstein

          Similar to the way the earth is constantly yet imperceptibly from our perspective rotating, we have seen in chapters one and two that our culture and its paradigm are dynamic and constantly changing – hopefully evolving rather than devolving, but only history will be the judge of that.  Although it remains difficult for us to imagine, we should consider the possibility that everything that is completely “normal” to us might one day be thought of as remedial, unsophisticated, ignorant, absurd, misguided and often times barbaric.  In this chapter we will examine from the same perspective what is considered to be the “self” in our culture as well as some of our customs, mores, and beliefs that define our “selves” and our individual paradigms.  For the purposes of this exercise I ask that you are willing to explore the possibility that our cultural paradigm’s belief in a consistent individual “self” over time is simply a mental construct or fiction. 

          I have developed the following thought-exercise questions in order to help you deconstruct your individual mental paradigm and slightly loosen your attachment to your belief system.  I hope that by the end of this chapter it is crystal clear that from an outside perspective – some time in the future or another universe – it is possible to view our cultural paradigms as well as our individual paradigms as remedial, unsophisticated, ignorant, absurd, misguided, and often times barbaric.  If you are capable of slightly unhinging the firm grip that you think you have on your self, your paradigm, and your beliefs, you may begin to feel that you are really the unwitting master of your thoughts and emotions and can thus shift them to a more favorable and peaceful, loving, fulfilling paradigm.  You may notice nervous laughter, shock, guffaws, and/or knowing smiles when you read the below questions but my aim is to have you imagine - however briefly - the house of cards known as “Western Culture” falling in on itself.  That doesn’t mean that everything you and I believe is absurd or nonsensical; it just means that our belief system is relative; it is not set in stone and unchanging - we just cannot easily see the paradigm actively shifting while we are living it (except for awesomely cataclysmic changes such as putting a man on the moon or electing the first African American President of the United States). 

           One problem for us is that when we actually believe that we believe something then we really do not like to question it.  Remember that just 500-600 years ago people believed that the earth was flat and that the sun rotated around the earth; some of the people who thought otherwise were deemed heretics and witches and put to death.  And just as we “know” certain facts and science has told us that these facts are unequivocal, there may be a time when our way of seeing the world, life, and ourselves is considered to be myopic, short-sighted, and relatively ignorant.  Can you consider this possibility or do you think that human consciousness has exhausted its potential after just a few millennia?

Imagine the following possibility for a moment, please: on the other side of your anxiety about your “self” - your attachment to your personal identity – who you are – who your culture has told you to “be” - if you are able to unhinge yourself from your current beliefs for even just a few seconds and get a glimpse of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain - you may experience a world of freedom hitherto unknown.  Can you accept this as a possibility or do think that something terrible will happen if you loosen your attachment to your beliefs?

           If while answering the below questions you go to the extreme and deem absolutely all of our beliefs fictions or absurd, that’s OK.  That’s a normal reaction (over-reaction).  But the possibility that we as a culture create our beliefs does NOT in any way imply that life is essentially meaningless and that lying in bed for the next 40 years eating licorice, watching bad television and masturbating will be as fulfilling as being a proactive member of a thriving community dedicated to raising consciousness and making the world a more equitable, loving and positive place for all sentient beings.  The point of this exercise is to ultimately empower you to be masters of your destinies rather than to accept the stories of the status quo.

Please try to honestly consider, ponder and ruminate on the below questions.  It may be beneficial to get a partner and speak the questions and some of the possible answers aloud to each other:

1. Where does your personal identity or sense of self come from?  Who are you?

1. Are you your appearance?  Are you what you see when you look in the mirror?  And if so, what do you see when you look in the mirror?
2. Are you your job?
3. Are you your name?
4. Are you your bank account? 
5. Are you your house? 
6. Are you your street address and zip code? 
7. Are you your real estate holdings? 
8. Are you your 401K (or what’s left of it)? 
9. Are you your accomplishments? 
10. Are you your status symbols?
11. Are you your vacations?
12. Are you your father’s son or mother’s daughter – your partner’s partner or lover’s lover – your boss’s employee or employee’s boss?
13. Are you your religion?  A Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim?
14. Are you your nationality?  An American?  A Norwegian?  An Irishman?
15. Are you your political party? 
16. Are you your sex or gender?  Man?  A woman?  (And what does it mean or imply to have a sexual identity in our culture?)
17. Are you a capitalist?  A socialist?  A communist? 
18. Are you a child of god?
19. Are you all of the above?
20. Are you none of the above?
21. How do you define yourself?
22. What is your story?  How did it become your story?

• How do you feel about your story?
• Are you the hero or the victim in your story?
• How do other people perceive your story?

1. If you had to live your life over what would you change and why?

1. Is yourself or what you consider to be your “self” just a vessel or container for thoughts and emotions?
1. Are you your thoughts?  Cogito ergo sum?
2. What percentage of your thoughts are positive?  Negative?
3. How many new thoughts do you have each day? 

• A Harvard study concluded that you average 3 new thoughts per day.  What does that tell you about your mental soundtrack?
• What are most of your thoughts about?  Are they about getting your physical needs met?  Are they about getting your emotional needs met?  Are they about getting your ego’s needs met?

1. Do most of your thoughts revolve around planning, rehearsing, strategizing, judging, anticipating or remembering? 

• How helpful or successful or fulfilling is it to spend most of your mental life planning, anticipating, rehearsing, judging, strategizing and remembering?

1. Are you your emotions?  What emotions come up for you right now when you read these questions asking you to question your beliefs about who you are?

• Do you think you experience a normal and healthy range of thoughts and emotions?
• Are you open to the possibility that in some ways you are a bundle of reactions waiting for stimuli, complex version of Pavlov’s dog?
• Are you open to the possibility that you are a bundle of defense mechanisms subconsciously (and unintentionally) established to ward off anticipated pain and disappointment?
• Are you prejudiced?  Has your mind “pre-judged” numerous phenomena and already sorted them into categories of “good” and “bad,” non-lethal and lethal, fun or not-so-fun?
• Is it possible that your mind is on auto-pilot?

1. How consistent is your “self”? 

1. Heraclites said that you cannot step into the same stream twice.  If all of your blood cells recycle every seven days and all of your skin cells recycle every 30 days then how can you be sure that you are the same you from last month or last year?
2. How do you present your self to strangers?  Think of cats and dogs: when animals meet other animals they smell them to assess several possibilities:

• Can I eat it? 
• Can I have sex with it? 
• Can I play with it? 
• Is it encroaching on my territory or food or family?
• Does it pose a threat to me – must I kill it or flee from it immediately?

1. How different are human beings from animals when we meet strangers?  Do we use language to “smell” (assess) people?

• What are the first 3 questions you ask when you meet a stranger?  Name, rank, and serial number?  Friend or foe? Or…  What’s your name?  Where are you from?  What do you do?  (Which is really “What do you do for money?/How do you earn a living?”) 
• What does the above information really tell you?
• Do you subconsciously or even consciously audition people to see if there is a role for them in your story?

1. What is your façade, the outward persona you present when you meet people?
1. When do you present your “A-game”? 

• Is it all the time or only when you are looking for a job or to seduce or convince someone? 

1. Is your “A-game” (“putting your best foot forward”) closer or farther away from authentic self, your real self? 
2. Is your real self as hip and cool as your façade? 
3. Does your real self look or smell as lovely as your constructed outer self and its moisturized glowing waxed and buffed skin? 
4. Do you consider your real self – your core – to be more or less lovable as the persona that you show the world?

• What events shaped whether you feel you are lovable or not?

1. Do you hide some thoughts and emotions because you do not think that they are terribly glamorous or appealing? 
2. Is your authentic self different from your essence or soul?  How so?
3. Do you believe you have a soul?  If so, what is its relation to your mind, personality, ego, self, brain etc.?
4. Who gets to see your real self, your authentic self? 

• Under what criteria would you show your real self?

1. What can you own or possess? 
1. Can you possess money? 

• If so, what does money represent?
• Does currency always have the same value or worth?  Is a dollar bill worth the same to a millionaire as it is to a homeless person?

1. Can you possess other people? 

• “My wife,” “My husband,” “My brother,” etc

1. Do you possess your pets?  Aren’t you their legal “owners”?
2. Can you possess your cars? 
3. Can you possess your experiences?
4. Can you possess music? CDs, Ipods, songs?
5. Can you possess clothing?
6. Can you possess land, property? 

• Can you actually “own” land, a piece of the earth?  Or are you just purchasing the right to temporally occupy that designated area?

1. How many of these things will be with you after your last breath leaves you?
2. Nietzsche wrote, “Those who possess little are that much less possessed.”  To what extent do your possessions constrain your freedom by hidden responsibilities that they engender?

1. What is your diet like? 
1. Do you eat to live or live to eat?
2. Do you eat for energy or for psychological reasons?

• Does food represent love or security to you and your body?

1. Do you believe that it is acceptable that human beings are the only mammals that drink the milk of other mammals?  Why or why not?
2. Do you believe that it is acceptable that human beings are the only mammals that “farm” other living creatures before we “harvest” - ie. murder them - and cook them before we eat them?  Why or why not?
3. Are you open to the possibility that addictive uppers such as caffeine, meat, sugar, salt and high fructose corn syrup – things that help you maintain alertness and “productivity” - may cause common afflictions such as Diabetes, ADHD, Restless Leg Syndrome and even Depression? 
4. Do you think it is better for your body to eat three meals per day or for you to eat when you are hungry?
5. Do you believe what the FDA tells you about the calories, nutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates that your body supposedly needs?  Why?  Who is the FDA?  Why would you believe that they know more about your body than you do?
6. Are you aware how certain foods affect your moods and well-being?
7. How does it make you feel to learn that over 1 billion people will go to bed hungry tonight and almost 3 billion people live on less than $2 dollars per day?

1. How do you wear your body?
1. How do you stand? 

• Do you have “good” posture?

1. How do you sit? 
2. How do you wear your hips? 
3. How do you wear your feet?
4. How do you wear your shoulders? 

• Are your chest and heart open and vulnerable or are your shoulders hunched over to protect them?

1. Did you consciously decide how you pose your feet, hand, head, shoulders and hips or did they get molded and shaped by various forces, traumas, and incidents?
2. How do you feel about your body?

• Are you ashamed?
• Do you feel physically imperfect? 
• Do you think that you are too skinny?  Too fat?  Too short?  Too tall?  Too flabby?  What are the criteria you employ to evaluate your physical body?
• Who determined those criteria? 

1. Marriage was a fantastic idea in the 13th century when life expectancy was 27, but now that the average American life expectancy is around 80 and the average couple gets married at 25 do you think that spending 55 years married to one person is still a brilliant idea?  If so, then why do more than 50% of marriages end in divorce?
1. Do the disadvantages of being married for life outweigh the advantages of such a commitment?

• Could marriage for life as a social institution have outlived its function or usefulness?

1. Of the married couples that you know how many of them would you consider successful or happy?
2. Can you imagine renewable marriage contracts, like other legal agreements, set for delineated agreed-upon times such as 2 or 4 years, that then get re-negotiated?

1. Our ideas about courtship, dating and/or mating rituals are esoteric to our culture and only about 700 years old – most of the world still gets married for financial and familial reasons.  Have our beliefs about romance brought happiness and satisfaction or despair and depression to the majority of participants?
1. Could there be a better way to learn about and express love than the push/pull “tactics,” “strategies,” “rules” and “games” that we employ during our typical romantic courtship practices?
2. Could passionate romantic relationships in our culture require hierarchical situations where one party has more money or power than the other? 

• Do unions of equals make for good lovers?

1. Could intense passion actually subconsciously require the feeling that something illicit is taking place?
2. Do you find that both parties in most relationships you know feel that their greatness and happiness is facilitated by their boyfriend or girlfriend?
3. What is the relationship between sex and love?

• How did you learn about the relationship between sex and love?
• Do you think that your conception of the relationship between sex and love is universal, the same for all people in all cultures?

1.  How’s your sex life? 

1. Or rather, how do you measure your recreational sex life? 

• How is that scale of measurement working out for you? 
• Do you measure by quantity, frequency, or quality? 

1. If you look at your partner and say, “I do not want to make a baby but let’s go through the reproductive sexual act so that it is a mutually satisfying experience” what are you actually saying?

• Is sex just physical fun? 
• Is sex a “release”?  If so, what does it release you from?  Stress? 

1. Do you think that watching human beings perform sexual intercourse on the Internet, television, in movies and magazines contributes positively to a healthy conception of loving partnership? 

• How did you learn how to perform sexual intercourse and other sex acts?

1. Have you ever experienced sexual performance anxiety?  If so, why?
2. Is talking about your sex life actually part of your sex life and you do not realize it?  For example, if you could never tell anyone – even that one best friend – about what’s happening or not happening – how would that add or subtract from what you deem your “sex life”?
3. Are you open to the possibility that our ideas about “normal” and “healthy” non-procreative sex may be culturally contingent? 

• Could our current sexual mores be a reaction to all the shame heaped upon sexuality by the Victorians and Puritans and all of the different lineages of the Judeo-Christian tradition?

1. Is it possible that the intimate phenomena that we consider to be “healthy” and “normal” might be looked upon at some time in the future as dysfunctional or the result of dysfunctional upbringings or misguided searches for love within a cold, individualistic, “scientific” culture? 

1.  What percentage of your waking life is filled up by work or thinking about work? 
1. What is the goal of your job? 

• Is the goal to produce something? 
• Is the goal to be a productive member of society? 
• Is the goal to earn a living? 
• Is the goal to be of service to someone?

1. Are you more interested in giving or receiving?
2. Would you do the job that you have now if there were no pay?
3. Do you think that America is a meritocracy, that if you work hard you will “succeed”?

• How is success measured in our society?  By notoriety?  By money?  By where you live?  By where you vacation?  By how much you can afford to give to charity?

1. If you had $1 billion dollars in the bank would you still do the job that you currently have?  If not, what would you do?
2. A disproportionate number of heart attacks occur in American on Monday mornings between 8 and 9 am: can we infer from that that some people would prefer to die than go to work?

1.  What are your addictions?
1. Are you addicted to tension and drama?
2. Are you addicted to busyness?
3. Are you addicted to business?
4. Are you addicted to sugar?
5. Are you addicted to caffeine?
6. Are you addicted to nicotine?
7. Are you addicted to alcohol?
8. Are you addicted to marijuana?
9. Are you addicted to chocolate?
10. Are you addicted to salt?
11. Are you addicted to animal flesh?
12. Are you addicted to milk and dairy products?
13. Are you addicted to medicine?
14. Are you addicted to sex?
15. Are you addicted to high fructose corn syrup?
16. Are you addicted to shopping?

• Do you regard shopping as a leisure activity or sport?
• Do you ever rejoice about “shopping victories,” finding great bargains?

1. Are you addicted to work?
2. Are you addicted to procrastinating?
3. Are you addicted to exercise?
4. Are you addicted to television?
5. Are you addicted to facts?
6. Are you addicted to sleep?
7. Are you addicted to shoes?
8. Are you addicted to gambling, betting?
9. Are you addicted to getting something for nothing?
10. Are you addicted to a survival of the fittest, winner take-all mentality?

1.  Are you able to recognize your own self-destructive, self-thwarting, self-sabotaging tendencies?

1.  What is the basic mental paradigm from which your mind operates?
1. What is the lens through which you see the world? 
2. Where did this perspective come from? 
3. Did you learn that the world was a giving, loving place and everyone around you wanted to help and cherish you and facilitate your greatness?  Or did you learn that the world was a cruel and volatile place where people constantly judged you and would ultimately betray or violate you if you allowed yourself to be vulnerable? 
4. Can you share genuine joy for others or are you secretly jealous? 
5. Do you wonder why other people have such good fortune while you feel that you are somewhat “less fortunate” financially or in relationships?
6. Do you feel blessed to be alive or is life challenging and burdensome to you?
7. Do you think that all human beings have the same basic way of perceiving and assimilating information?  And if so, if there is one basic mental template, how can we ever be sure about it?

• Wittgenstein pondered that when one person says ‘red’ and another person hears ‘red’ how can they ever be sure that they are envisioning the same color? 
• Try to imagine what your partner experiences when he or she verbally describes what it is like for him or her to have an orgasm.  At the end of the day, you can only imagine what an orgasm is like in your body and then map it onto your partner.
• You can empathize but you can never truly share another person’s sensations or emotions and even if you could there would be no way to verify it.

1. Do you have a particular “way of being” and can you identify it? 

• If you can identify it can you also question its foundations?
• Is it possible for you to change or alter your way of being?

1.  If you know anything about history, when you consider all of the above-mentioned cultural practices - food, diet, hygiene, medicine, beliefs, sex, relationships, politics, customs – from 1000 years ago what do you think? 
1. What do you think about the beliefs, lifestyles, customs, and practices of our ancestors in Europe in 1500? 
2. What about the beliefs, lifestyles, customs, and practices from our ancestors in America 1700? 
3. Do we not consider people from the years 1000, 1500 and 1700 and their ways of life and their beliefs rather remedial, unsophisticated, ignorant, absurd, misguided and often times barbaric?
4. What do you think people – if there are any left on earth – will think of us and our customs, practices and relationships when they look back on us from 2300, 2700 and 3000? 
5. Is it possible that people in 2300, 2700 and 3000 will find us to be rather remedial, unsophisticated, ignorant, absurd, misguided and often times barbaric for murdering countless people every day by armed drones, lethal injections, and gunfire while we allow thousands of people to die from needless famine and curable diseases?

1.  How does language work? 
1. Do you have thoughts that are beyond words? 
2. Are there times when you are speechless? 
3. Are there times when you are thoughtless? 

• Is this not the goal of meditation, to go to the “other side” of language, beyond thoughts?

1. Does language represent the world or create it?  Is it possible that through the language that we employ we create our perspectives and are responsible for them but subconsciously abnegate responsibility for them because life is easier and more “fun” and titillating with drama and histrionics?

• Is it easier to say, “Oh, I genetically suffer from bipolar disorder” and I am sure of that diagnosis because a board “certified” “scientist” (a licensed doctor) told me so, than to say, “I am experiencing a normal range of human emotions and it is really challenging to find the tools to ride these emotions out right now”? 

1. We often say “I am angry” or “I am sad” rather than “I am a human being temporally experiencing sadness or anger right now.”  Does claiming to “be” an emotion influence how long that emotion will last?

1.  Do you agree that our interpretations of our experiences are contingent upon language? 
1. Have you ever heard a cat say, “Man, lunch was really lousy last Saturday”? 
2. It is fantastic that human beings have language and memory but does that mean we have to live in the past or let our pasts rule our lives?
3. Our minds are meaning-making machines.  They create stories to make sense of the infinite phenomena that bombard our senses.  Can you consciously re-create or reframe your story?  If so, what would it take for you to see your “self” in another light or in another way or from another perspective?

1.  What do we as a culture consider to be “crazy”?  Psychologists Rollo May and Thomas Szazs – based on the theories of Michel Foucault - believe that we consider other people to be “crazy” when we as a society cannot understand or do not wish to condone their behavior.
1. Are our definitions of sanity contingent upon “productivity” which is a underlying tenet of capitalism? 

• If someone is not “productive” or “doing something – anything” then does that mean that something is wrong with that person?  Why?  Because anyone who is sane in our culture wants to be “productive.”  Do you not see the tautology here? 

1. Similarly, such a definition of sanity is culturally relative and the goalposts shift every generation. 

• Freud treated many women for “hysteria” which doesn’t exist anymore; do you think it is possible that “depression” and “ADHD” and many of the ailments and afflictions listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders may not exist in 100 years? 
• Do Bulimia and other “certified” eating disorders and “dis-eases” exist in Ethiopia and other famine-ravaged places?

1. Regarding the DSM, there are 900 pages of “disorders” listed but where does our notion of mental “order” come from?  What is mental “order”?  Do you think that your mental life is “orderly”? 

1.  Are you spiritual?
1. Do you believe in a higher power?

• If so, what are its attributes or qualities?
• What are its responsibilities?
• What are its parameters?
• Where is its jurisdiction?
• What is its purpose?
• How does it relate to you?

1. Do you believe you have a soul?

• Are you open to the possibility that our society – based on our science paradigm – threw the baby out with the bathwater during the Enlightenment when “science” deemed that human beings were comprised of blood and tissue and cells and neurons but that we do not have souls or else we could measure and weigh them? 

1. Assuming you have one, what does your soul or essence yearn for?

• Does your soul want a big house and a big bank account or does it want to love and be loved? 
• Does your soul believe that is perfect as is or does it want to evolve and become enlightened?  What do souls want?
• Does your soul reincarnate or does it’s life cease when your body dies?  If you believe in reincarnation then who incarnated your soul in previous lifetimes?

1.  What are your means of artistic expression?
1. Do you think that you create art ex nihilo (from nothing) or do you believe that you are a conduit for a higher power? 
2. Is artistic genius just random talent or is it being free to allow the spirit to move through you?
3. Where do songs or poems come from?  Is there some sort of platonic form for them or did they just evolve randomly and haphazardly?

           It is hard for me to imagine you honestly answering the above questions dispassionately, haphazardly or nonchalantly.  As Yeats intuited in 1920 in “The Second Coming,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  Do you have complete conviction and certainty about who you are and how the universe is operating?  Maybe you are a fundamentalist and intensely believe everything that has been inculcated into you; that would be awesome if you are leading a 100% positive, fulfilling, satisfying, loving, wonderful life.  But if you’re not leading such a positive existence, if there are kinks in your armor - doubts, worries, obsessions, frustrations, afflictions, resentments, addictions - or if you self-sabotage or suffer from depression or anxiety, maybe it is time to start questioning your paradigm, your way of being in the world, and your ways of perceiving and interacting with the world?  You cannot expect to live in a loving compassionate positive reality if you are unwilling to commit to leading a loving compassionate positive life – right?  The paradigm shift must begin with you, no matter how daunting that responsibility seems.  In answering the above questions I hope that you realize that real change is not only possible but necessary.  However, if you just sit and hope and wait for change you may be disappointed.  The change will occur only because of your proactive intentions and efforts.

 

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