'I' is not just a thought
Some excerpts from email correspondence on ‘direct pointing’
and the early developmental origin of recursive self-contraction
The following passages are from my side of email exchanges with two friends, one of whom was an ardent seeker who’d been working with a ‘guide’ in a popular direct-pointing movement known as Liberation Unleashed (LU), about which I had reservations. As I put it in an earlier email to this same friend:
Direct pointing is a way to be Socratically guided to the insight that there is nothing substantial behind the sense of self. But this insight, while always valuable because true, can transpire on any of various levels without undoing the deeper conditioning that keeps the dilemma and suffering in place. The advocates and practitioners of the contemporary direct-pointing movement (Liberation Unleashed, Ruthless Truth, et al) seem not to understand that one can quite clearly see that there is ‘no self’—no agent behind the eyes or behind the ‘I’—while still remaining subject to the deeper reflexive tendencies that belief in such an agent supported over a lifetime.
The first excerpt below enumerates some of the underpinnings of the above assertion:
Some odds and ends that I've experientially and/or contemplatively gleaned:
• As long as there is a busy, unquiet mind, there is seeking to some extent—whether that seeking takes a ‘spiritual’ form or that of good old fashioned escapism or compulsive busyness.
• The mind can and should be disciplined via some kind of attentional practice (e.g., repeatedly arresting the inner monologue by bringing attention to the present sensory perceptions), but it is impossible to bring it to rest once and for all through effort.
• The mind finally coming to rest seems to happen when or if it happens, and when it does it is (apparently) usually sudden and permanent. In any event it comes as a byproduct of realization, but one cannot reverse-engineer realization by attempting to completely subdue the mind.
• Contrary to what some even quite esteemed spiritual teachers claim, the ‘I’ sense is not just a thought, even though it's completely true that almost all non-task-driven thinking is compulsive, recreational and ‘I’-related.
• The ‘I’-as-thought is only on the surface, but underneath (as it were) is a far more intimate and entrenched sense of agency.
• The inability to locate an entity of some sort when searching for the ‘I’ does not constitute realization (except rarely), even though realization reveals that there is no self or ‘I’ (herein lies the fallacy in LU and other similar direct-pointing approaches).
• The real culprit behind the sense of ‘I’ is the identification of one's energy with volition. Since this identification has pre-verbal roots and operates unconsciously, it remains intact even when self-inquiry has revealed the post-verbal elements closer to the surface.
• As with any final quelling of the restless mind, this identification of energy and volition that sustains the sense of agency will only cease on its own, if at all. Investigating it in depth couldn't hurt, though.
There's more, but I'll leave it at that for now. As always, I welcome your comments or questions on any of this.
My friend did reply with a question about what I’d written, specifically the fourth point, to which I replied:
You asked me what I mean that the ‘I’ sense is not just a thought. I mean that thoughts come and go constantly, while your sense of being a recognizable, locatable someone—or at least something—remains more constant. And even though, as I pointed out earlier, it's clear that most of our thoughts revolve around I-me-mine, even when those thoughts pass and give way to less subjective thoughts—and, at moments, to no thoughts at all—you still feel like a localized subject, right? That feeling of localized subjectivity is what I mean that the ‘I’ is not just a thought.
Put simply, the sense of being a subject experiencing a world of objects is learned but has little or nothing to do with thinking, even as problematic as our thinking tends to be. You have to go deeper. The LU folks might want you to buy that it's all as simple as disabusing a child of her belief in Santa Claus, but however well intentioned they may be, this is misconceived. They posit some conceptual straw man—an ‘I’ entity behind the eyes—and when you naturally can't find it (because like Santa Claus, an ‘I’ behind the eyes really does not exist), they ask for that show of hands you mentioned. Voila—you're done!
Here's an analogy that occurred to me today. Think of it like a solar system, with planets orbiting around a star. Our thoughts, regardless of what they refer to, constellate around a seemingly much denser or heavier center of gravity. Did you know the root of the word ‘planet’ means ‘to wander’? What keeps our thoughts wandering in such predictable circles? What's the real center of gravity without which those thoughts would be released from their orbit, leaving only space?
One approach that helped me get to the root of the matter was to retrace my developmental steps, following the leads of latent memory and intuition to ponder the mystery of infancy from the inside, as it were. For instance, in the earliest stages an infant cannot so much as scratch an itch or turn over. (No wonder babies cry!) It is utterly helpless and vulnerable. But gradually, over the course of thousands of repetitions, it learns to associate certain of its behaviors—starting with crying, and really kicking into high gear with mobility—with an effective response from its environment. Cause becomes associated with effect on a visceral level. This is the pre-verbal foundation of the sense of personal agency, and it's exactly here where the localized sense of a contracted ‘I’ begins to form. Language and conceptual thinking come slightly later in the developmental process, and are very much built upon the foundation of this early developmental sense of agency.
In short, we feel before we think, and we exercise volition before we think. Can you get a sense of the significance and the truth of this? And do you now have a better understanding of the basis for my saying that ‘I’ is not just a thought? And not least, can you grok the reason why so many ‘graduates’ of the contemporary direct-pointing mill are frustrated because their totally valid insights into the phantom nature of ‘the self’ fail to provide an abiding release from suffering?
And here's another brief remark of mine to another friend, who, unlike the other one, had already expressed reservations about Liberation Unleashed:
I’ve been aware of Liberation Unleashed and one or two other “direct pointing” movements for many years, and have been critical of them from the start. Several friends of mine have gone through their process, to no avail. One even described the process exactly the same as you did—as an agreement mill. But even years before that, I read through transcripts of their sessions and came to the same sense you have about what they’re about. I think what they guide people to is, at best, an insight or epiphany that the sense of ‘I’ isn’t based on anything localized that can be pointed to. But even if this strikes deeply enough to prompt an abiding shift of base—and I suspect that happens only rarely with Socratically guided pointing out sessions like this—it’s very unlikely to amount to the level of release that would warrant terms like awakening or enlightenment, let alone liberation.
It seems a lot of people—seekers and teachers alike—ascribe major significance to the fact that the ‘I’ isn’t a real, localized something inside the head (or anywhere). I get that, but I don’t see this as being at the root of anyone’s existential suffering. If anything, the sense of being a localized something is symptomatic of the core affliction, not causative.