The Collapse of Reflexive Self-Identity

Originally written around 2014

Just finished watching a video interview with a well known spiritual teacher1 during which he was asked to give a broad outline of the path to awakening as he has experienced it.  I found my attention and interest wavering a bit until he got to the point of issuing a disclaimer about what ended up being the final step in the outline.  The language of the disclaimer — basically, that “you cannot want this” — was familiar to me from Franklin Merrell-Wolff (describing what he called “the High Indifference”), Bernadette Roberts ("no-self" or the falling away of “self,” “God” and their much-vaunted union), David Scoma (The Red Card or “ejection from the game”) and perhaps a few others.  In each instance, the authors or speakers stressed two essential things about this final experience: that it was completely unexpected (compared to a prior penultimate awakening experience that had been recognized as a theoretical possibility and was even intuited or sensed as impending), and that, in their view, nobody could possibly find it desirable; that even they themselves would not have found it remotely attractive had they encountered a description of it in advance.

What is significant about this for me is that in every single instance mentioned above, I actually found the given individual’s description of this “non-desirable” event or outcome to be profoundly, singularly and unreservedly desirable.  Probably not coincidentally, I have never resonated with descriptions of bliss or the kinds of supreme and sustained pleasure which seem to motivate many seekers.  And probably also not coincidentally, I have never had any such experiences, nor any real desire for them.  It has long been quite clear to me that, for one, the sense of self or personhood is based on a deeply entrenched reflexive mechanism, and two, the functioning of this mechanism is the root of all psychological suffering.  Since this has become clear to me, it should not be surprising that I’d be so favorably responsive to descriptions of the utter collapse or falling away of this apparent foundation of experience itself.  

I was also especially struck by this teacher’s description of this “non-desirable” occurrence because in an attempt to point to it, he drew a parallel to the first major developmental event of early childhood, when the child is first able to look in a mirror and recognize that the image they are seeing there is “me.”  Prior to that, the child could see the image in the mirror but be unable to make the reflexive association between the objective image before them and themselves as a perceiving subject.  He then described his ultimate experience as the ceasing or falling away of this primal movement of reflexive awareness that gives rise to “self.”  Even more saliently, he refers to it as a “complete loss of the inner life” (here closely echoing Roberts).  

Alleged undesirability notwithstanding, this strikes a deeply resonant chord: here is true freedom, the freedom of reality itself.  Not the “freedom-from-x” posited as the goal of an entity — which is really “freedom-for-x” where x is the entity — but the very essence of freedom itself, which is what remains when the profoundly intimate illusion of a freedom-desiring entity vanishes.  It is simply life playing out with perfect immediacy (immediate = not mediated = not-two.2  It is the recursive action of reflexive self-identity that mediates).

Of course there’s a classic rub here: the freedom-desiring entity, however illusory, is both the very problem itself and recursively aware of itself as the problem.  I’ve written elsewhere of how this seems to happen.3  The upshot is that this endlessly self-referencing phantom is like a dream character that can, at best, recognize that it’s a dream character, yet by virtue of its spectral nature remain unable to either catapult itself out of the dream or end the dreaming to which it owes its apparency.  Like the zeros and ones forming the code of a computer program or operating system, this recursive movement is transpiring on such a fundamental level that it can neither be seen nor sought by the character, because the very activity that produces a character and a search is already founded upon it.  Still, it seems there can arise a shift in the experiential base of reference which exposes the illusory nature of the character, and which is analogous to the dreamer not merely achieving lucidity within the dream, but being dispelled upon the ending of the dream.  And yet, even this analogy doesn’t hold since it still implies something dreaming then waking up.

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1  Adyashanti being interviewed by Tami Simon of Sounds True at the August 2012 Wake Up Festival.  The broad outline begins around 45:30, the disclaimer at 51:40.  [ed. note: removed link due to video no longer being available]

2  “Not-two” is what the “Advaita” in Advaita Vedanta means. The reason it’s not-two rather than simply one is subtle but significant, and not merely semantic.  This subtle meaning is hinted at in Jac O’Keefe’s bon mot about Oneness: “one is [one] too many.” 

 3  The reflexive tendency prismatically refracts the nondual light of awareness (no-thing-ness) into the manifold of subject-object duality (the world) via a subtle but potent trick of parallax that has its genesis in learning language and modeling behavior in earliest childhood. The language and behavior thus learned are not, of course, the problem; in fact, they are as necessary as they are unavoidable. Rather, it’s the tendency to identify emotionally and energetically with the content of experience, which tends to get reinforced in various ways during the learning of language and behavior. Life is thereafter mediated or filtered by this mechanism of reflexive self-identification.