When you start writing about your life, who are you writing for? Who is your audience? It takes a certain amount of conceit to believe that anyone is or will ever be interested, of course, but say we’re past that hurdle. Who is reading this now? I know a whole lot of people, having had human encounters now for 60 years. But we may have never met in the flesh. I may not know your name or what you look like. And your only experience of me may be through these words, or through words or images you’ve seen elsewhere that take some sort of stab at describing me or my actions in this life.
But RD Laing suggested that’s really all we have anyway. Our experience of each other – not any kind of deep knowing or grokking, but a projection of ourselves that like the filter of a historian colors whatever I see of you to be whatever I think you most likely should be. We are impressionists, not photo-realists. To be honest, most of us haven’t even developed any skill at all with brushes or other artistic implements, and are busy dirtying our hands with paint on recycled construction paper. We look to philosophers to be our abstract expressionists. We stand in front of their works and nod our heads knowingly, but all the while are really confused as to what is being communicated. Because, of course, communication can only occur between equals. Between parties that consider the other party a useful equivalent to themselves. When we really talk, it’s to ourselves.
Interestingly enough, that conversation can actually be useful. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. It may also be true that when the teacher is ready, students appear. Everything is just one end of a stick. Everything else is the other end. There is no cause without an effect, nor effect without a cause. As I’ve said before, it’s turtles, all the way down.
The nice thing about talking to yourself is that you’ve got a captive audience. No matter how you try, it may be possible to dull the sound, or temporarily hit the mute button, but ultimately, because the sound of your own voice is created first instead your head before it hits your vocal chords, you can’t turn off the endless stream of chatter you provide yourself on a daily basis. Honestly, even listening to the void, or emptiness, or Nothingness, is still using your brain to kick-start something.
So maybe everything we write is just an extension of that self-talk. We throw our thoughts on paper just to prove to ourselves that we have them in the first place. The only thing we actually have of ourselves, if you consider the Buddhist idea that we’re just temporary aggregates anyway, with no permanent or abiding substance, is our experience of ourselves. It’s not, as Descartes put it, that “I think, therefore I am.” It’s that we are what we think we are, and nothing more. Once we stop thinking about it, that sense of separate identity, individual essence, isolation, smallness, and independence slips away. Form is nothingness. Nothingness is form. It’s not that we realize our connectedness or interdependence, either. Those words and concepts become meaningless, irrelevant. Remember, it’s two ends of the same stick. And there’s no stick.
Rumi said, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.”
But a true conversation with our self is beyond even that field. There are no words or sounds or even vibrations. Just the ghosts of who we thought we were once, communicating via osmosis to projection of who we think we are now, translated by who will believe we will someday become.
02 APR 2025