THE EPIPHANY
In all honesty, would you even consider it if some unsettling feeling hinted at the outrageous idea that your reality was merely an illusion? Is it even comprehendible? Where does one start to dissect such a supposition?
It sounds much more like a riddle to be ignored rather than a puzzle to be solved. I would be telling a flat-out lie if I said my first, second and third instinct was not to ignore that unsettling feeling. How dare I entertain an unfathomable concept that I was controlled by a counterfeit system!
But somehow, this mysterious notion put down roots which slowly grew into manifold stems of fluorescent screens; revealing the hidden patterns of my pre-programmed system which was engineered by civilized world orders over multiple regimes with the objective of assuming control. The ethos of my free will was altered long before my genesis by an institution with methodologies largely successful at stifling our natural capacities for intuition and higher consciousness.
All of a sudden, the profoundest depth of my human character had been revealed. Alas, the forms of sensibility and the categories of my thought were so confined that my narrow mind could not pierce through my limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization.
With the foreground of my existence now epiphanized, I was caught between a rock and a hard place. The choices were crystal clear: self-deception or self-annihilation.
Self-deception was undeniably the sensible choice. Why on earth would I want to destroy myself? Wait a moment, umm, who am I? Who is my Self?
Am I merely the physical form I see when I look in the mirror? If yes, then it must be such a shame that our early ancestors never got to know themselves! I think not. Rather, I consider my Self to be a non-physical unified entity made up of a collection of perceptions, thoughts and experiences; a product of social and cultural influences which I connect with most strongly – the synthesised form became my identity, my character, the essential qualities of my being.
Selves are not physically detectable. Instead, they are a kind of convenient fiction, like a centre of gravity, which is convenient as a way of solving physics problems, although they need not correspond to anything tangible — the centre of gravity of a hoop is a point in thin air. People constantly tell themselves stories to make sense of their world, and they feature in the stories as a character, and that convenient but fictional character is the Self.
With the illusory nature of my existence fully uncovered, my external world began to feel foreign to me. I felt like an alien lost in a lonely planet. I hated my narrative: the career-focused-wealth-and-power-hungry Mrs Independent! There was a constant tug-of-war between my outer Self and my inner Self.
My outer Self is my personality, my sense of identity and my ego which had been painstakingly fashioned over the last decade with a lot of my “real” blood, sweat and tears and nourishes the elegant structure of my human physique. Should I give it all up, at a whim, to an unknown, still-to-be-discovered inner Self?
All things considered, there was a great deal to lose; self-deception was still the right choice. My true Self will have to pierce through the limiting horizons of my rational mind if I were ever to lose my connection to my external world.
2 Responses
Self-deception – meaning: the action or practice of allowing oneself to believe that a false or unvalidated feeling, idea, or situation is true.
I think it’s really very difficult to come to the realization that this is an issue and even if that happens, our pride gets in the way of admitting it, talk less of even doing something about it.
Great content and thought-provoking!
But if the Self is just a fictional character, where does one begin to dig beneath the surface to unpack the true depth of the human character?