690 Words.
A few years ago, I started noticing something that initially felt uncomfortable: every idea I hold, about myself and the world, every single one, is exactly that. Just an idea.
Some are grounded on facts; others not so much. But they are all just ideas. Something that arrived from somewhere inside or outside, was developed or understood through a network of existing ideas, then settled in and, to one degree or another, became part of me. Think of this as a set of concentric circles: the ideas most core to ourselves sit closest to the middle; the more surface-level ones closer to the outer edge. Some become crucial to me because they are used by me to build who I think I am — what kind of person I am, whether I am capable of the things I want, how I stand in relation to others; things like whether I am a good person or whether I deserve the good things that come to me. Others sit further out — preferences, opinions, habits of thought that shift more easily — things like a preference for a particular kind of music, a political opinion loosely held, or a habit of thought about how a conversation should go. But all of them, close or distant, are ideas. Constructions. Stories the mind tells itself and then forgets it is just a story.
This realisation has developed into a very simple practice I have come to find very useful. I just look at all these ideas and ask a simple but very uncomfortable question: is this story I tell myself actually true? In other words, does it correspond to something real in the world (1), or is it something that arrived from fear, or uncertainty, or a moment of misreading, and simply stayed? It turns out that many ideas were never true in the first place.
This is a challenging process. First, seeing the stories for what they are is very difficult. A lot of these ideas may have started as being true but don’t hold anymore; many came from somewhere painful or confused and were assimilated by my psyche in a distorted form. Regardless, they all spent years shaping my decisions, relationships, and life. Second, for any idea one discards, one must either find another to put in its place — which, of course, must be reexamined at a future date and probably also discarded — or become comfortable with the doubt, ambiguity, and dissonance that it leaves behind. Being comfortable with uncertainty is a very difficult thing. Third, the process itself is very painful: being wrong is never a pleasant experience, and Western culture has many invisible mechanisms to stop individuals from doing exactly that.
I call this a spiritual path, though self-development works too if spirituality makes you flinch. It is what many schools of depth psychology help us do — Jung’s individuation being perhaps the clearest example (2). I call it a spiritual path because, if one decides to walk it, at some point one arrives at a kind of emptiness: an understanding that, at our deepest level, there really is nothing in there. Nothing (3). No fixed self. No essential nature. Just the process of constructing, and, if one is up for it, examining, deconstructing, repeat. Stories upon stories upon stories. That is where I go to, anyway.
At first, that was frightening, and I spent years desperately looking for other stories that could replace the ones I lost. However, I soon realised that no matter what new stories I choose, they too need to be examined and let go of — to the point where I actually realised that the emptiness itself is a story that had to be let go of. Ram Dass described something like this when he spoke of his first experience with psilocybin — watching every layer he thought he was being stripped away, one by one, from the corner of the room. What remained when the layers were gone was the question he spent the rest of his life sitting with. The Buddhists have been saying something similar for a very long time — śūnyatā, the vacancy at the heart of things, not as nihilism but as the condition of possibility (4). I am not sure I fully understand their version, but I recognise the territory: that is the thing that no story can tell, the ineffable, the ‘ground of being,’ the unspoken of apophatic theology that can only be experienced. A tree does not carry a theory — or story — of ‘treeness’. It just grows toward the light. There is something in that — something our storytelling mind (5) tends to miss entirely.
Once one understands that we are always building ourselves and the world with the stories we tell, and that those stories can be set down, something shifts. You can start looking at your actual desires and preferences and begin creating a model of yourself that is more true to who you actually are, rather than who fear or confusion decided you were. The freedom in this is not the freedom of having figured something out. It is the freedom of knowing the building never stops, and that this is not a problem. The new model one builds is also built upon the emptiness that exists underneath everything — but now one knows that these stories are not ‘the truth,’ but rather, a useful story.
This path has been frightening and challenging but, crucially, freeing, lighter, simple and simplifying… For now, that is more than enough to keep going.
- Essentially a Correspondence Theory of Truth assessment.
- Jung, C.G. (ed.) (1964) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books.
- No fixed self, no essential nature — this is the territory that contemplative traditions across cultures have pointed toward, often through different means.
- Most accessibly explored in Thich Nhat Hanh’s commentary on the Heart Sutra. See Further Reading.
- Read this post if you want to know more about the egoic-linear mind.
References and Further Reading
Dass, R. (1971) Be Here Now. New Mexico: Lama Foundation.
Jung, C.G. (ed.) (1964) Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books.
Nhat Hanh, T. (1988) The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley: Parallax Press.