Note to ‘Self’

Consider yourself to be a goldfish inside an aquarium. The aquarium is extensively decorated

like our lives with Pasta, friends, cigarettes, ballet, music, the internet and knowledge about what
it means to be a fish, about what shampoo will make your fins glow, about how the scales on
your beautiful body are illusionary and why you shouldn’t be too proud of them because
eventually they’ll fall off and you’ll be left with nothing but gills that filter water (the gills being
the brain/mind/heart and water being the external environment). Let us first note down all the
universal certainties inside the aquarium.

● The aquarium is your home. You might see a bigger world outside the aquarium if you
are ‘enlightened’ enough but the world outside is off-bounds for all practical purposes
that concern us right now. (Unless the goldfish is adventurous enough to resort to
psychedelics to sneak a peek into the external world which wouldn’t still liberate it from
the physical reality of the aquarium)

● You are free to wander inside the aquarium but your movement will be determined by the
prefixed ecology of the aquarium (thermostat, density etc.). If you start treating the
prefixed ecology as a barrier to your freedom, then the aquarium would appear to be
perpetually rotten.

● The extensive decoration is meant for the convenience of all fish-folk in general. If you
associate any of them with your inner self, then that is what we term as attachment.
Attachment is not necessarily bad. It shapes your identity as a fish and distinguishes one
fish from another. Excessive attachment can obviously lead to complications which is
why almost all great artists are irreparably broken.

You are not the product of the aquarium. You merely dwell inside it. Thus the aquarium and you
mightn’t be compatible at times. The aquarium isn’t hostile towards you. It is just terrifyingly
indifferent to your existence. The water thus may get too polluted for your gills to filter leading
to estrangement. The décor might sometimes be over-influential and lift you up a bit too much
only to smash straight into the face of cold reality. Sometimes you’ll consume something overtly
peculiar and rare that’ll make you feel out of place and disenchanted. You might be inclined to
gel in with the other fish and consume the regular stuff that they consume that doesn’t take a toll
on your gills and doesn’t make you wayward. But you must know that to change your
preferences in order to facilitate the smoothness of your inherent water filtration system might be
detrimental to your identity since your gills are unique and to force them to conform to a regular
‘one size fits all’ diet would mean undermining your mental growth. The trick to achieving
serenity inside the aquarium is not to change your consumption habit but rather to change the
way in which your body assimilates that which you absorb from the external environment. The
only thing that you have complete control over inside the aquarium is you. Thus if you try
searching for favorable surroundings in order to feel peaceful then you’ll only find that which
numbs down your core self. The numbing down of the core will give you ease of mind(gills) at
the cost of your mind(gills) itself.
Once you have achieved a certain degree of self-awareness through rigorous exercising of the
gills, you’ll stumble upon a peculiar problem. The self-awareness will itself contradict the
fruitfulness of being aware. For while the self-awareness might give you a transparent
understanding of the ignorance of the other fish towards themselves and their surroundings, it’ll
also make you question the point of almost everything you do in your everyday life. After all you
are just a fish inside an aquarium. Self-awareness will only make you flap your fins voraciously
and conclude that almost anything that we do inside the aquarium is a futile exercise in
existential thermodynamics. However, it is at this moment that I must remind you that self-
awareness varies in degrees. It oscillates between absurdity and lucidity. In trying to get rid of
your self-awareness, you’ll only condemn yourself to agony and frustration. You can’t go back
to living an unexamined life no matter how alluring it might appear from a distance. The only
way out of the dread of self-awareness is more awareness leaving behind the tangible
vulnerabilities of the self (more on this later). Ultimately you must realize that awareness isn’t a
means to an end where you find something meaningful to hold on to for the rest of your life.
Rather awareness is an end in itself. The trick is to learn how to live with it without risking your
sanity.

The Self
The nature of human intelligence is such that it is non-physical and yet it manifests itself in our
everyday lives. We watch a particular movie or read a specific genre of books or act around
people in a certain way because our cognitive setup dictates our physical outlook towards
external reality. This isn’t a problem as long as you consciously mold your mind merely to
improve or sharpen your social identity. But the moment your intelligence starts interacting with
your individual identity is when you start to feel nauseous. Part of the problem is that our busy
minds distract us from immediate experience; we’re too absorbed in our thoughts to be truly
present. The bigger problem however is that the nature of these thoughts is so volatile that it
threatens to violently disfigure our physical outlook towards reality. We feel out of place even
when we are sitting in the comfort of our homes because our mind is never at rest. It is constantly
creating thoughts and analyzing the thinker’s (your) identity. It is a tragedy that the most radical
function that we as an advanced civilization can perform (thinking) should be the cause of our
suffering.
If you look closely enough at this problem, then you’ll realize that at the root cause of this
suffering isn’t the thought itself but the dissonance of the thought and the thinker. The comfort of
the thinker almost always overpowers the urgency of the thought (good or bad) and the thinker
feels distraught because he is torn between the duality of what he thinks and what he can do with
it/about it. Crucial to resolving this mind-body conflict is a reflexive change from the thought to
the thinker himself. The aggression directed against the thought causing the suffering should be
turned against the ‘self’ itself. We do not repair the damage; rather, we gain an insight into the
illusory nature of that which appears to need repair. The thought hasn’t caused the problem. If
we treat the mind as a laboratory where we examine random ideas by virtue of our cognitive
thinking, then we need not internalize all that we read and think about. Thought without a thinker
doesn’t lead to any complications because a thought in itself is inert as long as it doesn’t interact
with a functioning person. The solution thus lies in keeping the thought inert as long as we
haven’t scrutinized each aspect, counterview, implication and value pertaining to the thought.
This cognitive exercise of simulating ideas in an enclosed environment (Treating the mind as a
sandbox) can liberate us from the trauma of over-thinking since thinking becomes an activity
independent of physical manifestations as long as you don’t voluntarily allow it to be
internalized in your system. But how do you attain this seemingly unachievable state of saintly
aloofness from your own thoughts without giving up on all your attachments?

Securing your core

Let us go back to the aquarium. You've now been living inside the aquarium for quite some time
and you've developed traits that define you (or so you think). These traits have been structured
by the consumption patterns that you've followed throughout your life. It can be safely said that
there must exist a drastic difference between who you are and who you've become because of
your consumption patterns. It is thus these consumption patterns that constitute the "self" in your
self-awareness which get brutally effaced whenever you think critically about your'self'. The
practice of securing the core is twofold. First you must distinguish between who you are and who
you've become. Who you are must be consolidated and strengthened. Who you've become is
what needs to be kept reasonably detached from your core identity so you can constantly keep
altering its pieces in order to keep your external self in resonance with the growing sophistication
of your thoughts. Think of this as a modular external self that can be modified at will. Moreover,
you must not be wavered by the conviction of an idea. You never know when something
completely radical and more convincing will render the old idea redundant. At this point you
must have the strength to let the old idea pass, no matter how deeply entrenched it is in your
conscience. Holding on to it merely because of its familiarity would be detrimental to your
growth.
The core self (who you are) is your body. It has a set of fairly basic and inalienable value
systems that make the body function. You should always stick to an idea of ‘self’ that is
independent of anything else in your life. Everything else that shapes your identity (who you
become) is some form of a fabric because it's been fabricated artificially through human
cleverness to help you cope with the external water in the aquarium. (Interestingly some amount
of water always remains inside the body of the fish but it's stagnation would lead to death). If the
fabric instead of helping you cope does the opposite, then it defeats its own purpose and must be
rooted out from your conscience. Think of everything you’ve ever read/heard/seen/experienced
that seemed relatable because it gave you clarity about what you thought was wrong or peculiar
about you. It articulated the haziness that surrounded you and so you latched on to it without
contemplating whether you were merely reaffirming your own cognitive biases by virtue of the
clarity of an external opinion. Over a long period of time these cognitive biases have become so
hard-wired that they have created obsessive thinking patterns that become more and more
difficult to evade with time. You’ve accepted that you are broken in a certain way or that you
have an indescribable illness that is accessible only to you because you have explored it so
extensively in borrowed ideas. The invented intellectual awareness of your discomfort made you
comfortable in a strange way. “Who you became” (no matter how disfigured) was for the first
time so much easier to comprehend than “Who you are”. This was only because you could
visibly see the source of your newfound orientation or even the lack of it!
The mantra is to not let the clothes become baggage. To travel as light as you possibly can
preferably in self-stitched clothes eating self-cooked food. At some point in this journey of self-
awareness there must come self-acceptance which will make the horrendously pointless journey
seem worthwhile. If you choose to deny yourself the struggle of this journey, you also
simultaneously accept the idea of never being able to look as yourself as an individual without
the need of borrowed symbols.

Other Fish-folk and their enviable ‘Normal’ lives

“All fish are created equal. Only some are more equal than others”

-A Fish

Unfortunately, we can never be as abstract as our thoughts. Your mind is at so many places at the
same time. Potentially doing so much that it becomes physically impossible for the rest of you to
catch up with it with your limited mobility and the constraints of time and physical output. It is
therefore not surprising at all that we feel out of place in our physical environment when our
mind is caught in a whirlpool so fierce that it renders almost all other physical endeavors trivial
and devoid of value. At this moment it is difficult to practice the subtle art of making the external
identity modular and securing the core self from the onslaught of inflated, well-packaged, case-
specific, potato chips wisdom because you are busy envying the others who seem annoyingly
well adjusted. The normality of their lives seems desirable because they are in perfect harmony
with the material world. It is therefore easy to conclude that our intrinsic mess makes us
incompatible with the established order of things. That the reverse might be true, that it is in-fact
the world that has shaped up to be violently incongruous with authentic human behavior seems
too incoherent an idea to gulp for it suggests that our dissociation from this popular normality of
the masses is permanent. And yet upon inspection that precisely seems to be the case. The
harmony of the ‘normal’ man with his external environment is parasitic in nature for this
symbiosis worsens the already worse state of numbness that makes the normal man immune
from himself. The ‘normal’ fish is in harmony with the aquarium because the majority of the fish
in order to facilitate their blissful ignorance make the environment of the aquarium
unidimensional and thus toxic for our protagonist fish invested in her journey of actualization.
Despite this seemingly fatal flaw in the world order the solution as always lies in acceptance.
When we accept something as it is instead of how we want it to be, we miraculously conjure a
spell that blunts the impact of its roughness for in accepting it just as it is, we have refused to
give it the power to subdue us. In order to internalize this acceptance of our perpetual
disharmony with normality we must dissect the illusionary appeal of a normal life so as to not
aspire for it when the lows of our journey start haunting us. It can be safely said that the normal
man is normal because he doesn’t care for a lot of abstract superficially pointless complications
of the human condition. What constitutes the “don’t care” attitude of the normal people and why
is it unadvisable to adopt it even if its benefits are so starkly noticeable all around us?
The notion of not caring means that you voluntarily ignore an aspect of the human condition that
you either consider to be an unnecessary hindrance or worse a nonexistent delusion. You live a
life carved out of reductionism and oversimplification. The purpose of making this choice is
often to live well without bothering about unnecessary abstractions. However, if an individual
shuts down a part of himself in order to avoid pain, he kills that part of himself in order to fit
better in the universal definition of normality. Consecutively he’ll end up killing as much of
himself as is essential to perfectly fit himself in that prefixed mould. The logical end of this type
of reaction to life is partial suicide, killing parts of you that make you feel out of sync with the
rest of the world. Amputation cannot be the default cure for a bodily ailment even if the entire
world is populated by one-legged men. The choice therefore for our protagonist fish isn’t after all
as complicated as it seemed at the beginning of our story. Since we are not likely to shoot
ourselves in the head to avoid the grim nature of human life, we should also sequentially avoid
seeking normality at the cost of awareness.

With all the love and light, I could gather

Vishwam