The following is essentially a summary of some of the main ideas in the book 'Self and Unself' by Darren Allen. If you ever feel like there is something interesting in what you are reading but that it feels incomplete, then you will very likely find a much more thorough and coherent description of the nature of the self in Darren Allen's book.
We experience the world from our self, which gives us a sense of separation from the things and people around us. This self is much more than just an identity we have to learn through childhood and start clinging on, because separation is a felt experience, not merely an idea or narrative that our culture gives to us.
For instance, our experience of space, and the separateness of things, and our experience of time, the causal change of Reality around us, are much more fundamental than whatever ideas we learn from our environment. Self does not 'learn' space and time, unlike say language, or mathematics, or how to apply for jobs, because it itself is a spatio-temporal entity. Thich is why, no matter how whimsical our ideas of what Reality consist of, we still act, feel and think within space and time. We can bend our mind and adopt entirely different ideas outside of our usual frame of reference, but it's not easy to see how we could experience or even imagine anything 'outside' of space or time, (notice how 'outside' already implies a sense of space). We can imagine a room without sound, smell, or colour, but not a room outside of space and time.
Self is an extremely important part of our lives, it is what allows us to interact in the world, through our body and will, which we can strengthen and which confront us with our own limits, and it allows us to experience internal states through our mind and emotions, which can guide our decisions and help us to relate with others. Those four aspects, or modes, of self, body, emotions, mind and will, constitute the tool of the self, or rather they form a useful map of what the self is, what its limitations are, and how we might go about working with those, or overcoming them, if such a thing is possible.
The self is far too complex and subtle to be reduced to just those four modalities, but nonetheless such an oversimplifying map can still tell us a lot about ourselves. In general, it is impossible for any map to be a one-to-one copy of the territory, and even if it were possible, in the case of self, it wouldn't be of any help to the endeavor of living more consciously, as the self would just get lost in the models about itself.
It is very tempting for instance to ask about the fundamental nature of mind, body, will and emotions, and indeed when descriptions and arguments are necessary, they should be provided, but ultimately the ground of this work, as is the ground of any sane philosophy, is conscious experience. It's nice if you can give a good description of what the mind is, but first of all, such a description can never be literal, because the ground of Reality is not literal (read more of this piece for the definition of 'literality'), which is why the distinctions between all the four modes of the self are not rigid, and second of all, what use is it if you cannot use your mind more consciously? I am making a sort of appeal to practicality here, but not to the utility of the self, what is useful for the self to perpetuate itself, but rather, to the recentering back to conscious living.
Because self is not all there is to the story. Even though our mind and our will like to pretend that they are in charge, there is a conscious I which 'precedes' our self, which is how we can experience anything to begin with. To experience anything is to be conscious of it, such that the subject and object can be said to be 'one' when we learn to see 'past' the self, a consciousness which is 'always' 'there', but which gets 'filtered' through the 'lens' of my self, which is why our pre-conceived biases can make us blind to something that clearly happened—it couldn't have happened because it would contradict my theories!—or our emotions can make us interpret someone's actions as malevolent when they were simply clumsy or ignorant.
The trickiness of relating consciousness to self is that fundamentally, it is a relationship between the unknowable and the knowable, which is of a totally different type to the usual relationships that we are used to, between knowable things. We can describe how an object is made of various parts, like how a chair is made of four legs, a seat, and a backrest, or how two objects of the same category are similar and different, like how an apple and a banana are both fruits but very different ones at that, or even how two things are of completely different categories, like the number 'five' and the color blue, and all of those relationships are between knowable, non-mysterious things that the mind can understand.
However, when we use words such as 'behind' or 'precede' to talk about how consciousness is more 'fundamental' than self's experience, we are introducing an implied spatiality and temporality, which 'come' from the self and not Reality or consciousness themselves. This means that we have to relate the ineffable conscious I, and our effable self through metaphors—the usage of language to point beyond itself—but not literal ideas, which take Reality as a series of discrete, separate bits, which are then related to one another in a causal, mind-graspable manner.
Literality can be used to relate aspects of the self, and its self-generated experience, with one another, but not between self and Unself (what is beyond the self). For instance, we can use the mind to identify physical properties about the external world that we observe, such as mass, weight, length, and time, and construct models of Reality that put all of these properties in relation to one another.
This is the realm of science, which provides us with predictive power, the ability to construct models that can accurately predict what will happen given certain conditions, and to dismiss this work entirely is to be foolish to the practicality and depth of inquiry brought about by science.
But. Accuracy and truth are not the same thing. There are maps of the territory which are accurate, making them useful in certain situations, but a map a tool which is useful for navigation precisely because it ignores certain aspects of Reality. A geographical map will ignore the flora of the territory, for the obvious reason that plants grow and die out over time, and instead focus on much more important and reliable information such as distances and elevation. Still, as someone navigating on the real territory, you might have to pay attention to some of the plants around you, either because they could be dangerous to you, or simply because you find them beautiful. To live merely on the maps of the self is to miss out the astonishing beauty of everything around us.
Science does not give us an understanding of Reality-as-it-is, but rather an understanding of a represented world, one of physical, unmysterious matter that the mind can grasp. This represented world holds important correspondences with Reality, otherwise none of its predictions would be verified, but does not constitute Reality itself. We can study the spatio-temporal properties of matter, but what that matter itself is, is a mystery that science can tell us nothing about, anymore than a meter reading of light-waves can tell us what the color yellow is, or anymore than a clock can tell us what time is. Measurements of properties and how they relate with one another do not constitute an ontology of anything, or even a conscious experience.
This is why (naive) scientists tend to answer away when asked questions of primal importance, the kind that asks what something really is, such as what gravity is, or what light is, or what time is. They answer away by referring us to more concepts, in a never-ending circular loop of models, because those people are not rooted in, nor interested in, conscious experience, as I expand on in my piece on the self-referentiality of the mind.
You would be hard-pressed for instance to find a definition of time which doesn't involve the words 'past', 'present' or 'future', which are already temporal constructs, revealing the circular nature of the (self-informed) mind.
Another approach, more sophisticated perhaps, is to relate time into a larger framework, such as Einstein's General Relativity. There, the physicist tells us that time is one of four dimensions of curved spacetime, which allows us to describe how objects move around with respect to gravity. Even when an object is seemingly standing still, it is nonetheless moving through time, in a trajectory which is influenced by the gravitational field of the ambient spacetime.
Ignoring the circularity of my second definition here, where I use terms such as 'move', 'still' and 'trajectory' which also imply a form of temporality, which could simply be attributed to my clumsiness, the definition begs even more questions about the nature of space, gravity, matter and light (being the speed limit of the universe), none of which are understood as they are, but are instead understood within the scientific model, in an internally coherent fashion yes, but not as something-in-itself.
Viewing time this way also does something rather interesting, in that it sneakily frames it a spatial representation of time, in the form of a dimension of a linear space. We spend so much time (hah) with this spatial representation that it feels natural to us, which is why we are not shocked to use spatial words such as 'long' and 'short' to describe how long a period of time feels, or why we use spatial metaphors to describe and measure time, such as the clock, or the arrow of history. The problem is that our experience of time is not spatial, and doesn't match the usual representations we have of it. This mismatch is why of course one hour can feel like an eternity, and another can seem to zip by us. But in the spatial representation of time, such nuances are homogenized away, and one hour becomes one hour no matter what.
Returning to scientists, it is not that their ideas are wrong, or their reasoning and conclusions flawed, it is that they completely take for granted the mediating effect of the mind, and the self which constructs our spatio-temporal experience of the external world, from which all of science is built upon. They implicitly believe that there can be nothing outside of those, or that if there is, it couldn't possibly be very important, both of these claims being complete and utter assumptions, which are furthermode never even made explicit—the metaphysics of science is always hidden because to make it explicit would expose its limitations and absurdities—and which can never be verified from the point of view of science.
Literality doesn't merely concern the 'objective' side of the self, namely the mind in service of practical, externally-driven projects, and its maps of Reality, it also concerns the 'inner', 'subjective' side. One thing that people often learn over time is that their emotional patterns are a major hindrance in getting what they want, such as living a more joyful, peaceful life. Thus they might learn various models or methods to identify and work with their emotions, through a variety of approaches, either the kind that self-help touches upon, or therapy and its thousands of modalities, or perhaps more obscure methods provided by occultism, or anything that falls under the headline of 'spirituality'.
By and large, these ideas and methods are also literal, in that they work with the self, namely the emotions, the mind, and the will, how those aspects interact with one another, how they create resistance in producing the desired results, and how to resolve those problems. There is nothing wrong with any of this obviously—who doesn't want to get a better handle on their problems?—but by itself, literality runs into several walls that it cannot go beyond, such as the realm of direct experience, which allows me to know what anything is to begin with, not how it's related to other things, but what it is, plainly, directly, experientially.
Without such a capacity, my self ends up turning onto itself, and only allows me to perceive what is useful to the self, or what could threaten it, or what the self wants to believe in, never things as they are. This is, as you may expect, terrible when it comes to living consciously, especially when it comes to one's relationships, because it means that self, by itself, can never love anyone or anything, only enjoy the fact that they give it something that it wants, such as pleasure, reassurance, comfort, safety, etc.
What are the people we can turn to when it comes to such a direct experience, the kind from which conscious love emerges? For that, we can turn to the greatest artists across time, who had aspirations to convey Reality and its emerging qualities through their respective medium. Even if a canvas, a poem or a piece of music are all finite forms which necessarily mediate our access to something beyond them, they can point to a vivid Reality which we can consciously experience, and which gleams from the works of the greats, such as Rembrandt, Shakespeare or Beethoven. We could say that they allowed their self to 'step away' to experience a vivid Reality through their consciousness 1, which they then brought back in the familiar world of the self, a self which they had to develop through arduous practice in order to reach the technical mastery necessary to honor the qualities that their conscious I experiences.
The best artists have this amazing combination of a self in service of a greater Whole, a conscious and unified Reality, whether it is the Truth we get from Dostoevsky's novels, a Truth which like the best jokes, cannot be summarized to mere ideas, because it is found in the whole, or the Beauty from one one of Monet's paintings, which despite appearing on the surface as 'unrealistic', strikes us as far more vivid than anything we typically see in the world around us. This is why we rightfully call those great artists geniuses, because few are able to develop in their life this combination of conscious depth of experience, with the self-mastery necessary to put it into a beautiful, coherent form.
What happens when an artist cannot reach greatness in that manner is that they tend to follow two opposite paths, which are essentially the same in that they lack conscious quality.
The first type is obsessed with mere technical mastery, but hollowed out of any conscious depth, which is how we get the myriad of contemporary photo-realistic artists who depict trivial scenes and subjects, like a crystal clear window that looks out onto an empty parking lot. On the opposite side we get those who tell us that art is entirely subjective, meaning that they can make (or showcase) whatever they fancy, whether it is a banana plastered on a wall, a urinal, or puke splattered on the floor, all of which are considered equally good to any other piece of art, because the only things that matter to them are the ideas behind them, and the interpretations of the audience, the spectator, or the reader. These postmodern (pomo) 'artists' are, unsurprisingly, not interested in conscious qualities, only in their masturbatory subjectivity and their solipsistic ideas, which is why the only thing they can appreciate is more pomo art, and one another's company (and money).
The two sides of obsessive but hollow technician, and self-absorbed pomo artiste (the last syllable has to be pronounced in a very posh manner) seem to be opposites, but they are ultimately united in their inability to reach beyond their own self, which not only means that their work is empty of any conscious quality, but that they do not even notice what is missing. The technician sees what he doesn't understand as fanciful invention, whereas the pomo artiste sees masterful technique as irrelevant to the 'bigger' ideas that he fancies his work contains.
Pomo art provides us with a window into the fundamentally alienated condition of the self, when it falls out of touch with consciousness. It highlights how easily people can deceive themselves and one another when there is an incentive to do so, namely the need to make lots of money while having no technical ability whatsoever, or when people are able to surround themselves with others who share their viewpoints, resulting in all of the insane echo chambers and mini-cults that we find on the internet, or when they have no contact whatsoever with beautiful, natural experiences, and are instead born into the ugly, unnatural, mediated and fragmented simulacrum that we live in, 2 and call modern society, which they eventually become used to, the same way that zoo animals become used to their captivity and alienation, and come to prefer its safety and comfort, because they are no longer able to live in the wild.
When self only experiences itself, through mediated experiences that come from its surrounding society, or through its own representations, emotions, likes and dislikes, and command over Reality, then it leads to a disastrous degeneracy, a sort of inbreeding process that prevents it from 'contacting' conscious experience.
When there is only self, there comes about a momentum that it cannot stop, such as the obsessiveness of the men who can only think about lifting weights, or solving maths problems, or the plain addictions of those hooked on pornography, video games, or drugs. Or there is an overwhelming anxiety at its various problems and what it cannot get, which culminates in the fear of death and the inability for self to face it, let alone overcome it. Or there is a crushing loneliness that prevents self from both being by itself, in solitude, and also in being with others, in complete intimacy, bathed in the warm presence of the other person, without any of their personal insecurities and selfish attachments getting in the way. Or there might simply be a plain old sense of boredom about it all. Boredom about life, about doing things, about everything around it, the existential void of ennui that rids the face of any joy, and threatens to swallow the world in a drawn-out yawn. 3
These form some of the fundamental limitations that the self, by itself, cannot overcome: addiction (or in general, the inability for self to stop itself), existential loneliness, existential fear, and constant boredom, a symptom of its own solipsism and inability to feel anything out from within, all of these contributing to the fundamental alienation of the self when it is out of touch with consciousness.
Other limitations include how self, by itself, is unable to make the right decision, ever, constantly referring to its mere ideas of the situation, or its own emotions, how it feels about it, never able to see the situation as it is, and selflessly act from its conscience. Or how its diagnosis of what it must change about itself is systematically wrong, because again it does not understand the situation, and it does not understand what a harmonious self is, because harmony and the situation are not things that the mind can isolate and grasp, they are totalities that elude the mind and the self at large, which is why genius is not arrived at through obsession, but through surrender to Unself.
On the level of the collective self, we also see self-informed societies that arise from civilization (agriculture onwards), and the fundamental impasses that they cannot solve, such as the inevitability of societal collapse, because unconscious societies are unable to come to terms with limits, and inevitably over-extend past their energy and labor supply, and run into the diminishing returns on complexity.
To the extent that collectives understand limitations, the way they go about implementing them is through regulations, which necessarily lag behind the ability and desire for other selves to slip past the regulations and seize scarce resources for themselves, or through conflicts, which lead to arms races between competing sides, which eventually lead to the demise or one or more of the sides, accelerating the inevitable collapse of the complex society.
And we can also think of how a self-informed society can only provide surrogate versions of the Real, the beautiful, the joyful, and the meaningful, because all it has access to are representations of Reality, which then become reproduced over and over again, packaged and advertised, and then distributed to hundreds of millions of people in order to meet their (egoic) needs, and circulate the flow of money. When people say that the economy meets the needs of people, what they miss is that it can only meet the literal needs of the literal self, not the conscious needs of people, which are fundamentally non-literal, and non-scalable, because they are grounded in direct experience.
There is a lot to say about consciousness, and how self might 'stray' away from it, but this doesn't mean that consciousness is complicated, since after all we are all conscious, otherwise none of us would be able to understand one another. 4 We can all know what consciousness is through being, which is more fundamental than knowing, and does not require any intermediaries, including the intermediary of mediation that comes from the mind, and the structures of our society. The trickiness comes from the fact that self is constantly interpreting things around it, and labeling things in terms of what it likes and doesn't like, such that self, left to its own devices, tends to convert the ineffable into something effable, something which it can understand easily and then use for its own survival, or pleasure, or power.
As mentioned in a paragraph above that described how space and time are significantly more subtle than the mere ideas that the mind uses to look at Reality, this selfish mode of perception, that focuses on representations of the mind, emotional interpretations and labels, and that becomes blind to the simple truth of it all, is not something that self has to consciously do, it is essentially automatic when self is sufficiently unconscious, such that to it, it becomes reality by virtue of being totally immersed in it. Self, unconsciously, ends up creating a hermetic shell of its representations and interpretations, and in doing so, becomes self-informed, and can only experience itself.
There is nothing inherently wrong with experiencing separation, representing the world, or acting on it for one's own benefit. We must do all of those as human beings, which is why a crude interpretation of spirituality as being about 'killing the self' is at best misleading, and at worst antithetical to living virtuously. We do have a self, and it is incredibly important to develop it, to take care of it, and to erect boundaries from other selves if need be, and if it comes to it, defend ourselves from them.
The real problems occur when this self becomes self-informed, when all that we have are the sense of separation from others, the representations from our mind, the likes and dislikes of our emotions, the (selfish) pleasure of our body, and the drive for control and power of our will.
In such a state, which I am going to refer to as 'ego', it only makes sense for the self to violently cling to what it has, because there is nothing else in Reality that could inform it to do otherwise. Ego is fundamentally alienated from anything beyond it, such that any experience that points to its own limitations, such as silence, pain, uncertainty, and the awareness of its own death, prompts it to double down on its own strategies: numb away its pain through stimulants, blast music in its ears to drown the silence and the boredom, obsessively plan for the future in order to feel in control of what is uncertain, and spend its entire life in denial of its own death.
The selfishness of ego, and the length it will go to preserve itself and hide its wicked nature from itself and others, might appear incredibly irrational to the outside, but to itself it is always, always rational. Its drive for self-maintenance exists because it fundamentally only experiences itself, which implies that only more can make sense to it, more power, money, safety, intelligence, 5 ambition, pleasure, which also means that anything which is less, or qualitatively different, is at best irrelevant, like a different flavor it is not used to, or at worst, utterly terrifying, such as in the case of its own death.
This drive for constantly more culminates in the addiction which I hinted at in the previous section, which can take the form of pleasurable substances, sex, narcotics, to stimulate or numb the pain of the body, or an obsession with acquiring ever more money and status (will), or an addiction to the roller coaster of drama (emotions), or restless intellectualization and constant worrying about the future (mind).
Addiction looks monstrous, hollow, and utterly self-destructive on the outside, because it is, but on the inside, it feels to the ego like freedom, like elation, because again all it understands is its own solipsistic bubble of experience, not the greater whole in which is it embedded in. As the ego becomes more and more addicted, it becomes more and more numb to anything outside of its addictive loops, unable to feel the gentle and subtle joy of real intimacy, preferring the crude, mental pleasure of porn instead, such that it becomes more and more narrow, unhealthy, and unable to experience anything outside of itself.
The self-informed nature of ego also means that it will always play a game of rationalization with itself. It will always come up with justifications about its own selfishness, cowardice, lovelessness, disinterest in things, because fundamentally it resists change, particularly surrender to something greater than itself, at all costs.
This is the tragic existential nature of ego: it is impossible to convince an egoic person to give up their ego, because any such reason would be grounded in a broader conscious reality which it does not have access to. Love does not convince ego because it does not experience love, only the pleasure from having sex, or the stroke to its own self-esteem of being with an attractive partner, or the reassurance of a safe relationship, or the abstract ideas and romantic fantasies of love, but never the self-softening experience of loving someone and experiencing, even for just a moment, the other from within.
Thus ego is committed to, not as a conscious decision but from the nature of its own blindness, a life which torments it in ways it cannot solve. It runs away from conscious reality and then craves more self-satisfaction (pleasure) and self-augmentation (power), but nothing can fundamentally fill its emptiness, which compels it to keep chasing more, or give up the whole thing and be depressed. Whatever strategy the ego adopts however, it never willingly surrenders itself.
Ego would prefer to rationalize its existential fears and start building an entire world which can shield it from conscious reality than face the Truth. This is not just insane because it's an attempt to go against Reality, but also because even that project cannot satisfy the ego, even if in the short term it might appear 'successful' and sensible to itself.
The building of society is juxtaposed with this downward spiral of the ego, rooted in existential fear, and this project initially seems to create a prodigious armor for the self which can be used to ward away any danger and any uncertainty. Things seem to work at first because the resource base of any early civilization is abundant, because the complexity of operations is low meaning that things can quickly change and adapt to new problems, and because exploration and figuring out new challenges is exciting at first.
Eventually however, exploration gives way to management, bureaucracy and monotony, simplicity gives way to complexity, and abundance gives way to scarcity, especially in the face of competing societies, which forces the ego to double down and fight other selves over scarce resources and over ideologies, and violently coerce people to keep working for the failing civilization.
This cycle of rise and fall has happened many times in the past, the main examples in Europe being the Bronze Age collapse, the fall of the Roman Empire, and currently, the decline of the Modern World, which is most evident in the poorer parts of Europe and America, but which is coming for every country eventually.
The most interesting thing about such a decline is that the combination of the complexity of our world, and the ever-present divisions found in it, implies that there will always be a worldly justification as to why things aren't working out, a justification which allows ego to not look at itself. Ego can always blame a group of people for the failures of civilization, or this or that ideology or trend it has identified—such as religion, secularity, feminism, toxic masculinity, capitalism, inter-generational trauma—which are all true from a limited perspective, but miss the deeper reality of the fundamental alienation at the root of ego and civilization.
The fundamental impossibility of building a tower to reach Heaven is not seen for what it is, and instead ego naturally reaches out for scapegoats in order to not face itself. Just like an addict will examine everything but their own addiction to explain their own problems, ego will go through an endless list of external reasons to justify why it currently feels joyless, loveless, tense, passionless, enslaved, or this case, why the world it has built and maintained is falling apart. Fundamentally, ego cannot solve its own problems, because to change would require the ability to see beyond its own representations and to surrender to a conscious reality bigger than itself, which it rationally equates as being a shackle, or even as a form of death.
This dynamic as a whole is not a problem, an isolated thing which a mind could grasp and work on solving. It's an existential predicament, because to describe it in literal terms would reduce it down to the language which ego can work with and thus co-opt so as to assimilate it. Which is to say, if you believe that simply meditating will make all the problems in your life go away, your ego will co-opt meditation so as to render it impotent. You will for instance start to meditate in a mechanical manner, on auto-pilot and just for the sake of filling out hours, the exact opposite of being more conscious. Or you will use meditation as a tranquilizer for the anxiety in your life, never getting at the root of your fears. Or you will rationalize your meek passivity into a virtue, or you will focus on and attempt to climb a hierarchy of states which you can work your way up there and attain "higher" states, all as a distraction from ego itself.
Only unity can dissolve ego, and the lens of problems is fundamentally one of shatter and control. This unity cannot be captured by literal means, which is why our plans for happiness always make us unsatisfied in an important way, because plans come from the isolating-focusing mind, why real cultures cannot be engineered into existence, because they arise from people consciously living with one another in a specific context, solving problems as they go, and harmonizing the whole over time, why you cannot reduce the writing of a great (not merely good) novel into following a few principles, because it really takes an entire conscious life to write something great, and why all attempts to make people more loving have fallen down to the state of dogmatic religions, which end up becoming the justification of countless wars and other atrocities.
This unity is not some 'thing' out 'there' to reach out for or figure out, it is a unity which is always 'there' as long the self is able to 'step away' and experience it as it is, in this moment, in this situation. And even if the self is be too rigid to allow much of it to come through, it is still here and will always be here, even when the self dies it will be here, because at the end of the day, only fear dies, the fear of the ego that is. 6
26th June 2026 - This post now appears in a series titled 'Clusterfuck collapse', with a few differences from this one because I am restricting myself from linking to the blog in that series.
1 To say "one's consciousness" is rather misleading because consciousness does not belong to anyone, since it is not finite nor spatial. But each individual certainly has a different access to consciousness, which is a capacity we can develop, or in the case of most people, let wither away, which is why children tend to be so curious and alive, whereas most adults nowadays are essentially dead inside, 'living' as collections of habits, prejudices and rigid armors of tension. Thus we can make the distinction between 'awareness', the ability of self to allow the conscious I to inform its experience, and 'consciousness' itself, which is not bound by space or time, and is therefore non-local, non-causal, and not confined or specific to any individual. This type of distinction, between awareness and consciousness, and between the self and the conscious I, are all useful pointers, allowing the mind to recognize its limitations, but from the point of view of consciousness, there is no fundamental distinction between self and consciousness.
2 Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch painter from the 15th and early 16th century, provides us with one of the most vivid, disturbing, and culturally relevant depictions of Hell in his work, where the unity of Reality is broken down into a nightmarish kaleidoscope of objects and body parts, none of which are related with one another in any harmonious way, because there is no unifying consciousness to do so. This provides us with a world where any isolated part is depicted realistically, such that you can zoom on any part of the painting and think it to be normal, but where the whole is analogous to the fractured, incoherent, literal hellscape that we now live in. It is truly fascinating how ahead of his times he was, but it is even more notable, and perhaps hilarious, that his vision preceded the works of the surrealists by several centuries, except that Bosch knew perfectly well that he was depicting Hell, whereas they thought that they were visionaries for breaking conventions.
3 From the introductory passage of Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal.
4 Which doesn't invalidate the idea of degrees of consciousness. Some selves are very receptive to consciousness, while others resist it in all the ways they can, and turn inwards, towards themselves, the same way that some minds are in service of a 'user', while some minds chatter on by themselves, and busy themselves through distractions. At the level of consciousness however, 'better' doesn't make sense, because it is a dualistic, relative notion.
5 More precisely, worldly intelligence, which is to say cleverness. Intelligence is about responding appropriately to the situation, cleverness is about understanding and manipulating the literal concepts of our literal, unnatural society. Cleverness is what you know, intelligence is how you act when you don't know. See also intelligence versus cleverness for an elaboration of the distinction.
6 A book by Barry Long of the same name: 'Only fear dies'.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Ego Alienation Problem Selfunself Clusterfuckcollapse
2025-10-24