Letting myself go

Over the past few years I have become fascinated by our idea of a self, the narrative that we create about ourselves, a homunculus sitting somewhere behind our eyes that we feel steers our lives.

But this narrative is made up. In fact we don’t exist as a separate self, we are a collection of millions of tiny organisms, doing what they do without our active control, without real boundaries between ourselves and “other”, just a part of the fabric of life doing life without any active input from our little selves, despite the fact that our frontal lobes retrofit agency to decisions that our biology has made quite happily on its own.

I have become increasingly convinced that we don’t have free will. That what we are and what we do is a result of inconceivably complex chains of events and influences that we have no control over. So this “self” suffers. It suffers from feeling out of control and fearful of the world out there causing it to feel alone and anxious much of the time.

Through reading endless books about Advaita and Buddhist thinking I have ended up trying to let go of this idea of self. Trying to let go of stories about what I should or shouldn’t be doing, trying to let go of feelings of worthiness or otherwise, trying to let go of the sense of a little me that has to defend itself against the world “out there”. All the time fully aware that there is no little me trying at all, it is all just happening…

The result, so far, appears to be closer to the other sense of “letting myself go” namely losing the plot and losing all sense of purpose.

But that sense of purpose is cultural, it is another story. Rest is Resistance convincingly pushes back against these cultural narratives about usefulness and purpose, which are stories perpetrated to keep us in our place and nose to the grindstone in support of the success of others.

So I am waiting to see. Waiting to see if I “achieve enlightenment” or disappear up my own proverbial backside…