selfworld

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.

-Henry Van Dyke, The Prison and the Angel (Poem)



For whoever wants to save their life will lose it,
but whoever loses their life for me will save it.

-Luke 9:24

This is a long post but an important one, please bear with me.

Psychologists think of the "self" as a structure of human psychology. Others think of their "selves" as their whole being, body and mind. Some people speak of inner selves, outer selves, and even multiple selves. These are individual trees in a much larger forest.

Self is the fundamental operating system of all life on Earth. It is the software of life. The cell is hardware, DNA is hardware designed to store information. The information itself, how that information is encoded on the DNA, is what makes you different from a cow, a lamb, or an elephant; and different from every other human being on Earth. This system is the underlying process of this stage of existence, which I call the Selfworld.

Now, by self I most specifically do not mean soul. Self does not have anything to do with soul, self is information. Information is an interesting and even mysterious substance sometimes, but it pertains to this world. Nevertheless, people mistake selves for souls all the time, because they are dominated by the selfworld, which is centered on selves.

"The Selfworld is a system, Neo...."

If you will excuse a computer simile, the information encoded in DNA is like the ROM (Read Only Memory) of our systems, in this case containing the operating system. What we normally call the Self, the psychological self, is merely the contents of our RAM (Random Access Memory), our brains. When the computer is turned off, the information stored in RAM goes away unless it is stored in a more permanent external memory. For computers, that might be a hard drive or other external media. For humans, this external memory is the knowledge stored in books, on the internet, in computers and elsewhere. When we die, what we think of as our “selves” may go away, but the instructions encoded in DNA continue on, changing slightly with each new generation.

The dominance of this Self is so great, that very often one animal will fight another of its own kind, a creature that is 99.9% identical to it, for the right to pass on that .1% difference. It is willing to kill the other creature, its genetic brother. It is willing to be killed. Why? DNA demands it. The Self demands it. The story and drama of life on Earth is pretty much the story of each species, defined by the information in DNA, and each individual of that species, attempting to dominate and survive at the expense of other individuals and species.

I am not bringing all this up because I am particularly interested in wild moose butting heads in some forest somewhere. The point of all this is to understand us.

We ourselves are very ready to subject creatures that are 95% genetically identical to us to grossly inhumane conditions for our own food. The conditions that prevail in factory farms for many of the creatures we eat, make Dachau look like a kiddie park. We don't usually have too many qualms about it (with some notable exceptions) because, well, they aren't us. They aren't even human. We hear the voice of the Self, and close out compassion for creatures who feel fear and pain much like we do. I am not done yet however.

We subject creatures that are 98% genetically identical to us (primates) to medical experiments because, well, the corporations want the results and they are not us. They are not human so their lives do not matter. But this is not yet the kicker.

We wage wars with other human beings, 99.9 percent genetically identical to us, by any count our brothers, because they are another race of human being than us. Or even just a different national origin. Or they speak a different language or worship a different God.

Lest you think that genetics have a monopoly on this, the short-term memory banks of Self do even more terrible things. We wage war on people who have pretty much the same culture, the same color of skin even, because they think differently than us. Maybe even we just think they think differently from us. The most terrible wars in history were between groups of people who were culturally very similar. We want something, they stand in our way.

We are very ready to think of other human beings as sub-human beings, as a prelude to killing them. The Nazis were all-time champions of this. They killed people who were born German, who for the most part looked like Germans, who spoke German. Yet these Germans were subhuman scum that had to be exterminated. If the people responsible had to face the truth, that these were Germans and human beings just like them, it would get in the way of what they wanted to do. What they wanted to do, no matter how many innocents would be killed.

Why do we do it? Because we value that .01% difference in us, completely and totally out of all proportion. It may not even be a genetic difference worth mentioning, it may be a difference in the information in our heads. In other words, we are so dominated by our Selves, that we would do anything, any horror, and justify it until doomsday. We would rather see thousands die, than disadvantage ourselves by even a tiny amount. It has happened time and time again.

We would rather see 100,000 foreigners die horrible deaths
rather than miss our morning tea.

We justify these things by twisting the language, among other things; human language can become very malleable when self-interest is involved. Here is one example - I am not talking about politics here, I am talking about human beings. We invaded Iraq to give the Iraqi people “freedom”. Freedom is one of the most abused of these words in the United States, used to justify American self-interest, or rather the self-interest of those who control powerful commercial entities in the United States.

So lets see. Approximately 100,000 civilians have died in the Iraq War, according to most sources, and all of them are directly or indirectly tied to the presence of US forces in that country. So One Hundred THOUSAND people were deprived of the freedom to continue living, in the dubious hope that Iraq might some day be a “free” country?? And what kind of “free country” are we talking about here? Is America a free country?

No, the kind of freedom meant here is the freedom of US corporations to access Iraqi markets and resources. This is the kind of perversion of language that takes place, when the Self gets involved.

Again, I have no interest in talking politics whatsoever. My point is that people will go to the greatest extremes, they will kill, they will mangle the language and their own minds, they will even risk death, for this “Self”.

Before we take our leave of this little cavalcade of evil, we need to talk about the Milgram Experiment.

An experiment started in 1961 at Yale University, to see to what degree people would obey authority figures and ignore their own conscience. Basically, there was a person in charge of the experiment, a person (the teacher) who asks questions and administers electric shocks in response to wrong answers, and a person (the student) who was actually an actor in league with the experimenters who would act like he was being shocked at the appropriate times. The shocks would increase by 15 volt intervals up to a lethal 450 volts. As the voltage increased, the actor would pretend to be in more and more distress, complaining of a heart condition and finally beating on the walls and begging for mercy before falling completely silent after the supposedly fatal voltage was applied.

Every “teacher” did in fact show signs of great distress when applying the higher voltages, offering to refund the money they were paid, asked to go in the next room to check on the “student”, ect., but most elected not to disobey the experimenter. Most, 65% of them, elected to shock to death an innocent person rather than disobey the experimenter. Milgram summarized the experiment in a 1974 article:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

This has been explained as a resistance to disobey an authority, but the matter is much deeper than that. The truth is, the participants were more willing to kill an innocent person, than they were to bring personal consequences on themselves. Even minor consequences, even if the only consequence is having to alter their own ideology or dissent from their peer group. Like I said in a previous paragraph, people will let others die rather than give up their morning tea, or disadvantage themselves in any significant way, as long as those persons are sufficiently different from themselves. To bring up the Iraq example, people will willingly submit to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians: overtly in the name of a “freedom” that has been emptied of all real meaning and distorted into a slogan; unconsciously for significantly less abstract reasons.

The Milgram experiment has been repeated many times, and always with essentially the same results. People are more willing to hurt other people than they are to resist peer pressure or authority, and more willing to hurt other people even in violation of the moral codes they think they believe in, than to question themselves and their actions. Further confirmation of this effect, if any were really needed, comes from the Abu Graib scandal. Ordinary people, reservists, not even regular military personnel, were willing to do the most atrocious things once they found themselves in an environment which approved of torture. Perhaps we can even think of examples from our own lives, when we did the wrong thing because we put the opinion of the group or avoidance of consequences above ethics. The only way to resist such things, is to be armed with knowledge about how easily they can occur. In other words, not to blindly believe the best about ourselves and other people, but to understand the very worst. The behavior of ordinary Germans under the Nazis was not some strange abberation, it was reprehensible but not at all incomprehensible. The Milgram experiment shows that the majority of average Americans, or Europeans, or anyone else under the same conditions, would do the same thing.

Here we come to the heart of the matter: if people will kill to avoid relatively mild consequences to themselves, what will they do to avoid truths they would rather ignore? What will they do to shore up belief systems that they (unconsciously perhaps) consider to be in their own best interests? Can anyone see the truth, so long as self-interest is so dominant?

This is the fact that we have to accept, going into this. For the vast majority of people, self-interest is a far more dominant motivation behind what they think and believe, than goodness or truth or any other such desire. Most people will defend their thoughts like a fortress. Some are even willing to kill for them.

It is important to emphasize the negative aspects of the selfworld, simply because most people are very much mired in it to the point of not even being able to see it. How you view it, very much depends on where you are in your journey into it or out of it. It is both a path and an obstacle. The selfworld is evil from the point of view of someone trying to counteract its negative capabilities. The selfworld is also the sphere in which we can evolve into something better.

I spoke earlier in the "Existence Loop" that some people will choose to return to the selfworld, return again and again to it. For them, it is what they want. The people I am really speaking to, are people who want out of it. To them, the selfworld must inevitably be viewed as evil. To say that it is evil in itself, is to say that are viewing it from a higher state of mind in some sense, and from that viewpoint, it is indeed evil. When the Gnostics said that matter and the world were inherently evil, that spoke more to their own state of spiritual evolution than to the world. Most people choose to return to the selfworld; for them it is much desired. Those like us who want to leave it, can find our way out.