CHAPTER 5
The Self that
Isn’t a Self
“I am what I am not, and I am not what I am,” concluded the French philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre, reflecting the dual nature of our reflective self-consciousness, the being and non-being of our evolving enantiodromiac
nature; but how can this be? How can we possible be what we are not? What is
this impenetrable mystery?
This was my call to destiny, my mission in life—to
resolve the mystery of the self that wasn’t me, that aspect of my personality
that wasn’t who I was; and how did I know that it wasn’t me? How could I
possible be a false me and a real me at one and the same time? That’s what I
set out to resolve in the twenty-third year of my life when I dropped
everything and fled to Annecy, France to begin my long and painful quest for my
true self.
I’ve explored this story over and over in all of my
writing (twenty-three books to date), but most succinctly in The Summoning of Noman and The Pearl of Great Price, and I need not
rehash my story here; suffice to say that my knowledge of the dual
consciousness of our reflective self did not come without sacrifice; I paid for
it with every step I took on my journey to wholeness and completeness, and the
price that I paid would make one shudder.
But there was no other way to pass through the eye of
the needle and enter into the third and final stage of personal evolution to
complete what Nature cannot finish; and that’s the bloody irony—because we have no choice! We are all teleologically
driven to become our true self, and not until we find the way to our true self
will we satisfy the irrepressible longing in our soul for wholeness and
completeness. Here we are then, standing at the gateway of the inner circle of
life, as far as the natural process of evolution can take us, but we have no
idea where to go next, where to look, how to enter; and we despair. Oh God, how we despair!
The encoded imperative of our inner nature drives us
against the impenetrable wall of our unknowing, crushing our spirit or making
us stronger; but either way, not until one dares to risk it all will they find
the answer to the haunting mystery of our becoming.
And it is here that we find the broken souls, all the
wretched and miserable people who cannot make sense of life, some shaking their
fist at God and others falling into such dark pits of mental darkness that they
cast a pall upon everyone around them.
“All we have is
hope, but what hope is there?” said the
poet Margaret Atwood, author of the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale that was made into a television series last
year and continues in season two with a much bleaker picture of human nature
but which I refuse to watch on principle. And what does this say about postmodern
nihilism that has cast a blight upon the good professor Jordan Peterson’s life?
But he’s right to divide the world into order and chaos, because this is the enantiodromiac nature of the human
condition; and this is the clue to the mystery of the being and non-being of
our evolving self-consciousness; but how can we possibly see this if we
relegate the reflective self of man to our brain?
Is the self an epiphenomenon of our brain, or is it
independent of our brain? Is it a product of our biology, or is it “something”
that we are born with?
In all honesty, it boggles my mind whenever I read the
literature and listen to all the materialist naysayers like Margaret Atwood;
and it’s beginning to bore the hell out of me when people—and the more brilliant, the more annoying! —argue from the
perspective that our reflective and autonomous individual self is a product of
our brain; but knowing that there is only self-initiation into the mysteries of
life, I forgive them their spiritual obtuseness.
But this is professor Jordan Peterson’s dilemma, standing
on the razor’s edge of this haunting question—which reminds me of the epigram
that William Somerset Maugham quoted to introduce the remarkable story of his
hero’s quest for truth in his novel The
Razor’s Edge that inflicted me in high school with what the eminent
literary critic Professor Harold Bloom called an “immortal wound” (a wound that
pierces one’s soul) and called me to become a seeker like Maugham’s hero Larry
Darrell, a quote from the Katha-Upanishad, one of the holy scriptures of the
East: “The sharp edge of the razor is
difficult to pass over; thus the wise say that the path to Salvation is hard.”
I was called to walk the razor’s edge, as every soul
must when they have come to the limits of personal evolution, and though I got
cut and bled many times I survived and found my true self; and it’s from this
perspective that I wrote the spiritual musing that I was called upon to write
by the movie Still Alice that Penny
and I saw last summer:
Personal Identity and Alzheimer’s
“We are more than
the memory of who we are,” I said to Penny on our drive home from the Uptown
Theatre and early dinner at Wimpy’s Diner in Barrie yesterday afternoon, and I
knew instantly that this was my entry point into the spiritual musing that the
movie Still Alice had inspired; and
this morning I called upon my muse to help me explore the haunting question of
personal identity and Alzheimer’s that the remarkable movie Still Alice inevitably gave rise to…
I didn’t really
want to see Still Alice, starring
Julianne Moore who won an Oscar for her moving performance as the fifty-year
old Alice Howland, professor of linguistics at Columbia University afflicted
with early-onset Alzheimer’s, because I knew it would be a tear jerker; but we
went anyway, and it proved to be no less than a three-tissue movie.
But it wasn’t so
much the emotional impact that Alice had upon me as Alzheimer’s ravages her
memory, even though that in itself easily moved me to tears; it was the
unbearable irony of her tragic predicament: Alice is an exceptionally bright
high-achiever whose personal identity is inextricably linked with her
intellect, and when she loses her memory she loses her sense of self-identity
and slowly sinks into an abyss of blank-faced dumbness from which she won’t
recover.
This bothered me
more than her disease, not because I didn’t empathize with Alice’s rapid
deterioration and the effect it had upon her loving family, but because this
beautiful and gracious wife and mother of three responsible adult children was
hopelessly trapped by the spiritually suffocating scientific constraints of her
condition; and with each passing day and hour and minute her comfortable
middle-class world slowly shrank into memory-fading oblivion.
“You know,
sweetheart,” I said to Penny as we drove through Minesing on our way home to
Bluewater in Georgian Bay after the heartbreaking movie and simple hot
hamburger dinner at Wimpy’s Diner; “what a person believes in makes a
difference in how they feel when they’re faced with their own mortality, or facing
a tragic disease like Alice’s in the movie. Do you remember me telling you
about my buddy Michael Ignatieff’s novel Scar
Tissue that dealt with this same issue of Alzheimer’s and personal
identity?”
“Vaguely,” Penny
said. “But you’re going to remind me, aren’t you?”
I was being
sarcastic when I called the disgraced former leader of the Liberal Party of
Canada Michael Ignatieff my buddy, because I had lost respect for him when he
forced a totally unnecessary election that decimated the Liberal Party and
reduced it to third party status. “Those who can’t, teach,” I responded to his
catastrophic and personally humiliating defeat (he even lost his own Toronto’s
Etobicoke-Lakeshore seat) when he resigned as leader of the Official Opposition
and ignominiously shrunk away with his bushy academic tail between his legs to
teach at the University of Toronto and then back to Harvard’s ivory tower where
he had been plucked by the Liberal Party establishment to be the next Pierre
Trudeau to save Canada from Premier Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party.
I respected the former
professor/journalist/author Michael Ignatieff, whose TV show Ignatieff I watched with avid interest
(I distinctly remember his interview with Hemingway’s third wife Martha
Gellhorn, whose life with Hemingway inspired the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn, which in turn inspired my book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway), and
I read with fascination Ignatieff’s autobiographical novel Scar Tissue that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, because the
core of his story was about Alzheimer’s and personal identity, just as the
movie Still Alice that was based on
the New York Times bestselling eponymous
novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova.
I didn’t lose
respect for Ignatieff because he aspired to become Prime Minister of Canada,
which is a noble if not impossible ambition for even the most astute
politician; but because it was an arrogant presumption to think that he could
squirm his way to the top position of the Liberal Party and become Prime
Minister of Canada without paying his political dues, which was why he was
branded by the Conservative Party attack adds during the ill-timed election as
“arrogant and elitist,” and it wasn’t by any stretch of imagination that I
connected the dots of his massive ego with his novel Scar Tissue whose theme was so intimate and personal that it caused
a rift with his family, especially with his brother Andrew who was primary
caregiver for his mother and not his fictional self as he wrote in Scar Tissue.
Michael
Ignatieff’s mother fell prey to Alzheimer’s, and he watched her lose her sense
of self as her memory faded from week to week until she mercifully passed away
in a nursing home; and his novel explored the theme of loss of memory and self-identity,
because the narrator of Scar Tissue
is a philosophy professor not unlike the author who is haunted by his fear of
inheriting his mother’s Alzheimer’s, and what better way for the
professor-turned-politician, who when campaigning for the leadership of the
Liberal Party of Canada cleverly called himself “neither atheist nor believer,”
to immortalize his name than to become Prime Minster of Canada just in case
Alzheimer’s erased his memory? What better confirmation could one have to
validate their insecure egoic need to be?
I have no doubt
that in his mind the Harvard professor’s motives for entering Canadian politics
were pure and altruistic (despite the fact that he lived outside Canada for
thirty years, he professed to a philosophy of engagement to justify his commitment to the Liberal Party), but
novels based on one’s personal life have a tendency to reveal much more than
the author realizes, as many writers have learned after a critical study of
their work; and Michael Ignatieff’s intensely personal and poignant novel Scar Tissue reflected the tremulous
shadow side of the author’s scholarly trained ego that goes straight to the
issue of consciousness and individual identity: is our reflective
self-consciousness an epiphenomenon of our biology, which disappears when our
body dies; or does our reflective self co-exist with our physical body and
continues to exist non-biologically after our body dies?
This is the core
issue of Scar Tissue that Michael
Ignatieff tried to come to terms with creatively through narrative inquiry, and
it is the same issue in the movie Still
Alice that is left hanging in the air as Alice fades away into herself, and
it also happens to be the issue that I devoted my whole life to resolving and
writing about in my novels, poetry, and memoirs and which is the premise of
today’s musing. Having said this, I can now proceed to the heart of the issue
of being and not being who we are…
Alzheimer’s is
like a magnifying glass, focusing our attention on the individual self; because
as one loses one’s memory with the ravages of this disease, one’s self-identity
disappears. But where does it go? That’s the heart of the issue.
Science would have
us believe that when we die, the matrix of consciousness that makes up our
self-identity dies with us; or, generously speaking, science may allow the
possibility that, like energy which can neither be created nor destroyed but
simply changes form, the matrix of our reflective self-consciousness may simply
go back into the cosmic stream of life, which is what the Buddhist philosophy
contends.
Ignatieff’s
inquiry into the issue of Alzheimer’s and self-identity appears to hold this
point of view; and bringing his narrative to closure, the author/narrator says:
"But I know that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this
time. I know that at the very last moment, when everything I ever knew has been
effaced from my mind, when pure vacancy has taken possession of me, then light
of the purest whiteness will stream in through my eyes into the radiant and
empty plane of my mind."
But this is the
non-self of the Buddhist philosophy; not the individuated consciousness of our
autonomous self that pre-exists our physical body and continues to exist when
our body dies.
I’ve already
explored this issue in my book Stupidity
Is Not a Gift of God in my essay “On the Evolutionary Impulse to
Individuate: A Response to the Spiritual Path of Evolutionary Enlightenment,”
so I need not go into detail here; suffice to say that in my quest for
resolution to the issue of the self, I came to the conclusion that we are all
born with a spark of divine consciousness that evolves through life into an
individual and autonomous self; and the self evolves naturally through the
karmic process of being and becoming. To
be, we have to become; and we become who we are according to how we
live our life. That’s the central mystery of the human condition that I have
explored in my book The Pearl of Great
Price
Given my personal
perspective, then; I see the matrix of consciousness that we call our
reflective self not as a by-product (epiphenomenon) of the brain (our
neurology), but as an autonomous self that exists independently of our body;
but what other proof do we have?
In the movie Still Alice, Alice Howland loses her
self-identity as her memory is erased by early-onset Alzheimer’s; but was her
self-identity a by-product of her neurological system which disappears into
oblivion when that part of her brain is ravaged by her disease, or does it
recede elsewhere where it cannot be seen?
In other words, is
Alice still Alice despite the loss of
her memory of who she is? Would Alice
still be Alice if she lost a leg, an arm, a breast, or a vital organ that
had to be replaced, like her heart?
Many heart
transplant patients have reported the phenomenon of taking on personality
traits of their donors, like Jane Seymour did in the movie Heart of a Stranger that was inspired by the true story of Claire
Sylvia’s heart transplant; but that’s a separate musing that I hope to write
one day. The point of today’s spiritual musing is this: is our self-identity
limited to our memory alone, or does it pervade throughout the cells of our
entire body as pioneer researcher in cellular consciousness Dr. Graham Farrant
and Dr. Paul Pearlsall (The Heart’s Code)
have discovered, and even beyond cellular memory in non-biological form after
our body dies? And if so, what proof do we have besides my own conviction?
In October, 2012
Dr. Eben Alexander, a practicing neurosurgeon for twenty-five years who was convinced
that self-identity was an epiphenomenon of the brain, had a unique if not
providentially inspired medical experience that changed his entire scientific
perspective on consciousness and made him a believer in the independent
existence of our individual and autonomous self, and he wrote a book on the
experience that initiated him into the divine mystery of the self. The book is
called Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon’s
Journey into the Afterlife; and it was on the New York Times bestseller
list for 97 weeks.
“On November 10,
2008,” he wrote in his book, “I was struck by a rare illness and thrown into a
coma for seven days. During that time, my entire neocortex—the outer surface of
the brain, the part that makes us human—was shut down. Inoperative. In essence,
absent.”
Dr. Alexander
believed that “the brain is a machine that produces consciousness,” and when
“the machine breaks down, consciousness stops.” But the rare illness that he
contracted (which proved to be a rare virus) shut his brain down and sent him
into a seven-day coma that should have shut his consciousness down according to
his scientific paradigm, but Dr. Alexander instead experienced himself outside
his body in what Dr. Raymond Moody (Life
After Life) described as the most astounding near-death experiences that he
had studied in more than four decades of researching the incredible phenomenon
of near death experiences.
In the Prologue to
Proof of Heaven, former non-believer
Dr. Alexander contritely wrote: “My experience showed me that the death of the
body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience
continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of God
who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the universe itself
and all the beings within it are ultimately going,” which means, quite simply,
that Alice was still Alice despite
her loss of memory!
———
Once again, another
example in Dr. Eben Alexander’s OBE (the literature is replete with thousands
upon thousands of experiences of one one’s immortal, soul self), of someone who
hit their wall of unknowing and had a divinely inspired experience that
initiated them into the mysteries of the final stage of personal evolution;
that’s why I find it a waste of energy to try and prove that our soul self is
not an epiphenomenon of our brain. But this begs the deeper question: what is
it about our reflective self that denies its own existence?
Must take pause…
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