The Self You Are Trying to Find Is the Thing Hurting You

Many popular methods and currents of thought today are all working to strengthen the sense of self as subject. This is no longer confined to the West. It is intensifying everywhere, especially among the younger generation. Even in regions where collectivism has long prevailed, people no longer wish to give of themselves for the sake of some collective or some other person, and they hold that putting the self first in all things is best. The original intention behind this extreme individualism is to take back control, to refuse being discriminated against, oppressed, manipulated, to be the master of one’s own life and live freely. But buried inside this is an enormous trap of backlash.

At the very moment we are strengthening our own sense of subjecthood, we are continuously planting the seeds of trouble. The consciousness of self as subject is itself a thought pattern that connects to all other people and things with the self at the center. For the sake of a feeling of control, we naturally incline toward adopting this pattern so as to feel secure, because we have already recognized, in a fast paced society, the riskiness of depending on the external. If we place our needs and expectations on unreliable external supports, we will face a certain uncertainty, which brings enormous risk to the truly existent core of the self. Yet continuously strengthening the consciousness of self as subject is precisely what magnifies that truly existent core of self, letting this target that can be harmed swell without end, and thereby making the entire system more and more fragile.

This operation of emphasizing subjecthood is the strengthening of the barricade around the concept of a truly existent self, letting the self swell without stopping. We may well think nothing of it, considering that this is simply my right, my things, my self respect, my freedom, that I ought to defend these. Yes, that is not wrong. Each of us as an individual possesses these. But what we are examining now is a more fundamental mechanism, the core of the concept of truly existent attributes lurking behind these things. It is in fact a fatal trap. Why is it that so many philosophers and wise people, who appear to have already penetrated the mysteries of human nature, in the end collapse mentally? What exactly did they get wrong?

If you hold that subjecthood in itself is correct, then to what degree should this correct thing swell in order to reach its optimal state? Or is it that it needs no boundary at all, and can go on swelling as far as it is able, turning into an extreme narcissist? Clearly this cannot be sustained. Then where should the boundary be drawn? If the answer to this question is not clear, then we have no way of telling others how to accommodate themselves, how we are to find a balance between being hijacked by the external and the swelling of self. If the boundary simply cannot be drawn, that means the problem is not a matter of degree at all. Each time we let the self swell one increment more, the momentary feeling is as though we have gained a larger circle of self, and relatively speaking the external things we used to care about have become one increment smaller. But very soon, so long as the relations have not changed, this swelling will rebound, because the social system does not welcome any swollen individual, and the people around us are likewise only concerned with whether their own boundaries have been encroached upon. If we ourselves swell without stopping, we will inevitably become the target of everyone, and thereby lose the very security we wanted in the first place.

But this is not to say that we should have no individuality in any sense. Each of us is an individual. This is a fact and cannot be denied. If we were to go to the other extreme and abolish individual boundaries, that would be devastating. This much is obvious.

From the Buddhist perspective, our consciousness carries the characteristic of grasping at true existence innately, because every living being must rely on its own sensory system in order to survive. This sensory system has no need to understand the truth. Its function is to render an environment within which a living being can complete all the feelings along the trajectory of its life, and this rendering is precisely what obscures the truth. Grasping at true existence exists innately in service of the rendering. It engages its object in a distorted and inverted manner, and this too is part of the rendering. Grasping at true existence makes our consciousness suppose that everything that exists must have its own intrinsic essence inherent in the object itself. Only in this way can we distinguish subject from object, and the boundaries of difference between various subjects and objects. With people this is all the more so. Toward beings of their own kind, human beings have an illusion that both I and the other are absolutely free and autonomous individuals, and believe that we in fact possess an enormous capacity for free choice. But in reality, human beings are limited by all sorts of physiological and cognitive conditions of their own, as well as by the external environment, and the choices the self is able to make are extremely limited, so much so that they can be disregarded. If you were to realize that the person who harmed you in fact cannot make choices autonomously at all, that he is almost entirely limited by his own manifold conditions, that the boundaries of his cognition are extremely rigid, that his stress reactions are entirely beyond his control, would you still consider him an evil individual?

So now let us look at the popular courses out there that teach people to keep solidifying the self. What exactly are they doing to us? Endlessly emphasizing an “I” that is substantially existent and can be free and autonomous, telling us to be our true selves. What on earth is this self? In fact, looking simply at the appeal, the reason the true self gets raised at all is that one has felt a lack of ease, a sense of having no choice, a sense of powerlessness. But these feelings are all genuinely occurring, and they have their causes and their inevitability. However, because grasping at true existence is a natural given, the ordinary person will certainly and naturally seek the swelling of self in order to resist this powerlessness, and will subconsciously conclude that it is not that I am incapable, it is that I have not brought out my true side. In fact you are already real enough. Otherwise where would all these feelings come from? A person who is only pretending to live would not even have the impulse to seek a true self. Yet to go further in seeking the true self only magnifies the truly existent core, and this core is exactly where the problem lies.