In order to accomplish this with any sort of actuality, I need to engage in discourse that lies outside of any sort of private language in a Wittgensteinian sense. This is to say, I need to take the strings of my language that also have a sense and reference in the world, and compare and contrast them to the sense and references of other people. I am required to fit my concepts as best as possible to those of Others who also share in the use of these concepts. Again from a Wittgensteinian sense, I need to play within the boundaries of our language games in order to investigate these same boundaries. With reference to Alan Watts and in the context of my previous statement, I recognize I am playing a game that necessarily requires that I am not playing it alone. Thus, I am playing the game with not only myself, but with Others as well.
Some people believe, and I don't feel that they are wrong, that "work" on One's self is necessarily work on the world. Put differently, when we engage in playing the game in the milieu of self and Other referencing, we are necessarily also engaged with the conceptual models that Others use to play the game from their own perspective and experiencing. If we think closely about this, then we realize that when we are playing the game in such a way as to push at, question, and/or dismantle or otherwise alter our own conceptual models--our altars of being--then we are also necessarily, pushing at, questioning, and dismantling or altering the altars of Others. To put it more plainly, work at changing ourselves not only changes our world, but also changes the worlds of Others.
A problem we will sometimes encounter directly because of this necessary relationship between ourselves and Others is that while we are free to engage in the game from this sort of strategy, and they are also free to engage in the game from this sort of strategy, Others may not necessarily choose or desire to use such a strategy at this time. It is less that we, as investigators into our own concepts, are encroaching on the freedoms of Others, and much more that we are necessarily engaged with attempts to liberate them from the shackles of their concepts simply because we are also attempting to liberate ourselves from the shackles of our own conceptual limits. Put differently, work towards liberation of One's Self from the self, entails work towards liberating the Self from the self of Others. And to some not prepared or otherwise willing of their own free choice to join us in this process of liberation, in this potentially perilous journey, it can also sometimes make these same unwilling or unprepared Others become defensive in the protection of their self from the Self. People often tend towards deep emotional investment in the altars of their existences.
And this is where it can become somewhat tricky or otherwise problematic for us to proceed.
We are, as travelers wrapped up in notions of self necessarily dependent on our concepts and precepts of not only self but also Other, attempting to recognize and communicate with that greater archetype of Self. We seek to relate to the Other in a way that is explicated by Martin Buber as relating to our experiences and interpretations of our experiences not from a position of I and It, but from a position of I and Thou. Such a position seeks to recognize, acknowledge, and embrace the inherent divinity or absolute mystery wrapped up in the core of any particular thing and at the core of everything. Put differently, we are, in seeking to shed our current self images and instead reformulate them as informed by the Self, necessarily engaging with the Self as it manifests to us in instantiations of the Other. And, as noted previously, if the Other is not able to recognize this sense of Self within their self, well, our engaging with them from this perspective can create much friction.
We are, as travelers in this manner, necessarily moving in a direction that is neither perceivable nor understandable from our common, everyday, "mundane" movements through time and space. Indeed, it can also be difficult for our own self to understand and perceive such movement and the direction along which this motion proceeds. It is precisely our need to represent such motion towards our Self to our self in a way that becomes comprehensible to our self that we must necessarily engage with the common language game and the existential game that we are all playing: we are all pieces embedded in an interpenetrating and binary cross self-referencing existential and linguistic milieu. So, when we seek to manifest the Self in instances of self, we are also manifesting the Self in the Others we are necessarily related to.
The Self, as entirely empty in itself, but full of all the Other possible archetypes as potentiae, is an awesome thing: it meets us in our own sense of awe. However, its very emptiness, its absolute Otherness in absence of any specific set of rules governing either our language games or our conceptual framings of our existential games, is also terrifying. As Rudolph Otto described it, it is the manifestation and experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is, so much as we can describe it in language that must necessarily limit its unlimitedness--giving form to its empty formlessness--the meeting of the divine, the numinous, in our self and the Other; put differently, it is the meeting and recognition of the numinous from itself, to itself, and with itself.
Put differently still, it is a greeting and acknowledgement that we are, in fact, playing a game with our Self: it is breaking the fourth wall of reality where we as players come to see and communicate with our selves as the audience, and we as the audience come to see and communicate with ourselves as the players. Translation: we position the Self to acknowledge its Self as identical to both players and audience. And this is a threat, in some ways, to maintaining the illusion of the game. If the Self desired to maintain only a relationship to its Self, then it would not have ever bothered to begin the process of wrapping its Self in Self deception as manifest in the dual paring of One and Other.
Now, all the above simply to get to the notes of this particular traveler at this particular point in time at this particular point in space, so this particular traveler would like to thank you for coming along with me on this linguistic journey thus far: thanks, thanks to you.
To the notes, then.
As a human traveler we relate to the members of three general classes of Otherness in the world:
1) Members from the class of all things we commonly call "inanimate matter,"
2) Members from the class of all things we call "animate or biological matter" that excludes other humans, and
3) Members of the class of all things we call "other humans."
It is my opinion and experience that when we are pushing our own boundaries in order to move in an unnameable and incomprehensible direction that our relations to the instances of Others from class (1) and (2) relate to us from a position of joy. As Others that are not invested in, and shackled by, a human based sense of self, when we recognize our Self in them, then they can not help but be joyous in the manifestation of I and Thou. We, in relating to One and Other lift ourselves towards the direction of the divine, an embracing of the mystery that manifests the reality of One and Other. It is relating to the third class of Otherness that can be problematic.
There are, I think, I feel--I experience--three ways that relating to this class of Others tends to manifest in relation to our self:
1) Acceptance and mutual recognition.
2) Indifference.
3) Rejection of a mutual recognition.
Relating to those of type (1) is a positive experience of I and Thou. It can be as simple as an exchange of sincere smiles, including, perhaps, a warm and heartfelt greeting between strangers fully engaged in the fleeting moment of transitional recognition of Self. This will almost always be joined with at least a moment of direct and intimate eye contact, usually several such moments.
Relating to those of type (2) can also be a positive experience in terms of our own interpretation of that experience. Again, with reference to strangers, we offer a sincere smile and perhaps include a heartfelt greeting, and we receive in return something less than that. We might simply be ignored, we might get a forced or partial smile, we might get a mumbled greeting, we might get some formal "hello." This will sometimes involve fleeting eye contact, but not necessarily any eye contact at all.
Relating to those of type (3) is where the potential danger lies. We might simply get the very bottom of the barrel form of indifference, and this is the best we can hope for in such an encounter. We might also get a sense of possible negative outcomes, a sense of potential violence, a sense of a self acting out to openly defy the recognition of Self within itself. And, in the worst case scenario, we, in fact, get the manifestation of actual violence. It very much brings to mind a scene in the movie Inception:
It's obviously not as fantastical as all that. We aren't manipulating the very structures of existential experiences, but we are subtly imposing upon the Self, subtly beckoning to the Self, to acknowledge its Self, and the Self in some instances of self will do whatever it can to avoid acknowledging and recognizing its own entrapment within the game that it has created.
Sometimes, fleetingly, I get the sense of this last sort of interaction from strangers when I am out and about and engaged with the world. Rarely have instances of confrontation over acceptance ever spilled over into actual violence: perhaps never. However, sometimes, like recently, when I am really expending energy and training my focus intensely upon recognizing the Self in my self and Others, I get messages--brief, but clear--that from where I am and the motion I am attempting along that indescribable and incomprehensible direction that if only I take a few more steps, if only I am not very careful about the steps I take, then that Self that is inside the Others but also wrapped up so tightly as to deny its own existence, well, I feel like I am on a precipice where a simple transition or slight flutter leading to catastrophe is entirely possible and some kind of actual violence is a distinct outcome.
To conclude my notes on these matters, I will point out that the best way to banish such feelings--and it is best to banish such feelings swiftly and completely so as to not risk undesired and counterproductive consequences for our own mental and emotional well being--is invoking laughter. Laugh at One's self, laugh at One's Other, and laugh within the context of playing an incredibly complicated game of hide and seek. Because what we are encountering is not only, or merely, the resistance of Others to their recognition and embracing of Self in self within the context of I and Thou, but the remnants, the fragments, the slivers of our own resistance to acknowledging and embracing the Self in our self.
One day, perhaps, we will all be ready, each of us as manifestations within each of the three classes mentioned above, and we will call out with a sense of relief, a sense of sadness and mourning, and a sense of joy in our accomplishments and imaginations:
"Come out, come out wherever you are!"
And it is at that moment we will all cease our journeys and all return home: eternal in our undifferentiated Self, and yearning to once again become travelers in the next instance of the game.
Informal list of references (not necessarily referenced directly, but instead mentioned intuitively) for interested fellow travelers:
See also:
