Noticing our many inner and outer selves

or lack thereof

Greetings and Happy Sunday, friends. The all-encompassing wetness continues to accumulate throughout the Bay Area and beyond, and I feel mind-blowingly lucky so far. I have seen cars fully submerged just a half hour from where I live, and Sierra and I drove across the Golden Gate bridge yesterday mere hours before a giant truck flipped over in part due to high winds. Amongst many others, one of the farms that I work with through my job estimates that they’ve lost about 75% of their crop for this season—here is the Gofundme to support folks that care deeply about their land and the people/communities that land sustains. Yes, drought has been somewhat alleviated throughout the state, but as I mentioned last week, the intensifying too-wet/too-dry cycles signal the need for a radically different way of relating with that (or those) to which we are so inextricably interconnected.

A lot of things floated around my brain that seemed worthy of writing about this week—a good sign! Much of that headspace was filled with reflections and ideas from a lengthy podcast episode (YouTube, Spotify) in which Andrew Huberman interviewed Sam Harris, the creator of the Waking Up app and proficient translator of many concepts in the world of meditation and mindfulness (nonduality, the illusion of self, etc.) that often seem impossible to put into words. Many notes were taken, and I hope to return to them to help synthesize future ideas, but one specific concept was serendipitously complemented a day or two later by an article from the New Yorker sent to me by a friend whose tastes/takes I very much admire. So today I want to talk about our ever-changing external and internal selves—selves that may not actually exist (a realization that can be profoundly freeing) or are hard to put a finger on for more than a split second, but, nevertheless, influence much of how we go about our daily lives.

A note (maybe a caveat?): As someone who is very slowly starting to try and understand concepts core to Buddhism, such as non-self and emptiness/voidness, acknowledging the existence of a self in this post seems to warrant an endless disclaimer. But I think many of us (especially me) begin this journey thinking we have a central, relatively stable Self that is, in some sense, separate from the chair I sit on. So while I’m quite sure many of the ideas here will be in need of revision as the journey continues, we can start with these ideas for now, as they can still be of use. Just don’t take me too seriously.

So, who are you right now? It’s quite fun to think about how amorphous the “self” is, and how many different versions of our *seemingly* singular self can show up in relatively minute timespans. The moment I walked into this coffee shop I’m sitting in, my customer self was activated—I inhabited a self that I expected to act in a certain way (smile at the barista, glance at the options for an awkward period of time, try to pronounce my name as clearly as possible, etc.). When I was in grad school last year, I activated—often seamlessly and subconsciously—my student self many times a day, a self that used their phone less than in other situations and worried a little more about the quality of the questions they asked, amongst other things.

Different iterations of ourselves (again, accepting the premise of a self) emerge in interactions with parents, colleagues, close friends, not-so-close friends, non-human beings, and various contexts—alone with your favorite music playing, making love to a romantic partner, on the subway, etc. You are with different people in different ways—often without any effort and, as Harris emphasized in his explanation, with a specificity that would be really hard (or at least awkward/unnatural) to replicate with other people/contexts. I found this very entertaining to think about precisely because of how natural it can feel, to the extent that without any examination we may not notice it at all.

This sort of brings us to the point: Harris indicates that by noticing these changes (which can be much more dramatic for some and more subtle for others) and what brings them about, we can more intelligently “curate” our conscious capacities. In other words, by being more aware of how drastically different we may behave or feel in different contexts, we can be less beholden to the states of self that are vulnerable to external triggers, make us more reactive, and don’t align with the people we want to become. They may still be there, but they don’t have to take over for entire days or weeks at a time.

Through this process of self-inquiry, which can be made more effective by employing different meditative techniques, we can achieve a level of “psychological integrity” that doesn’t swing (or at least swings less) between different states of self in a way that doesn’t serve us. We can also gain a better sense of what is it to be psychologically unreactive. Here, unreactive doesn’t mean void of emotion or dead inside. Rather, it means can represent a sort of equanimity. In other words, without a certain “way of being” to defend or protect, we can feel and experience our different interactions and contexts more fully, bringing along more values-aligned selves as we float from one interaction to the next. In this scenario, it would be much harder to be provoked in a way that sends us spiraling, because we would know that that version of ourselves is just as impermanent and amorphous as the next one. This doesn’t mean we won’t encounter difficult, tense situations—it just means that when we feel angry or anxious, it will serve as a brief signal instead of a prolonged, overwhelming state of being. We can feel the feeling and then “drop the ball”, as meditation teacher Michael Taft often says, allowing us to approach the situation more lightly, peacefully, and compassionately.

Harris also emphasizes that we will never perfect this process, but by continuing to integrate this awareness into our everyday interactions—using mindfulness practices and other tools—we can show up more often as the people we’d like to be (or become). As I said, this is both fun to think about but also quite inspiring and motivating. Being less subject to the whims of our external environments, which are often curated to press our buttons of craving/desire, sounds pretty good.

Many of the selves I described above involve changes in how we present ourselves to others. But what about that which happens on the inside, i.e. the different ways we think about and analyze what’s going on in and around us (which in turn affects how we show up for others)? Enter a brilliantly written piece written by Joshua Rothman titled “How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?”

How do you, yourself, think about things? Like, what are your thoughts like? I’ll leave the details and research to Rothman because he explains them so well, but essentially, we all have somewhat unique ways of thinking about things. Some of us use pictures (object visualizers), some of us use words (verbal thinkers), some of us use a combination of both (spatial visualizers), and some of us are sort of-ish in between categories, creating a continuum of thought styles upon which each of us lands.

Does this even matter? Rothman compares himself (a verbal thinker) to Temple Grandin, a renowned object visualizer: “I struggle to imagine having a mind as extraordinarily visual as hers…at the same time, Grandin and I have many of the same ideas. We both understand cost overruns and cytokine storms; we arrive, by divergent routes, at the same destinations. How different do our minds really make us? And what should we make of our differences?”

I love those last two questions. And after reading the article, I’d add to them: how many of us have actually given any thought to how we think? This opens up many somewhat obscure paths to go down—where do thoughts even come from, who thinks them, etc. But on a more practical level, taking the time to think about how we think (similar to pondering how our different selves do or do not get morphed by what is around us) can reveal aspects of our psyche that we’d be better off without, or at least noticing so we can decide if we want to further engage with them or simply let them dissolve on their own. To quote the article again: “It’s easy to get stuck in your loop: monologues can be insistent, and some people succumb to circular, negative inner talk—what Kross calls “chatter”—and end up “desperate to escape their inner voice because of how bad it makes them feel.””

The hard part here, at least for me, is when I started thinking about how I think, I immediately noticed that I was coming up with answers that I didn’t fully trust. This aligns with one of the article’s positions as well, which is that once we think about how we think, we force it “into a form it does not have,” which could partially be due to the impression that thinking is somewhat dreamlike—hard to describe in the weirdest of ways.

Anyway, strange realizations aside, what I’m really trying to get at here is the power of simply noticing. When we notice that we are prone to getting stuck in a certain thought loop, or that we are often unreliable narrators of our own stories, we gain an enhanced ability to take advantage of the ways our mind works to make us more Deeply Okay, more able exist in a difficult situation with a clear mind, more able to design our environments to feed, rather than drain, our curiosity, etc. “Take advantage of the suppleness of dialogue,” Rothman writes. “Don’t just rehearse the same old scripts; send some notes to the writers’ room.”

All of this excites me. In being fascinated by the amorphous self, we can more playfully decide to try out new selves or further nourish the ones we “have” that align most with our core values. In taking stock of how we think—and acknowledging that we are constantly creating stories to make sense of what is going on around us—we can tell new and better stories. In knowing that others have different ways of being and different ways of thinking about things, we gain perspective and a deeper appreciation for collaboration. Yes, my thinking has blind spots and I may not be able to grasp the full picture, but rather than let this bum me out, I can seek out the wisdom of others who—thanks to their own ways of thinking and ways of showing up in the world—hold jigsaw pieces that can create a more complete and lovely Puzzle of Life.