5
Who’s There?
How to Get Over Your Self
Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself – and there isn’t one.
– Wei Wu Wei, Ask the Awakened
IF YOU HAD SPENT any time in the park that dominates Russell Square, in central London, in the late 1970s, it is possible that you might have noticed a skinny man aged around thirty, with delicate, almost elfin features, sitting alone on a park bench and doing absolutely nothing. For almost two years, if his own account is to be believed, Ulrich Tolle sat on park benches all day, unless it was raining or snowing hard; then, he sought shelter in nearby public libraries. He spent his nights on the sofas of tolerant friends – or occasionally, when their tolerance expired, sleeping rough amid the bushes of Hampstead Heath. All things considered, though, it is unlikely that you’d have noticed him. Tolle was a nobody. And he would not have considered this label an insult, either, since from his perspective there was a sense in which it was literally true.
A few months prior to the beginning of his park-bench period, Tolle had been living alone in a bedsit in Belsize Park, in northwest London. He had recently completed a graduate degree at the University of London, and he was depressed to the point of regularly contemplating suicide. Then, the way he tells it, one night when he was filled with even more despair than usual, something snapped. Lying nearly paralysed on his bed in the dark, he underwent a terrifying, cataclysmic spiritual experience that, he claimed, erased his old identity completely. It was ‘a slow movement at first’, he wrote, many years later. ‘I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake … I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself, rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.’ He lost consciousness.
When he awoke the next day, he knew instinctively that he was no longer the person he had been before. But what had happened seemed even more wrenching and elemental than that: somehow, in a way he couldn’t properly put into words, it no longer felt as though he had a clearly bounded personal identity at all. His ‘me’ was missing in action. In its place, he felt only a sense of ‘uninterrupted deep peace and bliss’, which faded a little after a while, but never went away. ‘I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born,’ he wrote. After a while, he gave up the bedsit. With no personal agenda, no to-do list, no mental narrative telling him that he had to become someone or get anywhere other than what and who he was, the idea of spending his days on the park benches of Russell Square didn’t strike him as strange behaviour. There was no reason not to. And so, in a state of peaceful contentment, he did.
Some time after his bedsit crisis, Ulrich Tolle changed his name to Eckhart Tolle, and began to speak and write about his experiences. Several years after that, another cataclysmic force – Oprah Winfrey – helped propel him to the position he enjoys today, as the world’s bestselling living ‘spiritual’ author, with the arguable exception of the Dalai Lama. These facts do not enhance his credibility in every-one’s eyes, and some sceptics have questioned his account of his transformation. Tolle says he doesn’t mind the doubters, although you might argue that he doesn’t have much choice: when you’ve told the world that you dwell in a realm of infinite equanimity, you can’t start getting all snippy when people don’t take you at your word.
You might also reasonably suspect that a figure such as Tolle would have little to contribute to the ‘negative path’ to happiness. The books that clutter the mind/body/spirit shelves, where his reside, often embody the very worst of the ‘cult of optimism’. And Oprah’s endorsement is no less troubling, given that it has also been bestowed upon the likes of the The Secret, that epitome of magical positive thinking, as well as upon a number of questionable self-help gurus. Tolle’s own first bestseller, The Power of Now, was once photographed under the arm of the socialite Paris Hilton, as she prepared to serve a forty-five day jail sentence in 2007. None of this bodes well. But regardless of exactly what happened to him that night in Belsize Park, his insights are worth considering because of his perspective on a topic that most of us, most of the time, take entirely for granted: the idea of the self.
In this book so far, we have explored the many ways in which conventional approaches to happiness and success seem to backfire, for the same essential reason: that there is something about trying to make ourselves happy and successful that is precisely what sabotages the attempt. But there is an even more unsettling possibility. What if the problem is not just one of technique? What if we are mistaken, not only about how to change ourselves but also about the nature of the selves we’re trying to change? Calling into question our assumptions about what it means to talk about the self might prompt an entirely different approach to the psychology of happiness. And The Power of Now – which is, in fact, mercifully low on references to ‘energy fields’, ‘vibrational frequencies’, and the like – calls these assumptions into question with the title of its very first chapter: ‘You Are Not Your Mind’. Think about that, if you dare.
The notion that our commonplace assumptions about selfhood might need re-examining certainly didn’t originate with Eckhart Tolle. It is an ancient thought, central to Buddhism and to numerous other philosophical and religious traditions – a theme recurring so frequently in the history of religion and spirituality, in fact, that it is a part of what Aldous Huxley and others labelled ‘the perennial philosophy’. Tolle was saying nothing new. But these reflections are often buried deep in ancient texts. I wanted to visit Tolle because he claimed to have experienced, at first hand, what this was all about. And he was willing to talk about it.
I had half-assumed, perhaps even half-hoped, that he might turn out to be a clichéd kind of guru, living in an ashram, fat and drunk on his own power, wearing elaborate robes and surrounded by adoring acolytes. It turned out, though, that he lived in a pleasant but slightly cramped top-floor apartment in a building in Vancouver, in Canada, just up the street from the campus of the University of British Columbia. He answered the door himself, stooping slightly. He was sixty now and birdlike, clad not in golden robes but in a strikingly unfashionable orange shirt and brown slacks. He indicated a leather armchair, on which I sat down, then seated himself on a sofa facing it, and waited for me to say something.
In Tolle’s company, I soon learned, there was a lot of waiting. As on the benches of Russell Square, he seemed entirely comfortable with this, feeling no need to fill the silences, no pressure to move things along. I was less comfortable, because I couldn’t think of anything sensible to say. Even ‘How are you?’, I had suddenly realised, was a potentially problematic opening question when the word ‘you’ – and what, exactly, that might mean – was the very thing I had come to discuss.
Few things seem so obvious, fundamental and undeniable as the self. Whatever uncertainties you might harbour about how to live – how to be happy, how to behave morally, what relationships to pursue, or what work to do – you probably retain the bedrock assumption that all these things are happening to an easily identifiable, single entity called you. This feels like such firm ground, in fact, that it forms the basis of what is arguably the most famous line in the history of Western philosophy: the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes’s dictum Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. There are very few aspects of our experience of being alive, Descartes realised, about which we can truly be certain. But we can be confident that we are us – that, in the most basic sense, we are who we take ourselves to be.
It is worth following Descartes’s argument quite closely here. Imagine, he begins, an evil demon who is determined to play as many tricks on you as possible – a demon ‘supremely powerful and cunning, [who] has devoted all his efforts to deceiving [you]’. How far could the demon’s deceptions go? Don’t forget, Descartes points out, that you rely for your entire understanding of the external world on your five senses: you can’t know anything at all about what’s going on outside your body unless you can touch, see, hear, smell, or taste it. And so, in principle, everything you think you know about that world might in fact be a breathtakingly detailed and convincing illusion, concocted by the evil demon. Looking out from inside your head, Descartes asks, how could you ever be completely certain that ‘the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things’ are not merely delusions, traps that the demon ‘has laid for [your] credulity’? You might respond that such a scenario is absurdly unlikely, but Descartes is not concerned with its likelihood. He is employing the philosophical technique that came to be known as ‘systematic doubt’, attempting to isolate only that knowledge that he could regard as totally, unshakably certain.
Descartes’s evil demon might go further still. (He is extremely evil, after all.) By sending the right sort of deceptive signals to your brain, he might even be responsible for your feeling that you possess a physical body. Maybe, in reality, you don’t have a body. Maybe you’re just a brain in a jar on a shelf in the demon’s laboratory. How could you ever be sure? The parallels here with the 1999 movie The Matrix are not coincidental: that film is essentially a twentieth-century meditation on Descartes’s seventeenth-century insights. ‘A viewer of The Matrix’, as the philosopher Christopher Grau puts it, ‘is naturally led to wonder: how do I know I am not in the matrix? How do I know for sure the world is not a sophisticated charade, put forward by some superhuman intelligence in such a way that I cannot possibly detect the ruse?’
And yet despite all these possibilities for deception, there is exactly one thing and one thing only that cannot possibly be an illusion, Descartes maintains – and that is the fact that you are experiencing all this. Even the person who fears that he or she may be being fooled about literally everything else must know for sure that there is a ‘him’ or a ‘her’ who’s being fooled. The demon couldn’t fake that. ‘The proposition “I think, therefore I am”’, writes Descartes, ‘is the first and most certain which presents itself to whoever conducts his thoughts in order.’ You might not be able to know much with utter certainty. But you know that you are you. The sense of being you can’t be an illusion – because ‘you’ is what’s experiencing all these possibly illusory things in the first place. Somebody has to be there in order to be tricked.
Or do they? One of the first people to spot a potential flaw in this reasoning was a contemporary of Descartes, the French philosopher and priest Pierre Gassendi, who dedicated a significant part of his career to attempting – largely fruitlessly – to persuade Europe’s intelligentsia that their star philosopher had got things badly wrong. Descartes’s method of ‘systematic doubt’ had been intended to uproot every unwarranted assumption about the nature of experience. But hidden inside Cogito ergo sum, Gassendi argued, one final devilish assumption remained. Just because thinking is going on, that didn’t mean Descartes was justified in concluding that thinking is being done by one particular, unitary, thinking agent – by an ‘I’. As the German scientist Georg Lichtenberg would later phrase it, Descartes was entitled only to claim that ‘thinking is occurring’, not ‘I think, therefore I am.’
It was the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, writing in the first half of the eighteenth century, who most vividly illustrated this hidden assumption, proposing a thought experiment of his own. Never mind systematic doubt, Hume suggested: instead, simply try turning your attention inwards, and trying to find this thing you call your self. Hume had made the attempt many times, he claimed, but he could never succeed. Instead of a self, all he ever found were specific processes: emotions, sensations, and thoughts. Where was the self that was feeling those emotions, sensing those sensations, and thinking those thoughts? Hume was stumped:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep, so long I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist … If any one upon serious and unprejudic’d reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him.
It isn’t completely inconceivable, Hume concedes, that other people – possibly even all other people in the world, except him – do indeed have some kind of clearly identifiable, easily located self. The only interior world to which he has any direct access is David Hume’s, so how could he ever hope to prove otherwise? But he doubts it. ‘I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind’, he goes on, ‘that they [too] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.’
Modern neuroscience has provided strong support for the suspicion that the self is not the ‘thing’ that we imagine it to be – that there is, in the words of the neuropsychologist Paul Broks, no ‘centre in the brain where things do all come together’. One good illustration of this emerges from experiments involving patients with ‘split brains’ – people in whom the corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, has been severed. As the psychologist Michael Gazzaniga has demonstrated, ‘split-brain’ people behave as if each of their hemispheres were its own independent self. In one study, the word ‘walk’ was projected only into the right side of a patient’s brain. He got up and began to walk – but when asked why he had done so, the left side of his brain, responsible for language, quickly came up with a convincing reason: ‘To get a Coke.’ Each hemisphere seems capable of acting in those ways that we tend to associate with a ‘self’, casting doubt on the notion that there’s any one region of the brain where such a thing might reside. The philosopher Julian Baggini points out that this isn’t quite the same as saying that the self ‘doesn’t exist’; just because we may be a complex collection of things, instead of one simple thing, it doesn’t follow that we are not real. A ‘bundle of perceptions’, to use Hume’s phrase, is still a real bundle of perceptions. But the fact remains that we have been using a term and a concept – the self – that on closer inspection isn’t at all what it seems.
Eckhart Tolle looked at me and blinked amiably.
‘Thanks for sparing the time!’ I began, a little hesitantly, before immediately berating myself for not remembering that ‘time’ was one of the things that Tolle claimed no longer to experience in a meaningful way. ‘Time isn’t precious at all,’ he writes, in The Power of Now, ‘because it is an illusion.’ Only the present, ‘the now’, is real.
More on this – ironically enough – later.
‘It’s really a pleasure,’ he replied, blinking amiably again, and waiting. This waiting and smiling and blinking was something I’d seen him do before, albeit at a distance. A few years previously, Oprah Winfrey, while championing his books on her talk show, had enlisted him to take part in a ten-week online seminar video series, during which she repeatedly characterised him as a spiritual leader with the power to transform the consciousness of the planet. Tolle had just smiled and blinked. Winfrey seemed unnerved by his willingness to break one of the first rules of broadcasting: no long stretches of silence.
The voice in my head – the one that was, right at that moment, criticising me for still not having come up with a meaningful opening question – is something most of us notice only when we’re stressed, as I definitely was. But the starting-point of Eckhart Tolle’s philosophy – as he began to explain, once I’d finally phrased a question – is that we spend our whole lives in the company of such a voice. The voice judges and interprets reality, determines our emotional reactions, and chatters so constantly and so loudly that we come to identify with it: we imagine that we are the chattering stream of thinking. If you doubt this account of what it’s like inside your mind, consider the possibility that this might be because you’re too closely identified with the chatter to notice. ‘There is this complete identification with the thoughts that go through your head,’ Tolle said, his accent betraying a trace of his native Germany, when I asked him what he thought was the biggest barrier to happiness for most people. ‘It’s just a total absence of awareness, except for the thoughts that are continuously passing through your mind. It is the state of being so identified with the voices in your head’ – and at this point he emitted a tight Germanic chuckle – ‘that you think you are the voices in your head.’
In his book A New Earth, Tolle recounts an outwardly insignificant incident that occurred some months before his terrifying nocturnal experience in the Belsize Park bedsit. It was the first time he realised how closely identified he was with his thinking. At that time, he was studying in the central library of the University of London, and would travel there on the Underground each morning, shortly after rush hour:
One time, a woman in her early thirties sat opposite me. I had seen her before a few times on that train. One could not help but notice her. Although the train was full, the seats on either side of her were unoccupied, the reason being, no doubt, that she appeared to be quite insane. She looked extremely tense, and talked to herself incessantly in a loud and angry voice. She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she was totally unaware, it seemed, of other people, or her surroundings … Her monologue went something like this: ‘And then she said to me … so I said to her you are a liar … how dare you accuse me of … when you are the one who has always taken advantage of me … I trusted you and you betrayed my trust …’
The woman got off the train at Tolle’s stop. Out of curiosity, he decided to follow her, until gradually he began to realise that she was heading for the university library, just like him. For Tolle, this was troubling. He was an ambitious and driven young graduate student who had come to think of academic research as a pinnacle of human activity, and of universities like his as being home to an élite class of accomplished, or at least aspiring, intellectuals. He remembered wondering: ‘How could an insane person like her be part of this?’
I was still thinking about her when I was in the men’s room, prior to entering the library. As I was washing my hands, I thought: ‘I hope I don’t end up like her.’ The man next to me looked briefly in my direction, and I suddenly was shocked when I realised that I hadn’t just thought those words, but mumbled them aloud. ‘Oh, my God, I’m already like her,’ I thought.
I squirmed when I first read this, recalling my own Stoic exercise in talking out loud on the London Underground. Back then, my intention had been to learn that I could tolerate embarrassment, and live with the thought that other people might think me insane. Tolle was making a more radical point: that only a very thin line separates such ‘insane’ people from the rest of us. The main difference is that, most of the time, we non-insane people manage to keep our constant mental chatter inaudible to others.
It is when we identify with this inner chatter, Tolle suggests – when we come to think of it as us – that thinking becomes compulsive. We do it all the time, ceaselessly, and the idea that we might ever enjoy a respite from thinking never occurs to us. We come to see our thinking, and our continuing to exist as people, as one and the same thing. ‘Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction,’ Tolle writes. ‘But we don’t realise this, because almost everybody is suffering from it. So it’s considered normal.’ The sense of self that we construct from identifying with our thoughts is what Tolle calls the ‘ego’. (Different thinkers use this term in very different ways.) And by definition, living in the service of the ego can never make us happy.
Why can the ego never bring happiness? Tolle’s argument here echoes the Stoics, who concluded that our judgments about the world are the source of our distress. But he takes things further, suggesting that these judgments, along with all our other thoughts, are what we take ourselves to be. We’re not only distressed by our thoughts; we imagine that we are those thoughts. The ego that results from this identification has a life of its own. It sustains itself through dissatisfaction – through the friction it creates against the present moment, by opposing itself to what’s happening, and by constantly projecting into the future, so that happiness is always some other time, never now. The ego, Tolle likes to say, thrives on drama, because compulsive thinking can sink its teeth into drama. The ego also thrives on focusing on the future, since it’s much easier to think compulsively about the future than about the present. (It’s really quite tricky, when you try it, to think compulsively about right now.) If all this is correct, we have inadvertently sentenced ourselves to unhappiness. Compulsive thinking is what we take to be the core of our being – and yet compulsive thinking relies on our feeling dissatisfied.
The way out of this trap is not to stop thinking – thinking, Tolle agrees, is exceedingly useful – but to disidentify from thoughts: to stop taking your thoughts to be you, to realise, in the words of The Power of Now, that ‘you are not your mind’. We should start using the mind as a tool, he argues, instead of letting the mind use us, which is the normal state of affairs. When Descartes said ‘I think, therefore I am,’ he had not discovered ‘the most fundamental truth’, Tolle insists; instead, he had given expression to ‘the most basic error’.
What Tolle claimed had happened to him with such force that night in his bedsit was, precisely, a disidentification from thinking. At the time, he had just graduated with a first-class Master’s degree in languages and history, and was preparing for a doctorate. ‘I’d done well because I was motivated by fear of not being good enough,’ he remembered. ‘So I worked very hard.’ He saw himself as an intellectual in the making, and was ‘convinced that all the answers to the dilemmas of human existence could be found through the intellect – that is, by thinking’. But his intellectual labours weren’t making him happy – and this realisation made him feel even worse. ‘I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety,’ he wrote. Gradually, and then not so gradually, the anxiety was ratcheting up and up. Something had to give. And on that night, shortly after his twenty-ninth birthday, it did:
I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence … I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. ‘I cannot live with myself much longer.’ This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind.
‘I cannot live with myself’: the phrase is a cliché, but Tolle was stopped dead by its implications. ‘If I cannot live with myself,’ he remembered thinking, ‘there must be two of me: the “I” and the “self” that “I” cannot live with. Maybe, I thought, only one of them is real. I was so stunned by this realisation that my mind stopped. I was conscious, but there were no more thoughts.’ And then, before he knew it, it was morning – the morning that he felt suffused with a feeling of ‘uninterrupted deep peace and bliss’.
What had happened, if his account is to be believed, was that he no longer mistakenly believed he was his thinking; he saw himself, instead, as the witness to it. This is an experience you can easily taste for yourself by deliberately deciding to watch your own thinking. Sit like a cat at a mouse-hole, Tolle advises, waiting to see what your next thought will be. ‘When you listen to a thought,’ he explains, ‘you are aware not only of the thought, but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence – your deeper self – behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you, and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energising the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.’ We have all experienced something ‘behind or underneath’ thought, in those moments that thinking seems temporarily to fall away: when gasping in awe at beautiful scenery, after intense physical exercise, or while making love. The trick is to take that stance towards thinking all the time, even when you’re thinking. If any this sounds familiar, it may be because it leads back to Buddhism. Watching your thoughts in this way is a form of meditation.
This is the point at which Tolle’s outlook gets especially tricky for a sceptic to swallow. He seems to assume that when you stop identifying with your ego, you discover who you really are – that you discover your ‘deeper self’ or your ‘true Being’, which was hiding behind the fake self all along. But this kind of talk rightly makes more mainstream philosophers nervous. Just because you have succeeded in dismantling the conventional understanding of the self, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll find the ‘real’ one. Perhaps we are just a ‘bundle of perceptions’, as Hume put it. Perhaps there is no ‘deeper’, ‘truer’ meaning to the notion of who we are. Once again, though, this isn’t a question that we need to answer conclusively. Merely asking it is what matters. It is enough, for now, to enquire within: don’t you feel a certain tranquility when you seek to become the witness to your thoughts, rather than identifying with them completely?
The optimism-focused, goal-fixated, positive-thinking approach to happiness is exactly the kind of thing the ego loves. Positive thinking is all about identifying with your thoughts, rather than disidentifying from them. And the ‘cult of optimism’ is all about looking forward to a happy or successful future, thereby reinforcing the message that happiness belongs to some other time than now. Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found – the present. ‘The important thing,’ Tolle told me, ‘is not to be continuously lost in this mental projection away from now. Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.’ Another staccato chuckle. ‘And that’s a revelation for some people. To realise that your whole life is only ever now. Many people suddenly realise that they have lived most of their life as if this were not true – as if the opposite were true.’ Without noticing we’re doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.
Instead of seeking ways to solve your problems in the future, it can be illuminating to try asking yourself if you have any problems right now. The answer, unless you’re currently in physical pain, is very likely to be ‘No’. Most problems, by definition, involve thoughts about how something might turn out badly in the future, whether in five minutes or in five years, or thoughts about things that happened in the past. It can be curiously difficult to identify any problems that afflict you at this very moment, in the present – and it is always the present.
Or consider the fraught topic of self-esteem. We tend to assume that having high self-esteem is a good thing, but some psychologists have long suspected that there might be something wrong with the whole notion – because it rests on the assumption of a unitary, easily identifiable self. Setting out to give your ‘self’ one universal positive rating may in fact be deeply perilous. The problem lies in the fact that you’re getting into the self-rating game at all; implicitly, you’re assuming that you are a single self that can be given a universal grade. When you rate your self highly, you actually create the possibility of rating your self poorly; you are reinforcing the notion that your self is something that can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the first place. And this will always be a preposterous overgeneralisation. You have strengths and weaknesses; you behave in good ways and bad ways. Smothering all these nuances with a blanket notion of self-esteem is a recipe for misery. Inculcate high self-esteem in your children, claims Paul Hauck, a psychologist opposed to the concept of self-esteem, and you will be ‘teaching them arrogance, conceit and superiority’ – or alternatively, when their high self-esteem falters, ‘guilt, depression, [and] feelings of inferiority and insecurity’ instead. Better to drop the generalisations. Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible. But leave your self out of it.
One final implication of thinking about selfhood in this way
– and arguably the most significant one – concerns the idea of selflessness. We know from personal experience, and now from decades of psychology studies, that helping other people is a far more reliable strategy for happiness than focusing solely on yourself. One of the more distasteful aspects of positive thinking – and of conventional approaches to happiness in general – is the way in which they seem to encourage self-absorption. Then again, ‘selfless’ approaches to happiness can lead us into a conceptual muddle: if you take on a weekly volunteering assignment, say, with the aim of becoming happier, are you being selfless at all? Do you have to make yourself miserable in order to be truly self-less? The questions go on and on. Perhaps the answer to all these conundrums isn’t to act selfishly or selflessly, but to question the notion of the self on which those distinctions are based. Both ‘selfish’ and ‘selfless’ activities are liable to end up merely feeding the ego, which thrives on dissatisfaction. Loosen your grip on selfhood itself, Tolle argues, and you’ll stand a far better chance of cultivating happiness – your own, and other people’s – without the distraction of ego.
It’s quite possible that all this simply leaves you cold – that it fails to chime in any way with your own inner experience. If that’s the case, there is one more angle from which it can be demonstrated that selfhood is not all that it seems. This argument takes the form of an extended thought experiment, which I’ve adapted here from the work of the self-styled ‘spiritual entertainer’ Alan Watts. A bearded, plummy-voiced Englishman who made his home on the West Coast of the United States, and who died in 1973, Watts didn’t have any breakthrough insights of his own. He was a populariser, intent on explaining the philosophies of the East to the populations of the West. Few professional philosophers today would consider him worthy of their title. But his insights – which rely on no New Agery nor pseudoscience at all, just rigorous, rational thinking – may, in a surprisingly enjoyable way, warp your mind.
Watts begins with what seems like an utterly straightforward question: what do you take to be the boundary of yourself – the place where you end, and where ‘the rest of the world’ that isn’t you begins? For most of us, the answer, as he puts it, is that we think of ourselves as ‘packages of skin’. It is the envelope of skin enclosing the physical body that defines the boundary of our selves.
You might spot one immediate problem with this. Sometimes, when we use the word ‘me’, we seem to be using a different definition – one in which ‘me’ refers not to the whole body, but only to something inside the head. According to this definition, the rest of the body isn’t ‘me’ to the same degree as the head. Suppose your foot had to be amputated: would you consider that you had become less ‘yourself’? (Probably not – but if your head had to be amputated, things would be remarkably different.) Already, then, we seem to have two rival definitions of precisely what physical matter we’re referring to when we refer to ‘me’. But let’s stick with the ‘packages of skin’ definition for now.
Suppose you were to zoom in, using an ultra-powerful microscope, on a part of your left hand, until all that you were looking at was a tiny region of your index finger, and a tiny part of the air surrounding it. Given sufficient magnification, what you would see through the microscope would be nothing but a cacophony of molecules: some making up your finger, and some making up the adjacent air. Which brings us to the next question – or really the same question, in rephrased form. What exactly is your rationale for drawing a boundary between some of these molecules and others, so as to define some of them as ‘you’, and some of them as the world outside you? At this magnification, it’s readily apparent that all we’re talking about is molecules, after all. What makes some of them so special as to count as ‘you’?
One obvious answer that springs to mind has to do with conscious control. You seem to be able to choose to move your index finger, for example, in a way that simply doesn’t apply to things outside your skin. Perhaps this, then, is why the skin boundary is so important: on one side of it, you have conscious control; on the other side of it, you don’t. But Watts has a ready response to that. Do you really exert conscious control, he wonders, over your breathing? Do you actively and consciously pump the blood through your veins, or dispatch antibodies to fight viral infections? You don’t: those things just happen. Even thinking itself – as I had come to understand so acutely at the Insight Meditation Society – isn’t as voluntary as we might like to imagine. Most of the time, thinking just seems to happen.
Fair enough, you might reply; perhaps I shouldn’t have said conscious control. Unconscious control is plainly part of it, too. Whether consciously or unconsciously, I control everything inside my skin, and nothing outside it. Except, of course, that’s not true, either: you exert control over plenty of things that are outside your skin. Using the right tools, you can build a swimming pool in your back garden; using your powers of persuasion, you might persuade hundreds of thousands of people to depose a dictator. You might argue that this is different – that it’s an indirect form of control, while the control that you exert over your limbs feels more direct. But Watts wouldn’t let you get away with that objection, because it relies on circular reasoning: it presumes an answer to the very conundrum that we’re engaged in trying to untangle. After all, the distinction between ‘direct’ control and ‘indirect’ control is defined by nothing more or less than where you draw the boundary between ‘yourself’ and the rest of the world. And it is exactly this boundary – and whether we truly have good reason for drawing it where we traditionally draw it – that is at issue.
By now, the awkwardness of your situation ought to be apparent. Whatever criterion you propose as the basis for drawing the boundary between ‘you’ and ‘not you’, there seems to be a counterargument which, at the very least, throws the matter into doubt. It is at this point that Watts reveals the most disorienting part of his argument. Encountering it for the first time – I speak from experience – can be a little like ambling to the top of a gentle hill only to discover that its brow is also the precipice of a sheer, high cliff, dropping down to crashing waves below.
The argument goes as follows: that no matter where you draw the boundary – even if we could agree on a place at which to draw it – you would not really be drawing a boundary, in the conventional sense, at all. Because (here it comes) the very notion of a boundary line depends on it having two sides. When you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense to describe a boundary as something that keeps two things apart. It makes more sense to describe it as the place at which they meet – or, more accurately, the place at which they are exactly the same thing. The inside of the boundary relies for its very existence on the outside, and vice versa; they are, inextricably and by definition, part of the same whole. You simply can’t have the peak of a wave without the trough, or darkness without light.
This is the insight behind the ancient Chinese symbol of yin and yang, but there is nothing religious or even especially ‘spiritual’ about it. It is merely the conclusion, Watts argues, to which rigorous thinking must lead. There cannot be a ‘you’ without an ‘everything else’, and attempting to think about one in isolation from the other makes no sense. Nor is this some vague, insipid, flowers-and-incense observation about how ‘we are all one’. It holds true on every level, from the most abstract to the most concrete. Yes, it is true that you wouldn’t be you without the relationships you’re in, or the community to which you belong. But you also wouldn’t be you if it weren’t for all the physical objects in the world that aren’t you.
We spend our lives failing to realise this obvious truth, and thus anxiously seeking to fortify our boundaries, to build our egos and assert our superiority over others, as if we could separate ourselves from them, without realising that interdependence makes us what we are. ‘Really,’ Watts wrote, ‘the fundamental, ultimate mystery – the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets – is this: that for every outside, there is an inside, and that for every inside, there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.’
That phrase ‘they are different’ is important. The case being made here is not that boundaries don’t exist – that the ‘true’ way to perceive the world would be as some big, boundary-less mess of stuff, like half-melted ice-cream. The fact that ‘you’ and ‘everything else’ are intrinsically interconnected needn’t mean you don’t exist. Our sanity depends on maintaining a coherent sense of self, and on setting healthy boundaries between ourselves and others – and neither Alan Watts nor Eckhart Tolle wishes to imperil your sanity. Instead, the conclusion to which both their thinking leads is that the self is best thought of as some kind of a fiction, albeit an extremely useful one – and that realising this, instead of doing everything we can to deny it, might be the route to fulfilment.
Others have remarked on the way that Eckhart Tolle’s quiet presence seems to burn up people’s scepticism, and this applied to me, too. Reluctant though I was to admit it, he really did seem to exude a palpable stillness, which seeped into the corners of the small Vancouver apartment and eventually, by the end of an afternoon’s conversation, into me. The silences that had felt so awkward when I arrived slowly became more tolerable, then actually enjoyable, as my compulsion to fill them with talking began to subside. For long stretches of seconds, Tolle blinked and smiled, and I found myself smiling comfortably back.
Yet, still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that his inner life was as marvellously tranquil as he claimed. When, I wondered, was the last time that he had become really irritated? ‘I can’t remember the last time it happened,’ he replied. ‘I think maybe it was … ‘ Earlier today? Yesterday? ‘I think it was a few months ago,’ he said, after a while. ‘I remember that I was walking outside, and there was this big dog, and the owner wasn’t controlling it – it was pestering a smaller dog. And I felt a wave of irritation. But [the irritation] doesn’t stick around, because it is not perpetuated by thought activity. It only lasted moments.’ In The Power of Now, Tolle writes admiringly of watching ducks in a pond near his home, and what happens when they get into a fight. They tussle, but then, the confrontation over, they flap their wings and ruffle their feathers, as if to shake off the memory of the encounter. Then they swim peacefully once more. Ducks bear no grudges. People, with egos, do. Indeed, when Tolle hits his stride, there is no human outrage afflicting the world that he is not willing to attribute to our efforts to defend and strengthen our egos. War, tyrannies, and injustices of all kinds stand exposed as little but the efforts of insecure egos to fortify themselves: to harden their boundaries, to separate themselves, and to impose upon the rest of the world the thought patterns on which they have come to imagine that their very lives – although, in reality, only their egos – depend.
When I finally rose to leave the apartment, I hesitated for a moment – for some reason, shaking Tolle’s hand seemed inappropriately formal – when he suddenly stepped forward and enveloped me in a bear hug. Then I took the lift to the ground floor, called a taxi, and sat on the wrought-iron bench outside the building, waiting to be collected. I felt curiously light-headed and peaceful, and it occurred to me that it might not be such a bad thing to stay sitting on that bench, in the fading light, doing nothing in particular, for several more hours. But that wasn’t an option. I – whatever that meant – had to get to the airport in time for my plane home.