"Who Are You Really?" A Semiotic Spin on Selfhood

This post pertains to the workshop I taught at Gulch Fest on the morning of September 11, 2021.

I have since published a video which can be viewed here.

I have heard that Sri Ramana Maharshi was known for encouraging self-enquiry as a method of self-realization and ultimately, liberation. While I have not studied his teachings in-depth, upon learning this, I began to contemplate the centrality of the way we understand the self to everything else in our world of meaning. To use a technical term from the discipline of Semiotics, in each being's Umwelt, there is always a self in some form or another. It is the one thing we cannot get away from... But I view it in a semiotic way--self is not a thing, but a process.

To speak about what we are is not to give a teaching in the ordinary sense of the word, as it is a sort of knowledge that is already available to all of us. It is also not the sort of thing that can be fully encapsulated in words--nor in thoughts. I am inclined to think that what we really are is far more vast than our limited capacities, let alone languages, could ever fully grasp. However, I have found that it is possible to formulate words in such a way as to trigger those who listen to remember what they already know. Another powerful use of language in the endeavor of self-knowing is to describe and relate significant aspects of how we encounter ourselves in the world. This self-encountering can be described as the phenomenology of self. By understanding the phenomenology of self, we may be in a better position to understand what we are.

It is my opinion that good semiotics is essentially based in phenomenology. I say this because the phenomenological stance is where we orient ourselves towards the world in such a way that we take care to regard things as they present themselves to us moment-by-moment. The phenomenological stance understands that objects as-such are inferred from the sum of our experiences and memories. An example of this is that when we understand the rain cloud in the sky as a sign that it is about to rain, we do not just see the cloud that has the meaning of rain. We see the way the cloud is moving towards us, and we notice its steadily changing color and shape as it moves through the sky. We notice also the change in the force and direction of the wind, the shift in atmospheric pressure and humidity, and all kinds of other phenomena, undeniable aspects of experience that stand out to us. Were we to see the cloud from the top down, it would perhaps carry a different meaning. I recall flying over North India in to New Delhi during a particularly heavy monsoon season. The clouds towered to vast heights and stretched out in all directions as far as the eye could see. Through my encounter with this phenomenon, I came to know the meaning of the monsoon in terms of its incomprehensible vastness. Then later on, when I journeyed to Tirunelveli in search of a particular Temple of Aadigurunatha, the monsoon had not yet passed in this southern part of India. I found that the streets were so terribly flooded that one could barely navigate by any means without wading. When I made it to the temple I sought, I found myself instead looking at a greatly widened river. The temple is known to exist underwater during the flooding of the monsoon, but there was some part of me that couldn't comprehend this until I saw it. I fell to my knees in both disappointment and awe. Here I encountered the monsoon again, as one directly beneath its constant downpour. I am sure there are many other ways the monsoon presents itself that are much better known by those who live with it as a way of life. The monsoon is not just the towering and expansive cumulonimbus clouds and the flooded streets, and yet it also cannot be expressed without those phenomena. It is only through the encounter with phenomena that we come to abstract the named thing. And from the named thing, we do not encounter the phenomena--but only the name.

So to return to self: to speak of a "phenomenology of self" is to look at the self not as a given object or quality, but rather as a set of phenomena bearing significance. We encounter the various phenomena that make up the "self," in so many different ways, and it is from these phenomena that we abstract the idea of "self." Like the monsoon, the self is not just the phenomena by which we encounter it, yet it cannot be expressed without those phenomena. And from the name "self," we do not encounter the phenomena of self. But uniquely, the self is abstracted from a set of phenomena which bear forth in ways unlike the monsoon and unlike anything else. Through language we can get a glimpse. The Proto-Indo-European word that our current word "self" seems to derive from, is actually a variation of the root "*s(w)e-", a reflexive third-person pronoun referring back to the subject of a sentence. The very notion of self as we understand it may have arisen out of a peculiarity of language that works in a subject-predicate form. This seems to work well with Jean-Paul Sartre's focus in "The Transcendence of the Ego," where his thesis is that "I" is a quality that arises in reflection on the past, when attempting to describe the central point of experience. If I am folding the laundry and recall doing so, the word "I" is what we use as a descriptor of the one doing the folding.¹

A good way of explaining it came to me just the other day as I was walking in nature. I had played a ritual song that I didn't exactly think of as beautiful, but I realized that I wasn't playing it with the intention of making it beautiful. I was playing it to have some kind of power. It is often that we think of music we hear as beautiful, but beauty is a semiotic process, not a quality that occurs in things. I go more in-depth into beauty in my article on love, but for now it will suffice to say that beauty is a meaning derived through the interactive process of interpretation between a sign and its observer. So it is that one song may be thought of as beautiful by one listener and ugly by another listener. The evaluation differs based both on variations in the notes and rhythms of the song and on variations in the disposition of the observer. It is possible someone would hear my ritual song as beautiful, but as both a performer and listener, I wasn't particularly struck by its beauty, but more so by its power. 

So now let us think of songs from our lives that are very meaningful to us. We all surely have at least one song that we feel a connection to, that in some ways may even define us. The meaning of a song to someone may change over time as they grow and have new experiences and memories. Just as if the notes of the song were changed around and it would become a different song with a different meaning, if the person encountering the song is different, the meaning changes. The meaning happens between the listener and the song, and while it may be conveyed differently by different musicians, one can never know exactly what effects it will have on different sets of ears.

Now think of other key memories that constitute formative experiences of your "self". You surely could not think of every one of them right now, and the memories you pick might change depending on your mood and the day. Perhaps, just as a song can be performed differently every day, a self can be performed differently every day. Perhaps, just as a song can have a different meaning when being encountered by you on a different day, you can have a different meaning when being encountered by you on a different day. But what's this? Can you encounter yourself?

Just as the song is not possible without the listener who hears it, so is it that the self is not possible without someone to encounter it. In other words: just as the song really occurs as a meaning/interpretive process, so does the self occur as a meaning/interpretive process. If the self is semiosis, then perhaps there is indeed something we can understand about it when we do semiotics. 

But who is it that interprets the self?

---

1 It should come as no surprise that Sartre was himself deeply steeped in the phenomenological tradition. Much of his work on this subject is a direct response to the work of his predecessor (and oft-named father of phenomenology), Edmund Husserl.^↩

Hope vs Fear

 A battle between phantoms... but must it be fought?

 

When we hope for something, we wish for things to turn out the way we want them to. Yet in hoping, we imply that there is another way we very much wish for things not to turn out. The strong aversion we feel for the possible scenario we wish to avoid can be characterized as fear. It is for this reason, I think, that hope and fear are so often posed in opposition to one another. But while it is clear that there is a relationship between the two, I think it is mistaken to infer from this that hope and fear are opposites. If we look at them more closely, we will find a relationship of a significantly different kind.

 

Hope is quite strongly urged and cherished by many folks these days. It is all too often that we hear the admonition, "don't lose hope." When it comes to fear, the general tone I hear is "do not give in to fear," or at times I hear the even blunter phrase, "have no fear." These attitudes are at times so strongly held that they seem to have become stigma, both against a hopeless disposition and in favor of a fearless disposition. This quickly develops into a dogma that esteems hope as a high virtue and derides fear as a blemish to be scorned. With these opening remarks in mind, I'll state outright that in this article, I aim to clear the air up around three main points:

 

1) The supposed opposition of hope vs fear. I argue that they are not, in fact, opposites, and that conceiving them as such is based on a misapprehension of what they really are.

2) The excessive and earnest praise of hoping and hopefulness. (Taken to the extreme, this risks detaching people from reality and leaving them deeply dissatisfied or worse.)

3) The disdain and dismissing of fear. (Taken to the extreme, this reeks of toxic positivity--the attitude that says to wash away all "negative" emotions and "just focus on the positive.")

To attend to these three points will require us to engage in a deep semiotic exploration. And in this exploration we will surely discover much more than what we set out to find.

~

Our noun for hope comes from the Old English verb "hopian," meaning "to have trust or confidence that something will be so." The modern use of the word is more commonly used in a sense of: "to wish for a possible event," as in "I hope the weather will be nice tomorrow," though it can also indicate a kind of trust or confidence when used in a certain sense, such as in "I have high hopes for his project."  While it may not be obvious, hope always directs us at the future. We have to look deeper at the usage of the word to see this. It is obvious when we say "I hope I get the job." But when we say "I hope you had a good time at the party," it sounds like a hope for the past. But what the statement implies is "I hope you will tell me you had a good time" or "I hope I don't find out you had an awful time." In a similar way, it may sound like a hope for the present when someone says "I hope it is safe to camp here," but what is implied in that is "I hope we pass the night undisturbed and wake up well-rested tomorrow" or "I hope we don't wake up to an ambush." When we see past the misleading uses of the word, it is clear hope always creates an anticipation or expectation of what is yet to come. Hope lives in the future, and it actually requires uncertainty. Just consider this: if we had an exact knowledge of everything that would happen in the future, hope would be meaningless.

 

Fear, on the other hand, came from a word denoting calamity and sudden danger. It is intense and present in this moment. Fear comes from proto-Germanic "*feraz," meaning "danger," and even older is the Proto-Indo-European "*per-," meaning "to try, risk." Much of our very old language has evolved from being literal to being more abstract and figurative, and so has fear evolved from its root words denoting danger (the tiger or crocodile waiting in ambush) and risk itself (drawing closer to the edge of a steep and high cliff), to become a word that describes the emotion associated with these experiences. 

 

Right away, we can see that hope is a cognitive process of forming an expectation of the as-of-yet-unknown, whereas fear is a strong emotion that may be focused on either a present or future danger. We can also see, as I described in the intro, that rather than behaving as opposites, hope and fear seem quite inseparable. For example, one can imagine encountering a dangerous predatory animal and feeling immediate fear in this interaction, while also thinking, "I hope I will find a way out of this." Similarly, one can imagine, upon turning into a darkened side street, having the thought go through their head, "I hope I don't encounter anyone who wishes me harm as I go this way" while being afraid that such an assailant lurks in the shadows. (If they were opposites, it would be impossible for them to both occur simultaneously, as they do in these examples.) It looks like hope is one of the possible reactions we can have to fear. There seems to be a strong link here--more on that later.

 

Let's take a moment and consider things in light of the future. One thing (and perhaps the only thing) that is clear about the future is that it is uncertain. In the face of uncertainty, we often feel fear. We can also choose to have hope in the face of an uncertain future, and this can distract us from our fear about it, but hope is not an antidote to fear. Still, hope seems at first glance to be the opposite of  fear because of the way that it can distract us from it. The thing is, hope fixates on the future--and fixation on the future can breed something very closely related to fear... There are many things in our world that we may be afraid of that we do not have complete control over, from sudden illness to political leaders making dangerous decisions to just the thought of getting in a car accident...

 

But fearing uncertainty in a world of constant uncertainty leads to constant fear. 

 

This backdrop of fear about things that could go wrong but haven't happened yet, we call anxiety. Whereas pure fear comes from the presence of a perceived danger, anxiety seems to be a fear about the possibility of danger. (And since we can never truly know all the possibilities, it is not uncommon for people to be chronically anxious.) Our word "anxious" descends from the Latin "anxius," meaning "solicitous, uneasy, troubled in mind." This word evolved from the older "angere" which literally meant "to choke, squeeze," and this descended from a Proto-Indo-European root word "*angh-" which meant "tightness, narrowness." This much older origin of our current use of anxiety seems to still have some bearing today, as when someone feels anxious, they feel constricted and tight. I can say from personal experience that an anxiety attack involves shortness of breath, and relief from anxiety feels like being able to expand and breathe again after being suffocated. But I think we can broaden the sense of "tightness" and "narrowness" to convey the way anxiety affects our disposition towards the world. When we are anxious, we focus on how things could go wrong, narrowing our view of the situation, and attempting to tighten our grip on it. Yet when a fist tries and tries to tighten itself around nothing, the only thing that might come out of it is a muscle-strain. Anxiety feels like trying to get control of something uncontrollable--the ever uncertain future. Anxiety is a cousin of fear, but it does not arise from fear itself, but rather is a type of fear that happens when we fixate on possible outcomes. Again, we must be aware of how the mind works. Anxiety sometimes evaluates the past that already slipped by, trying to figure out "how did I screw up this time?", "what did I do wrong?" But what the anxious mind is really doing in this situation is trying to protect us. The overly 'helpful' mind thinks, "if I can figure out what we did wrong back there, we can avoid messing up again." "If I had only done Y instead of X, we would be so much happier right now." Playing through a specific memory over and over again is never going to change what happened--"but perhaps," thinks anxiety, "we can do better next time if we figure out how we failed before." Again, as with hope, we need only consider: would anxiety have any bearing if we were absolutely certain of everything that was coming up in the future? Anxiety, like hope, is rooted in uncertainty.

 

Isn't it curious how hope narrows our view to fixate on a favorable particular outcome. Isn't it interesting that when we are in hope, we tighten around the uncertain situation, to try and make the hope come true? Yet despite these similarities, the feeling of being full of hope is far different from having an anxiety attack! ...But what happens when that hope falls in jeopardy? What happens when our very highest hopes seem like they are about to be undermined? What happens when we feel like we are starting to lose control? And what happens when we can't get that control back?

I've made it quite clear by now that hope is inevitably tied to fear and anxiety, even though it is not the opposite of either one. So what, then, is its opposite? Ok, as promised...

 

Despair is actually the opposite of hope. If we look at the Latin roots of "despair," we find "de-" (a root meaning "lack" or "lacking") + "sperare," ( literally "hope"), so we get a word that literally means "a lack of hope." But despair is more than just a lacking of hope, because this presupposes that hope is normally present. But just as despairing is not a base state of consciousness, neither is hoping. If we look more closely at the root of "despair," we actually find that "sperare" is closely related to "speed," and both "speed" and "sperare" can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European "*spes," meaning "prosperity," also "fat" and "success."

A lack of success... A lack of prosperity. A peculiar worry regarding the future, (but then, are not all worries cast in that way?). Just as hope looks to the future fixating on success (sperare), so does despair look to the future fixating on failure. Both are thought-patterns fixating on future outcomes. It is curious how the workings of the mind can themselves stimulate powerful emotions in us. Despair can cause a fear reaction in the body, while hope can cause a confidence or sureness. But the cognitive exercises of hope and despair turn us toward the future and away from the present. The "fear" stimulated by despair is more like an anxiety, while the "confidence" stimulated by hope is more like wishful thinking. Despair seldom fails to produce a feeling of fear--and this curious power of our minds is another reason why people so often confuse fear as being the opposite of hope--when really it is despair that is truly hope's opposite! And it looks like the opposite of fear is really confidence, sureness, the feeling we are safe. But when turned towards the unknowable future, this kind of confidence is only a hope--it can never go any further than hope. And whether we hope or despair, we encourage fear. In hope, we fear that what was hoped for will not come to be, while in despair we fear that what we despair of is coming to be. (I keep coming back to the relationship between hope and fear, and I will unfold this fully when we get to the deeper analysis of fear later on.)

 

And none of this is to say that I think we should never hope. Indeed, hope can be a very good teacher--because when we indulge in hopeful thoughts, there is always some thing or situation we are hoping for. To hope with sincerity is to envision what it is you truly long for. But as hope is a fantasy, it is not a stable place to stay. In this present moment, we may work to move towards a future we seek. And hope helps us to idealize and visualize such a future. The same could be said of despair. When you come crashing down from the high platform of hope, there you have fallen into the abyss of despair. The despair also teaches us. It teaches us about what we dread. In despair we get to see the things that most terrify us. Indeed, fear is not the opposite of hope, but despair can show us what we fear... because in despair we feel we are falling headlong towards it.

In the realm of imagination we can come to hope or despair. But it is always from here in the present that I can evaluate, decide, and (if I have the wherewithal and resources) act to bring myself closer to that ideal I hoped for and steer away from the horror that despair warned me about. To hope implies that what we hope for is yet to be obtained; to despair implies that what we despair of is yet to be suffered... To put certainty into either one is to give much more credence to this sense of not-yet-being... It is just not very sturdy ground to stand on. I want to base my foundation in the present that does not know the future but remains open to all of its possibilities. Hope and despair are guests who come into my home but do not stay. In the face of uncertainty, rather than hope or despair, I am more wont to encourage faith. But you can read my piece on faith if you want to hear more on that--now we are going to look at what has been looming in the background: we must now face our fear.

 

One thing stays true about fear through the ages... Fear tells us we are facing a risk or danger, and gives us the impetus to respond (often by either fleeing or destroying the source of the fear.) Even the smallest creature could cause a fear reaction, such as when we see a colorfully-marked spider that is likely venomous, or a tick that could spread disease. Only the most disciplined person could repress the very real urge to get away from the potential danger, (and I suspect that, faced with real danger, even someone who appears totally stoic on the surface could still be dealing with an internal chaos stimulated by fear). As one of the most basic emotions, fear has an immediacy to us, and for good reason as well. Imagine if you did not have a response of fear to looking over a cliff or finding a wildly colored arthropod inhabiting your sleeping quarters. The extreme of this would be you neglect to have caution and go tumbling over the edge or get woken up with a deadly venom coursing through your veins. Fear is what impels us to step back from the edge or set up a permethrin-infused mosquito net. Fear motivates us to respond to danger by either avoiding it or modifying the environment to eliminate the danger. Fear drives us to take measures to protect ourselves and those we care about.

So far so good. At the surface, there is nothing strange about fear, and it in fact appears quite natural, as it is observable as a self-preserving feature of the emotional landscape of at the very least, all of the other mammals. Yet to only discuss it in this way would be to sidestep the deep cultural aversion to fear, as famously expressed by Dwight D. Eisenhower when he said in his inaugural address that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Indeed, it is by the very way that fear impels us to alter our behavior that it can have a more sinister side to it. Fear has an effect of dulling our reason and pushing us into action. Taken too far, the practical fear of particularly dangerous spiders becomes an extreme panic at the sight of any spider, even harmless ones. Some people cannot even handle the sight of any arthropod at all. 

 

At a basic level, fear is jumping back from a snake, but at the complex level of our society, it is avoiding a risky social interaction, or joining a crowd in chasing away a threat. Again, fear taken too far in these situations could mean avoiding even slightly risky social situations even if they might offer great rewards, or joining a witch hunt that targets innocent people. These examples of extreme fear are often characterized as phobias, and are generally regarded as mental illness. Phobias are what happen when fear is taken to the extreme, but it can cause problems even when it is not so extreme as to cause immediate panic: one particularly insidious feature of fear lies not in the emotion itself, but in the way it is manipulated. Many manipulators have used this method of invoking a strong fear in people in order to coerce them to act one way or another, because when people are truly afraid, their next actions become more predictable.

 

Some examples:

 

-Notice how people are kept in line in society, adhering to their conventional (and often severely limiting) roles, by the subtle overhanging fear that everything would go to Hell if they didn't. Frightened people won't deviate and try new things. 

 

-Notice how people can be coaxed into war (or at least being supportive of a war) when they are made to be afraid of another country, the "outsiders," the "barbarians," even if going to war may not actually be in anyone's best interests (except for the leaders urging it).

 

-Notice how the news channels broadcast messages of fear. Yet people who are afraid feel they must "watch the news to keep track of what is going on." When they watch the news, they only become more afraid, which leads them to feel the need to be more prepared, so they go back and watch more news... ad infinitum. (An effective marketing scheme, predatory as it may be.)

 

Thus, as clever as Eisenhower's phrase is, its irony does not escape me--and I suspect it did not escape him either. For in fearing fear, people still have something to fear. The people taken in by that speech may have thought, "well we had best get busy at eliminating the potential sources of fear, so that we are never afraid." A black widow nesting in your home can actually be dangerous, so we eliminate the danger by moving it outside (or for those of us more violently inclined, throwing a shoe at it). By making fear out as a danger in itself, (effectively making fear fearsome), we make it something to be avoided or eliminated. But is fear even the kind of phenomenon that can be eliminated or avoided? I haven't seen this work with any other primal emotions.

It is clear that those who are ruled by fear give up a great deal of their agency--in other words, they become less capable of making effective judgments and sound choices. Bearing this in mind, I certainly sympathize with those who want nothing to do with fear. There is no shortage in our culture today of people who implore us to "choose love instead of fear" or "have no fear, trust the universe." They have at least chosen to turn away from fear, but I wonder if these militant anti-fear folks are not only focused on the extreme examples and ignoring the ways fear helps and teaches us. And I also can't help but wonder: are these well-intentioned folks not falling into Eisenhower's trap? Are they not guilty of fearing fear itself? Are they not, perhaps, as little as they may like to admit it, afraid of what would happen if they let fear rule their lives? Ironic indeed. It would seem that as we humans presently find ourselves, we have not (yet) been able to escape our mammal brains. 

 

Maybe we can't get around the fact that fear is built into our very biology, and for reasons I have discussed above, it may not be wise to dispose of it, (if such a possibility even exists). The trick, then, seems to be in how we respond to fear.

 

One way of responding is to fall back on hope. If we are surrounded by danger, why not hope that we can get out of it? This is actually quite a common response, and I think the apparent palliative effect of hope in situations of great fear may be another culprit behind the ubiquitous (and false) dichotomy between hope and fear. It is not unreasonable, when facing a difficult and fearsome situation, to choose to focus on hoping things will turn out alright instead of being afraid that they won't. But there are problems with this approach. For one, hope, being a wish or expectation for a possible outcome, takes us out of our present awareness where we may actually be able to do something about the thing we are afraid of. But another, less obvious criticism, lies beneath. Hoping for a scenario implies, as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, the fear that its opposite will come to pass. Let's take a deeper look at this connection: While it may be possible to achieve our hope, it is also possible that we will never reach what we hope for. Thus, the greater the hope, the greater the fear that accompanies it--and they can never be detached from one another. Rather than being the opposite of hope--fear is the shadow that follows it. If someone has a hope that reaches to the stars, it casts a shadow of fear that could consume their whole world. 

 

This is not to mention that when hoping in the face of fear, there still remains the danger that one hoped to avoid in the first place. Add to this real danger the potential danger of a failed hope, and we now face a twofold danger. Hope mutates fear/danger by amplifying it beyond a mere present danger into a whole array of possible future dangers. It is like adding wood to a fire in an effort to smother it. Thus, in verse 13 of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, it reads: "Hope is as hollow as fear."..."Hope and fear are both phantoms / that arise from thinking of the self." Fear is a self-preserving reaction to a dangerous situation, and hope yearns for this same self to find itself in a more desirable situation. The more energy and attention we put into our hopes or fears, the more we reinforce our separate ego-identities, and the more we care for this ego-self, the more weight our hopes and fears carry. It becomes a vicious cycle. We need to look deeper than the ego-self if we want to get beneath our fear.

 

What happens when we accept that fear is a part of what we are, and may be part of what has gotten us this far? Perhaps you have heard a proposed choice between love or fear, and been urged to choose love. While love is not the opposite of fear, it looks like it may be a better antidote for fear's debilitating hold than hope. But I am not sure if it is possible to always choose love as a replacement for fear, and if it were possible, that would be denying fear, which still has a valuable place in our lives. I also find it hard to advise someone, when facing a real danger, to show that danger love instead of fear. The terror that compels us to save ourselves when the tiger gives chase is all-consuming, and its usefulness needs no explaining. But remember, the fear we are talking about today is the emotion that arises in response to a perceived danger (which may or may not be truly dangerous). When faced with the emotion of fear, we can be loving, and this love does not need to replace or push out the fear. Might I be so bold as to suggest, that instead of saying "choose love instead of fear," we go even further and start saying, "choose to love fear."? This would certainly be a most radical kind of love... though I must say I prefer love with roots that run deep.

What I suggest is that the troublesome aspect of fear is not so much what it does to us, but rather what we do with it. What I believe is possible is that someone can become more aware of the relationship they have with fear, and through this awareness not be controlled by it. By recognizing when fear arises from a place of stillness, by accepting that it has appeared (hence the love), by listening to what it tells us (while not necessarily allowing it to persuade us), we put ourselves in a position where we actually become freer from fear than if we tried to avoid it altogether. If fear is like the shadow that never leaves us, why are we running from it?

 

And beyond its usefulness as an aid to survival, doesn't fear have something valuable to tell us at a much deeper level? 

 

If you look over a cliff and feel the fear of death as you dwell dangerously close to the edge, does that not tell you that you are afraid of losing your life? So that in this fear, you know you value being alive? Can you imagine what kind of life it would be that you don't feel that fear?

 

Have you ever realized that you very much want to ask someone on a date that you really care about, but you are so, so afraid that you'll lose the connection you already have with them in an awful rejection? But doesn't that fear tell you that your feelings for them are so, so important to you? Can you imagine never meeting someone who makes you feel that kind of fear?

 

And what do we do in the face of this fear, if it is such an important and meaningful aspect of our experience? Rather than urge people to be fearless (which would be as sensible as urging them to run from their shadow), I would prefer to remind us of our capacity for courage. And all the more significant is one's courage when it faces the direst of fear.

 

Samwise Gamgee from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series had to look deep within himself to find the courage that empowered him to face unimaginable dangers. (Image is from an anonymous artist and is available on Pinterest).

 

Courage, the quality of mind that enables one to meet fear and danger head on, evolved from the Old French word "corage," which denoted the innermost feelings associated most often with one's heart. If we trace the lineage of the word further back to its Proto-Indo-European roots, we get the root word "*kerd-", literally meaning "heart." You see, the true opposite of fear is confidence, safety, sureness. But when faced with a real danger, one is anything but safe--and when faced with real fear, one is anything but confident. But when sitting in this fear, one can, after listening, respond to the fear with the resolve to be courageous. Dipping deeply into the strength of one's heart, one may find the courage that does not replace the fear, but is willing to face it. Courageously facing fear does not necessarily mean brashly charging through. When a real danger is present, courage may mean holding the presence of mind to calmly look for an escape. Love becomes the gateway to listen to fear, and listening becomes the gateway to courage. The suggestion here for the fearful ones, then, is not the cliche "have courage," but the radical: show love even to your fear, and then after hearing it out, see what courage you may find--deep within--corage--the heart. Is it a coincidence that love is also universally associated with--the heart?

When I think about everything that comes together to make me who I am, my deepest, most haunting fears end up being indispensable. I don't enjoy feeling these fears. But to reject them or aim for a state where they don't exist would be to reject an important part of myself. As an advocate of radical self-love, it is only sensible that I come to this position, that I may as well love this fear. Fear gives us the opportunity to be courageous, and indeed it is only in the light of our fears that courage gains its significance. As we grow and move forth in life with courage, we may someday find that we have overcome old fears; but, then unforeseen and new fears may lie in wait around the corner, only to give us opportunities for new courage--a never ending adventure. And if with courage welling from deep within the heart we can continue to face our fears--it may indeed sometimes lead us to what we--hoped for. 

Earlier we considered: the greater the hope, the greater the fear. So perhaps the most honest hope requires a most fervent courage--the courage to hope, even though it will imply the fear that this hope may not come to be. I think I have made clear the problems that arise when we let hope or fear be our commanders or solace... But we can accept them as part of ourselves without letting them take us over. And this love that can love both our hopes and our fears comes from the same place as our courage that empowers us to face them.

The greatest mark of courage is someone who, despite a clear danger to themself, will stay and face the situation, even if they do not know what to do or how it will turn out. If we find ourselves sometimes lacking in courage, maybe the place we can start first is to look for love. Maybe instead of looking to our hopes, we can look to our hearts. And maybe, if we do that, we'll find that the courage we never knew we were capable of dwells deeper within us than any hope or fear could ever reach.

Be the Weaver of Your Context

This is the blog post associated with the workshop I taught at a secret location in the Colorado Rocky Mountains the weekend of July 16-17. The video was published on the Meaning Is Alive Youtube Channel and can be viewed here.

What we are is beyond description. And yet the way that we are able to weave a story about what we are through language is not something to be so easily dismissed. It seems to me that people are very often engaged in telling stories or listening to the stories that others tell them. Each word, concept, image, experience, can be interpreted in so many different ways, and yet there seems to be a tendency among people to habitually interpret things in the same way so as to provide greater facility in navigating their lives--creating what I think of as thought-patterns. These thought-patterns are often systematic, and even more often, deeply integrated into the general workings of the mind, but perhaps the most pattern-like aspect of them is that they are recurring. One such pattern is "identity" or "self-concept" a useful tool that allows one mind to connect to others through common language-games, yet also a conceptual binding that locks minds into separate boxes, at times barring us from true connection and limiting the means by which one might conduct oneself.

What I think is the starting place of a lot of folk's troubles, is when one of these habitual chains of conceptual identification--an identity (which is really a type of story)--is assumed to be a default mode of being. What I mean by this is quite simply that I see people, who exist in a space of indefinable wonder, wrapping themselves up in a conceptual pattern that they don't ever look beyond. (This is not an understatement either--some people go their whole lives thinking of themselves as "man," "woman," "troublemaker," "saint," "fool," "genius," etc., and take these identities with them to their graves). When a mind holds an identity so close as to think of it as its essence, it blinds itself to different ways of experiencing life. How many fruitful possibilities have been lost this way? In the effort to define oneself, one runs the risk of reducing oneself to a definition. Supposing being-in-itself cannot be defined, this sounds like quite the slippery bind (I offer an oxymoronic name for an oxymoronic struggle).

Identity, as I said, is just one of these habitual thought patterns. The network of associated thought-patterns in which we anchor our interpretation of reality forms the background for all meaning. In other words, meaning takes place within a context.

"Context" comes from Latin "contextus," "a joining together," originally past participle of contexere "to weave together,"which is itself derived from Proto-Indo-European "com," "with, together" + texere "to weave, to make" (from the root *teks- "to weave," also "to fabricate"). When we use the word "context" today, we tend to think of it as something that we find ourselves in, rather than something we create. For example we might say that "in the context of our society, raising your middle finger at someone is a rude gesture," or "in the context of familial relations, a kiss is a simple expression of affection, whereas in the context of relating to people outside of the family, a kiss almost always has romantic implications." I could go on with examples, but what I am illustrating is the way that the meaning of a sign changes depending on the context wherein it occurs. Yet we don't tend to think about the significance of context itself, or how it changes.

The semiotic view of life is one where we acknowledge the creative role that we as interpreters of meaning play in laying forth the context we find ourselves in (or rather, that we weave ourselves into). We ask not only what does such-and-such thought or thought-pattern mean, but what is the significance of the very context within which its meaning takes place? This interplay of meaning and context takes place at many levels, including the individual level, the societal level, and as some theorists (including myself) would postulate, at a biological level.¹

In this workshop I will focus on this way of thinking: that we have the ability to modify our context, and we will see how this affects the life of meaning.

Say, for example, that someone were to seek education about their nation's history, and fit it into the broader context of world history. One then has the option to reflect upon one's life as it is situated in one or both of these contexts. One can see how they are related, but also how they seem to be nested in each other, such that if one is aware of the history of one's own nation but ignorant of world history, one would view their entire context differently than if they had the additional knowledge. History is indeed a particular recounting of past events, so the author of the historical texts or the teacher who introduces these ideas will shape what they mean to the student. It is quite different to learn about the history of music than it is to learn about the history of literature, yet learning about both may help one understand either subset in new and more comprehensive ways. Reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States makes for a much different version of US history than reading a textbook issued by the Texas Board of Education. What I want you most especially to notice in this example is how as we learn about history (by one way or another), the text we study becomes the center of our world of signification, as we work to understand and interpret the information being presented to us. But once we move on with our lives and focus on other things, the history we studied falls into the general context within which we operate.

Notice also that "learning" about history is not just being filled with "facts." What happens when we learn history is that we are confronted with a version of events that we must then, if we wish to relate it to ourselves in a meaningful way, interpret and situate in our lives. We do semiotics when we learn history, whether we are aware of it or not. But then at a certain point, the mind has done such a good job of integrating the history that it assumes the history it has accepted as the context in which it operates. You, your neighbor, and a person across the sea, may all have very different interpretations of history. Even you and your classmate who learned from the same texts presented by the same professor may have different interpretations. We often think of all of us as operating within one unified historical context--but what exactly is that context? It seems that it depends on what it means to you, and the "history" we know is exactly what the word's etymology implies: "an account or narrative." History implies a witness who gives an account what they have seen.

I could dig much deeper into this example, but I just used history here to exemplify a system of signs that we have all integrated into our lives, that we had to actively engage with before it was truly integrated as a context. When we learn about events or ideas we did not yet know of, or when we read different interpretations of those events, that context (which is in this example our knowledge of history) changes. In both cases, what changes actually is the significance to us of the events that we are systematically relating, including the very way we relate ourselves to those events.

Now let's step away from the example of history. Think of what else in your life you would consider contextual. You might say I do so-and-so and such-and-such as a human, as this-or-that gender (or lack thereof), in this-or-that society, in this-or-that time and place in history. We take on roles, we take on identities, we take on obligations, that are shaped or rather delimited by a context. In this workshop we'll talk about context as "the weaving together," the "fabrication," which is initially what the word came from. Think of each of our contexts as colorful quilts with intricate patterns of our weaving. And altogether we are wrapped in a vast quilt of meaning that is co-created. I would go so far as to say that "finding ourselves" suddenly in a context is an illusion, as the context has always been created by us.

Suppose you wake up in a dream, and in that dream you are somewhere that you are sure you have seen before, and there are people that you think you recognize but their faces are changing. But you think you know who they are. And as you do what you are doing, you are aware that you are doing it, and you are aware what it is that you are doing. But you don't quite remember how you got there, you're not sure how you met those people, and you don't remember why you started doing what you're doing. What happens in that dream when you start to ask yourself: "How did I get here?" "Who are these people really?" "How did we end up doing this?" Such a shift of consciousness leads you to start lucid-dreaming. When this happens to me, I suddenly start to realize that I can shape the reality around me and go where I want to go. I think something similar happens when we start to ask similar questions about what we are doing here, in the conscious state we find ourselves in now.

Do you remember what you were doing before you got here? And five years before that? And all the way back to when you were born, do you remember what happened before that? At a certain point, it seems unanswerable. What if you had lifetimes before this one that you could remember so clearly, could you think back to the beginning of the first life and remember that? It seems to me that far enough back, there is not so much difference between a dream and a reality, because in either case, you wound up there without knowing what you were doing before. Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? Who is going to be the one to answer those questions? Who is the one who wove together this beautiful textile of our lives? Who is doing the weaving right now? I am not putting ideas into you, I am just saying words and you are interpreting these words and relating them to a myriad of other ideas in your life. At a certain point I find myself asking... am I a dreamer in a dream, or am I a dream dreaming a dreamer? Is there really a difference?

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1 The way I am using the word "context" is similar in a number of ways to the use of the coinage "Umwelt" by Thomas Sebeok and other semiotic theorists, but I do think it carries some different connotations. For the sake of this distinction and because I do not intend to be overly technical with this workshop, I will stick to talking about things in terms of "context." I encourage those who are particularly interested in the semiotic theory that inspires my work to do some research on the idea of Umwelt and the theorists who frequently use it.^↩