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.↩
