Taking the Road Inward

An introduction to the principles of dialectic inquiry as understood in ZENOLETHIA'S approach to inner development. By Alessandro James Genovese Cicogna

DIRECT EXPERIENCE

I am. What? Let’s begin by exploring what is the quality of presence that is here? To engage the question requires actually experiencing experience for what it is, without interference. We don’t need to skip anything. Uncomfortable feelings can be there, thoughts can still happen. Direct experience simply means there’s no separation between what is and knowing itself. Knowledge is imbued in the fact of itself as immediate experience. Self-knowing “I-am-ness” is more fundamental than any content or conclusion. It’s not a case of inferring something about what’s here (Descartes’ famous “I think therefore I am” comes to mind), but rather we are starting with that “I am” experience itself. (Feeling it directly might show it is actually more accurate to say: “I am therefore I think”…) .

The reason this seemingly basic experience is not obvious is that we are usually more aware of our unconscious meddling with experience. We muddy the crystal clear water of our awareness and don’t see the bottom clearly. Picture being caught in a swirling current stirring up the debris of feelings, thoughts and reactions. Plotinus invites that to know our own nature we must determine to remove the things which have been added to it. We begin by getting specific about what’s going on, what’s actually here to start with. If we are precise, we will encounter our unconscious manipulation. Getting specific is not an analysis. We engage a different capacity that comes before thinking. It’s much more direct; this feeling, permeating that seeps into the fabric of conscious experience.

The first manipulation we encounter is belief. It makes sense from this perspective when Plato says many of us spend a lifetime in a Cave (meaning: a partial view on reality) without realising there’s actually a whole world we’re missing. I like to think of it as we live in a video game which we’ve forgotten is a video game happening somewhere and started taking it as the whole of reality itself. This subtle belief, left unquestioned, implicitly manipulates experience. Its method is the unconscious staying in the lines of what is known. Recall the film The Truman Show where Truman lives the first portion of his life within the boundaries of Seahaven without questioning it. That belief ‘this Cave is reality’ conditions experience to conform with and confirm that picture. It’s extremely convincing.

Now, I’m not calling the consensus view of reality an elaborate illusion. What I am saying is that to know more about it requires investigation. This exploration has the potential to reveal that what we think is the case may only be part of the picture. To actually see more of the picture, we need to learn how to look carefully. The scientific disciplines which take this as their aim believe in a subject-object paradigm of someone, the scientist, examining things. Dialectic inquiry, on the other hand, begins with our looking apparatus, which means our subjective experience. The way we look at the world is tied with how we experience ourselves, and a big component of that is who we take ourselves to be. This is going to determine what kind of video game it is we’re playing, whether one that’s violent, infantile, fantastical, scary etc.

It’s generally considered a given that we have to be someone. We need a character to play the game, right? Usually we forget we’ve chosen that character (actually, it’s more like we’re assigned it in early childhood) with its backstory and customisations, and actually think that’s what we are. This is the ordinary sense of self. We choose it in the sense we continue to believe in it. It’s the ‘who’ I am, with that familiar inner atmosphere, flavour of perspective and backstory. For true inquiry, nothing is a given. Everything is in question. When we play a game or watch a film, we willingly ‘suspend disbelief’. When we’re in a condition of being so absorbed into that reality that it stands in as the real thing, we need to ‘willingly suspend belief’, just for the time being, so it can be tested.

To question what we take ourselves to be could be unsettling or freeing, or both. Let’s check. How does “I don’t know what I am” feel like? Notice the reactions that keep that state from being experienced. If we are able to allow the question as a real possibility for just a moment, it’s actually kind of spacious. Experientially, there’s a feeling of potential and formlessness to it, an indeterminacy which is mysterious.

THE BLUEPRINT OF SUFFERING

The spacious looseness of not-knowing threatens our ‘who’. Our sense of self depends on being a fixed entity in control that knows. We resist openness, which experientially could include vulnerability, not knowing and sensitivity because, in that sense, it is life threatening to this pre-determined who. When we start to venture beyond the known, like Truman’s (spoiler alert) sailing to the edge of his reality and discovering it is a filmset, the second layer of experiential manipulation arises, what I call the Inner Preacher. If the implicit beliefs weren’t doing their job, we’re going to get its sermonic storms to keep us in place.

These are the Agent characters in The Matrix who want to stop anyone freeing themselves from it, like the Buddha Neo. They can appear in us as self-criticism, doubt, judgement and rejection. Tracking these patterns actually reveals a great bread crumb trail to getting to the unconscious beliefs they’re trying to hold in place. Those beliefs are basically the source codes of our video game reality. These codes encrypt our being a particular someone in a somewhere (our take on reality) and that means: constantly resisting the experience of open-endedness, which is how reality and conscious experience intrinsically manifest.

It’s not surprising that Gautama Buddha called out the Human Condition as a cycle of suffering. But what is suffering really? When you contemplate it from this perspective, suffering is the clothes of history dressing the nakedness of the present. What does that mean? Basically it’s our character’s backstory overlaying direct experience and generating the video game. The video game is a closed loop reality bounded by limiting beliefs, historical assumptions and ongoing unconscious manipulation to keep it operating.

What we are pointing to is the Blueprint of Suffering itself which precedes any particular manifestation of it (even the Buddha had a bad back): the programming entrenching us in being a character in a limited reality. 

THE RETURN TO REALITY

One upshot of living on our little patch of video game experience is that we’ve been absent from the rest of reality for a while. There could be different games we want to try out. In fact, reality is an infinite library of these different modes of experiencing. That’s why I’m not calling our version of it illusion. Caves like Plato’s can exist, they’re just small corners of a vast universe. To return to reality and see what’s really on offer means, as I’ve said, getting specific about what’s here now. When we’re not directly experiencing, or overlaying it with conjecture, we’re in the mode of believing our habitual video game is the only one. This is the real “League of Legends” (please excuse the pun): a world of belief.

I want to bring up here the story of the Prodigal Son from Luke’s gospel. It’s about a son who returns to his father’s house after being away for a long time having squandered his father’s inheritance. When he returns there is no justification asked of him. His father is simply happy that his son is home. He welcomes him with open arms so that they may share in the love of their reunion. We are touched by the father’s openness, free from the hardened position of resentment or rejection.

Inquiry is more than questions. It is the intrinsic loving force which moves toward unification and restores the fractured family of our consciousness into one harmonious household. And it asks. Its questions can bring up challenging experiences which are difficult to stay with. Oftentimes, we are not as gracious in receiving these Prodigal Children as the father from Luke’s parable. As children so beautifully model, they have the power to shake up the status quo. As many adults model equally beautifully, oftentimes this is not welcomed. When they’re not welcomed, they perdure, left to beg on the streets of our psyche. They are begging for our attention, to be included in the house of our sense of self.

When we obstinately refuse to acknowledge these parts, we actually become the beggars in our own lives. Recall the story of Odysseus returning from Troy as a beggar after several years away, not acknowledging his own royalty. In our case we have been disinherited from the vast kingdom of reality, homeless hermit crabs searching for an accepting container: the right partner, job, country, family, whatever; all because we hope someone else can accept what we refuse. Still, any external environment remains an imperfect copy of a process which must occur internally to become alchemised. This alchemy returns our sovereignty to us. Only when Odysseus eventually faced the suffering caused by his absence was his lordship restored.

ALCHEMY OF ASSIMILATION

By choosing to turn toward our inner beggars, the disowned dents of history, with the love of the father welcoming his long lost son, or the mother welcoming her daughter, our experience is included completely and we become undivided. The power of inquiry reorients us towards our own experience, the place where reality itself is restored to us in its full vibrant majesty. The subliminal messaging of our early environment, consciously and unconsciously, did not welcome our totality. It takes one human in history to have not recognised all that they themselves and reality are for them not to be able to reflect that in another. Over time, a systemic condition of blindness develops.

This is a distinctly human phenomenon. The source of seeing in our early development is external and depends on our caregivers. It creates version 1.0 of self-understanding. The unavoidable gap between what is seen and reflected and what actually is, what we are, leads to a reduced sense of self with the pieces that didn’t get seen still missing. This is simply a necessary stepping stone in human maturation. Acknowledging this truth, we can feel the pain of our inevitable amnesia. Feeling immediately the impact of our sense of self being forced to dismember aspects of our nature from its awareness, and thereby conscious experience, is the way. We arrive at what Plato called True Understanding via what I am calling True Seeing, the getting specific which experiences the fact of the matter. If we depend on others for this essential function we will continue to remain disinherited of the truth our nature.

The father’s open-armed embrace with a full-bodied ‘yes, come here my experience, you are welcome no matter what’ is required. It births a non-intellectual totalising understanding. This is the new type of reasoning Plato said we must learn in order to know truth. Its inner alchemy of assimilation reverts our conscious state from brittleness to pliant malleability, its natural condition. Through radical inclusivity of any experience, including historical imprints, we mature our experiencing vessel. 

Such maturation by welcoming purifies the occlusions which have rendered it opaque to new experience and therefore permeable to new understandings of the nature of self and reality itself. The more we see, the more we understand and, because of that: our seeing capacity gets even more refined. We can inhabit multiple paradigms of reality, an infinitude of video games. This Plato called anamnesis, the process of recollection, or remembering, truth.