The Structure of Self-Securing: On Fleeing Yourself

THE STRUCTURE OF COMPULSION

1. Lived experience contains a kind of background friction: a sense that one’s being/doing/having is insufficient, not quite “enough”—that is distinguishable from any specific, bounded episode of discomfort. This background friction is not a pathology to be healed/eliminated, but a non-optional dimension of experiencing.

2. This friction is the affective side of a core structure of experience. I find myself already given over to conditions I did not choose and cannot ever position myself behind or outside of: a body, other people, a language, a history. I never encounter a self that is prior to these conditions or that produced itself. Instead, I only ever encounter a self that is constituted through these conditions (and which is not reducible to any one of them).

3. In ignorance of 2, this friction is interpreted as a (usually personal) deficit: something is missing or wrong in me or my situation, and the right thing(s) added or subtracted from my experience would fix this deficit. Attention then organizes itself around projects of resolution. Some try to add (e.g., recognition, status, wealth, spiritual achievement) in order to make themselves more real/substantial/weighty or ineffaceable; others try to subtract (e.g., purge shame, defect, trauma, vulnerability) in order to shed the weight of their [perceived] inner discomfort/defects. Either path has the same objective: to make the self permanently sufficient, beyond dependence, immune to exposure: to the other’s gaze, to the body’s vulnerability, to loss, etc. Each project is founded on the implicit/explicit assumption that the self could, in principle, be made permanently sufficient.

4. Because 2 is true, no project under 3 can succeed on its own terms. The goal of such projects—a permanently sufficient self—is simply unavailable. And this includes contemplative practices recruited into 3.

THE CULTIVATION OF SELF-AWARENESS

1. It is possible, through sustained [and repeatedly-renewed] effort, to witness the (a) arising of discomfort and (b) the impulse to flee, without enacting the projects of resolution described in 3 (above). This effort does not intend a particular achievement—it is not a striving toward a final resolution or destination-state. Rather, it is the disciplined absence of reaching, something like a paradoxical redirection of will, like an active relinquishing of control. In actual practice, it amounts to remaining with the very exposure that those projects try to escape (rather than habitually and unthinkingly rushing to eliminate the thoughts/feelings produced by this exposure). When the reflex is caught, identification is suspended, thus creating room for choice—that is, for creative responsiveness instead of compulsive defence—even if one ultimately decides that their initial reaction was appropriate.

2. This effort cannot end in a “completed” state because what is witnessed keeps recurring: the impulse to secure the self against conditions it cannot escape arises again with each new discomfort, for as long as the friction of 1 (above) does. There is no state of having “finished witnessing”, only the recurring occasion for doing so. As such, yoga is not a technique for achieving an enlightened or invulnerable state but is the ongoing, non-terminating capacity to let experience exhaust itself (without turning it into a chronic defense— aggrandization/purification—project).

3. What this effort/practice discloses is structural, not evaluative: no content coincides with the awareness of it or, in other words, whatever arises is registered, and so it is never coextensive with the awareness registering it. Freedom, in this sense, simply names this recognition that awareness is not reducible to whichever content currently occupies it. This is the same non-reducibility noted in 2: a self constituted through its conditions and not reducible to any of them.

4. Freedom is not an escape from embodiment or from one’s conditions. “Transcendence” simply names the capacity of consciousness to know its conditions without being reduced to them—which frees agency to engage its determinacies creatively and with less defensiveness/fear (the latter produced by the will to self-secure).

NOTES AND FURTHER READING

• What is the Objective of Yoga?

• What is the Objective of Meditation?

*A Note on Scope: the above applies to projects aimed at making the self permanently invulnerable or self-sufficient or self-existing (that is, beyond the friction of 1). It does not apply to bounded, functional regulation, where the aim is something like practical adaptation rather than a permanent fix for the self (examples of practical adaptation include managing pain/stress, handling logistics, even the pursuit of material goals is not necessarily an attempt to secure invulnerability). To be sure, motivations are almost always mixed, so this distinction concerns what an act is demanding of its result (which isn’t always observable outwardly) and not what kind of act it is. As such, the demand is available only to the person intending it, and only while the doing hasn’t yet hardened into habit (by which time one’s intention is likely concealed from oneself).