Self distributed through space and time

When I think about what self means, I usually end up being lost in a vortex of images, smells, sensations, visions, memories. The self of a human being is something so huge, so enormous, so encompassing, so different that it requires an interstellar span of inquiry in order to get to the point where the space of vibrating wisdom appears to bring forth the light of elusive understanding. And yet the self can feel as something utterly familiar, unavoidably close, exclusively intimate. Something that connects both time and space in a singularity point of consciousness-awareness.

Here, in this short post, I would like to notice only the idea that the self is fundamentally historical in its nature. The history of humankind on the planet Earth reminds of a Plato's cave. This cave is the ecological homeland of the hypertextual human self. It is a little grotto in a forsaken corner of the galaxy. When you think about your life as your self, a human being with its identities, you can reach a place where all life is seen through the eyes of a transcendental witness. The witness observes your births, your lives, your deaths in the course of your being. And he weaves the story of your life into a web of individual existence. This individual web is interweaved with the vast networks of fates. The globality of these networks emerged through the process of historical unfolding that spans from the day one to eternity.

If you looked back into the history of humankind as a meta-observer, I guarantee that you would be surprised. Think of how long an average individual self, an individual human being lives. Perhaps 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years. Seventy one year ago, in 1939, the World War II began and brought horrors and terrors into lives of everyone in Europe. Ninety three years ago, in 1917, the Russian Revolution occurred that led to the beginning of a regime that destroyed entire cultures and murdered dozens of millions of men and women, families, nations. 93 years can easily be a lifespan of a modern person. One human life, one human self in its complexities and simplicities, ecstases and enthases, in its overall trajectory of space-time continuum.

If you looked even farther back in the history, and considered that a hypothetical average person lived at least 50 years, you would notice that ten human lives ago Europeans were just starting to explore America. You would shake your head in disbelief, if you realized that only forty human lives ago there was Jesus. Fifty lives ago there was Gautama Buddha. Fifty individual selves ago there was Plato speaking about the cave in which the human tragedy and comedy had been unfolding and continued its unfolding ever since. Only seventy people stretched in time connect me to the great Pharaohs of Egypt who built their pyramids as a symbol of wonder and awe in the face of the Mystery. Think of it, building one pyramid took thousands of lives stretched in space; and it takes only a journey of seventy lives stretched in time, seventy people, who passed their genes to the further generations, to get from Egypt to today's world.  

These seventy people were your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and so on (of course, the number is always multiplying by two when we take into consideration, e.g., that it took a man and a woman converging in the same singularity point of space-and-time to produce a new self).

So don't you dare to ever say that a human self,  your human self, your personality in its totality means nothing in the face of history. It takes just one human life, your self stretched in time, to create a culture or to destroy one. Less than ten human lives are needed to make the leap from the mythic stake-burning consciousness to the rational one. And it would take just one life now to go further, to change the world. To destroy the old. To create novelty—or not to create. The choice is here, right in front of you; and the impersonal meta-observer will be witnessing the choices you are going to make. Perhaps, the only choice you don't have is that you are always bound to make a choice.

(Incidentally, in many ways I am anarchistic: the whole point of abusive power that belongs to the other is in preventing you from realizing the creative Power within. The genuine Power is to be present in the world, to be aware of the very being-in-the-world, to change the world, to co-create it in the commonwealth of strong liberated and at the same time caring interdependent individualities. It didn't take long before the self realized it can learn this power within.)