Architectonics of the Self

If the sky were to suddenly open up... there would be no law... there would be no rule. There would only be you and your memories... the choices you've made and the people you've touched. The life that has been carved out from your subconscious is the only evidence by which you will be judged... by which you must judge yourself. Because when this world ends, there will only be you and him... and no one else.
— Donnie Darko (2001)

Who am I? There are always many ways to be answering this question. Every moment in life I am this or that, such and such, that's me, that's not me, this is mine, and this is not. Everywhere I go the sense of self follows my footsteps closely and generates the I-ness and the me-ness and the mine-ness of my being-in-the-world. The sense of identity can be very concrete for some people and it can be quite fleeting for others, but even when that which I am identified with changes rapidly there is always an intimate self-sense present to the sacrament of life, however big or small, strong or fluid, convenient or unconvincing, conscious or unconscious, personal or depersonalized and so on. It can be very dynamic, flaky even, and yet it undeniably exists.

The overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness looking from the outside can be called personality (in a somewhat narrow meaning of this term); the overall pattern of the self's manifestation as it is seen by a witness objectively looking inside can be called self-system. The total kaleidoscope of fluctuating identities and self-perspectives I would call architectonics of the self, and it is a penetrating look into the mystery of the architectonics of the self that could bring forth a first glimpse for a satisfying answer to the question of self-identity. This is even more evident if one encounters the complexity dilemma of simple, however experientially grounded, answer "there is no I" being as much unsatisfactory as defining the self-sense in a reductionistic static way as something concrete—indeed, as some thing at all.

When one attempts to speak of the architectonics of the self, it is absolutely crucial, in my opinion, to mention the name of Vasily Vasilyevich Nalimov (1910-1997), a truly unsung hero of our time. In his numerous works, published in Russian, English, and German, Nalimov was tackling different issues all related to the basic question of science, existence, personality, and consciousness. A member of a Moscow mystical anarchist circle back in 1920s, ex-prisoner of Stalin's concentration camps, the last and lonely knight of the Eastern wing of Templars; a renowned mainstream mathematician and a physicists who worked in the laboratory of A. Kolmogorov; an influential transpersonal philosopher, a gnostic, and a truth-seeker, he shined throughout his life with profound intelligence, adamant will, and a commitment to knowledge, honesty, and freedom. In 1970s and 1980s, many years before Soviet people were able to learn about the West and its recent cultural trends, he was writing about such transpersonal authors as C. Castaneda, S. Grof, Ch. Tart, and K. Wilber; in a thoroughly fundamentalistic-atheistic society he was openly asking the questions of meaning, life, God,  the universe, and the Ultimate Reality—something that had long been forbidden in the USSR and, probably, is still unprecedented in the Post-Soviet countries. (For more information on Nalimov see, e.g., Wikipedia article, Eugene Garfield's web page, and Thompson, 1993.)

In his book The Spontaneity of Consciousness (Спонтанность сознания [Spontannost' soznaniya], 1st Russian ed., 1989/2nd Russian ed., 2007), Nalimov attempted to draw what he called  architectonics of personality or self. Now, in the Russian language the word personality (личность [lichnost']) has many meanings; and it can be translated to English basically both as a personality and as Self (in its broadest sense). Most certainly, Nalimov's probabilistic vision of language would require taking into account the total variability of the word's semantics.

Nalimov writes the following about the intention of the book in question:

In this work we want to focus on the problem of architectonics of the Self with the hope that this way the nature of the Self will appear before us as an ultimately accessible manifestation of reality—the manifestation in which reality discloses itself through ourselves. First of all, we will consider the Self to be a carrier of meanings, thus exploring its linguistic (semantic) nature.

We fully recognize that any attempt to build such a model of the Self includes not only and mainly knowing but rather not-knowing. The deeper and clearer we are drawing an image of the Self, the clearer the patterns of that which we do not know appear. Not-knowing is always richer than our knowing. Not-knowing—the not-knowing contours of which we can delineate—provokes us, makes us seek, makes us look at the World and our own being with wonder. In this wonder life becomes full of meaning. That which modern psychiatrists tend to call existential emptiness disappears.

Before we continue I should note that it is always very hard to describe views of a thinker of such high altitude and magnitude as V. Nalimov in a short essay. He was a strong proponent of postformal thinking (which he called a probabilistic vision); he was a founding father of the field of scientometrics; he developed a probabilistic view of language that includes both discrete and continual aspects; he tried to create a postformal panoramic view of the universe and consciousness so as to find meaning in the fact that there is something rather than nothing. In his writings he was dialoguing through books with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Buddha, Christ, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Popper (with Sir Karl Popper he actually exchanged correspondence), early Ken Wilber, and so on. In an oppressive state of the Soviet Union he was a liberated thinker, a free soul whose transtemporal and transspatial flight couldn't be held by physical or social restrictions and boundaries.

In my opinion, the best of his approach that we can take may not be the concrete ideas themselves but the span and the depths of the questions and problems he inquires into. In The Spontaneity of Consciousness he quotes Maeterlinck: "The greatness of a human being is measured according to the greatness of mysteries that perplex him or that make him surrender." (I didn't find the quotation as it is translated in English, so I translated it from Russian; the phrase in original Maeterlinck's language and the way it is translated to English can differ significantly.)

When contemplating such complex subject as what the actual meaning and structure of the Self is, I believe, it is absolutely crucial to adopt the most panoramic and integral vision one can, otherwise the attempts of knowing would be childish and reductionistic. In the spirit of this approach facing reality means facing its ultimate mystery and pure silent not-knowing which is the ultimate knowledge itself. Immanuel Kant said: "Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." Gazing at the stars and contemplating the depth within can bring nothing else but the state of profound awe and not-knowing, not-knowing that is self-liberating. I resonate a lot with this stance of Nalimov and most mystics, the perspective that sees and feels the universe as a constant unfolding of the Mystery.

The first Mystery that we encounter is the mystery of our own existence. Most people in the world go on in their lives ritualistically thinking and perpetuating the thought that what they think is what they are. In fact, as long as they continue ritualistically doing whatever they are doing without asking this profound question of who am I and what does it all mean in some ways they don't even exist. By saying that they don't even exist of course I don't say that they are zombies without consciousness, what I am saying is that they are not fully aware of their existence. Most of our adult lives we are running away from the very fact that we are here, from the fact that there is the starry sky above us and the moral law within us, we are numbing ourselves to our being. We constantly dissolve ourselves in our personalized me on, which is Greek for non-being, by habitually pursuing the games we learned to play and telling each others limited stories we learned to narrate.

The most obvious example of this running from one's own authenticity can be encountered in a therapist office (and actually in any occasion where there is an opportunity for a field of intersubjective resonance to arise). Sigmund Freud was one of the first to show that we are not what we rationally think of ourselves or even how we feel about ourselves, that there is much more in our personalities, in our selves hidden beneath the iceberg of that which we are used to be aware of. Further advancements in the science of therapy and healing demonstrated that most of our lives we live according to a matrix of experience that has been forming during the early and not-so-early years of our lives. In fact, our life is grounded in the illusory feeling of knowing, in a feeling that we know what our life is about with all its upsides and downsides. We think that this—whatever this that happens to be entering our conscious awareness—is what life is about. We constantly run in circles in the self-built corridors of our "known life" and recreate on multiple levels the limited story that we learned about ourselves and the world; and there is no space for not-knowing in this story. The basic mystery of existence is something that shatters our house made of cards and brings terror to our life because in our selves we are used to identify with a limited range of possibilities and experiential realities.

And then suddenly it strikes us that we are getting divorced three times in a row, that we keep losing friends and alienating people, that our beloved children don't want to talk to us, that we have cancer, that we are going to die today—and then, at the moments like this, we look into the face in front of us with awe and not-knowing-ness: who is this person in front of me, whom I have always thought I have known? At whom does this face look? Who am I, really?

Something else can happen that will disclose this basic gap between our conscious self and the overall self, between the relationships that we picture in our minds and actual totality of processes happening around us, involving us as participants and transforming us constantly, every minute, every second, every moment of Kosmic existence. A policeman takes a gun and kills ten innocent people in a supermarket; a schoolboy does the same at school. Anomaly arises in our minds; something tells us that we are not seeing a crucial aspect of reality and it is killing us or makes us anxious and we desperately want to wake up. As we are gradually waking up we look in astonishment at the unconscious processes, scripts, stories, and scenarios we were so used to follow, the patterns that constantly recreate and magnify suffering in us and others. The emerging sense of amazement and wonder brings us closer to the determination to become truly liberated, truly conscious, truly wise so as to participate fully in the festival of life and co-creation.

Every human being has a profound depth hidden in his or her consciousness and self. An old homeless person taking care of her pushchair with bandboxes and empty bottles that for months has been her last resort. An imprisoned oligarch who declined to leave the country because of his pride and dignity. A president who looks sicker and sicker with every year he is in power. A young university teacher who keeps wondering about her life while living in a dry academic environment. A psychiatrist who suffers more than some of his patients. A schoolboy who passionately fell in love with the Goddess for the first time. A detective who ruins his career because he can't stand corruption anymore...

The architectonics of the Self that I am talking about includes not only what we think of ourselves in our minds. We ourselves are a mystery. We are what we eat, we are what we talk, we are what we think, we are what we see, we are how we move, we are what we feel, we are the scripts we play, we are the light we shine, we are the darkness we emit, we are everything that happens in this particular manifestation of our individual being-in-the-world. Our self includes everything, from the birth to the death; it goes through time and space; it weaves together aspects of  Kosmic being and experience like wind gathers together clouds in the sky. We are the Witness and the Witnessed in its many ways of manifestation and interconnectedness.