Why Am I Suddenly Deconstructing Everything?
How I learned to stop worrying and love Emptiness.
Readers might have noticed an unexpected trend in my work recently. I’m tearing apart or radically de-emphasizing just about everything that I have become known for as a content creator. A few examples of things I’m shredding:
Queerness I now believe that there is no such thing as the “queer community” –LGBT people spawn at random throughout the globe. There are LGBT communities, but no singular community, and I think it is dehumanizing to say that being gay requires anything more than being attracted to the same sex. We are individuals.
Race I believe that the concept of race – the pseudoscientific notion that there are a handful of discreet types of humans – is a pernicious lie that obscures real human diversity, genetic and otherwise. I believe that reifying race to defeat racism is a fool’s errand. This includes casting aside my own race – "white" – while fully acknowledging that I still enjoy certain benefits that emerge from being racialized as white.
Leftism I have distanced myself from the far left, while still holding many of its best thinkers in high regard. My beliefs now align with the center-liberal left spectrum.
Satanism I have taken a big step back from being a “Satanic content creator.” While I still retain Satanism as a meaningful part of my life, it has a much smaller footprint. Rather, it now fits within a broader spiritual mosaic that transcends the symbol of the Romantic Satan.
What accounts for such a dramatic shift? The answer: a deliberate meditation practice that deconstructs the self. Far from being a nihilistic deconstruction that leaves only devastation in its wake, this is more like an unearthing of deeper foundations. To use the words of C.S Lewis, this is a Deeper Magic.
Since 2021, I have been practicing daily meditation with Sam Harris on his Waking Up app. The particular method he teaches is "nondual" and primarily rooted in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He is teaching millions of people what he learned directly from his own Dzogchen masters.
The core of nondual meditation is directly experiencing the illusion of the self and allowing the fact of this illusion to be the focus of one's mindfulness. This sounds immediately paradoxical, so some clarifications are in order. By “the self”, I do not mean the person, consciousness, or one's personality. Rather, I mean the very distinct feeling of being a homunculus behind my eyes directing attention, making decisions, and being a meditator. This feeling is usually located behind my face. It is the thinker of thoughts, the director of will, and the subject perceiving objects.
When you pay close attention and look for this self, it vanishes. All that is left is the open space of consciousness itself — a boundless ocean upon which each thought and sensation is a wave. The self is yet another appearance within consciousness, alongside color and sound. Consciousness is the ground of your reality, all else is just a modification of that ground.
The first time I experienced this was a revelation that demarcated my life into a before and after. In the beginner's course in Waking Up, Sam instructed me to look across the room at an object and then to look for what's looking. He snapped his fingers to direct my attention. With that snap of his fingers, my self vanished as swiftly and seamlessly as a candle being blown out.
This is not a matter of supernatural belief or woo. This is a simple fact of neuroscience: the self is constructed within the brain, and you can deconstruct it.
I consider nondual meditation one of the most important skills I have acquired in my entire adult life, and it is a primary tool in my arsenal for passing the Three AM test. (I recently endured a hellacious Three AM about a week after I wrote that article. Nondual meditation and friendship were the resources that got me through.)
Two insights have emerged after two and a half years of daily nondual meditation. First, when you directly experience the illusion of the self on the regular, all the other stuff that comes with the self becomes much less personal. Identities that you once clutched with a death grip are now held loosely. You are less identified with your thoughts and therefore less attached to all the things that previously made you you. The inevitable result is that nothing is holy — everything I held dear or took for granted can be held at arms-length and examined more dispassionately.
Second, I realize that other people are just like me in that they, too, are grounds of consciousness. In the same way I take my own identities and thoughts less personally, I take other people's identities and thoughts less personally. We are ultimately the same: we have a fundamental shared experience of human consciousness. I know — cue the eyerolls. I sound like someone who just partied for a week at Burning Man. But I can't undo the force of this revelation.
At the most fundamental level, there is no gay consciousness or straight consciousness, trans consciousness or cis consciousness, black consciousness or white consciousness. The differences between these experiences are profound and must not be ignored, but they are also all appearances within the ground of human consciousness which we all share. By identifying with my ground of consciousness, I see it more readily in others.
I could do this practice for only so long before belief systems and identities I held dear started collapsing like old buildings ready for demolition.
A problem with these types of spiritual practices, be it psychedelics or meditation, is that they make you sound crazy to the uninitiated, which is almost everyone. I know I'm describing what sounds more like a fugue state instead of liberation. And yet, I can only say that this practice has reached to the center of my life and transformed it from the inside out.
The result of my meditation practice is that my identities and deeply held beliefs, while still present, are much smaller and less sacred. What am I, truly? I am Emptiness – an expanse of conscious experience within which identity and thought appear. When a particular identity or thought I hold dear gets shattered, the true self of emptiness remains untouched. The inevitable result is freedom from the identities that have, I now see, so enslaved me.
But that’s just me. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, and I might feature them in an upcoming post. Subscribe if you haven’t already, share this post with friends to rise on the leaderboard, and join the cult … I mean Discord server.
"Rather, I mean the very distinct feeling of being a homunculus behind my eyes directing attention, making decisions, and being a meditator. This feeling is usually located behind my face. It is the thinker of thoughts, the director of will, and the subject perceiving objects."
This is a really useful description for me, because I've long struggled to figure out what people are talking about when they discuss the "illusion of self". The reason for this is that I've never experienced myself this way. The self (or what I call "the self") as I experience it is simply the act of being aware.
This makes it really difficult for me to understand what's being talked about when people talk about "the illusion of self", because I don't experience myself in anything like the way they are describing as being illusory, but I still do experience myself. "I" exist in a meaningful sense, yet don't have anything like this sense of "self" that is the focus of these discussions.
"It's the self, Jim, but not as we know it!"
If I had had the experience you describe here: "In the beginner's course in Waking Up, Sam instructed me to look across the room at an object and then to look for what's looking" my response would have been, "I don't understand what you mean by 'look for what's looking'." But at that same time, "I'm looking" would be an accurate answer. It's just that what I mean by "I" is such that "look for what's looking" doesn't make any sense. It's not the kind of thing that the thing I think of as "I" can do.
I've probably just been using "self" language to describe my experience because it's very difficult to talk to people otherwise, and I grew up in an environment that was extremely intolerant of any kind of alternative model of awareness: I recall trying to talk to my father about this when I was maybe ten or twelve and he simply told me that people don't experience things that way. He wasn't a bad guy, but definitely had his limitations.
I don't think this makes me particularly enlightened, and because I'm way off on the autism spectrum the odds are this mode of experience is simply a consequence of how my brain and body work, so I'm very badly suited to teach anyone anything, never having learned anything myself.
I also don't experience any "emptiness", maybe because that's relative to what was there before, and I've never had anything there before.
One aspect of my awareness that I think is important is that I experience consciousness (what I think of as "myself") as inherently embodied, which in my understanding is not how most people experience "the self" in this sense. I had a discussion with a philosopher friend years ago about this and we concluded that what he thought of as being the least self-focused experiences were what I thought were the purest feeling of self: extreme physical challenges, from intense athletic experiences to jumping out of airplanes (the latter is something everyone who doesn't believe in free will should try, as it's an opportunity to experience the power of choice in a way that's hard to get otherwise.)
This experience of the self as embodied grounds my understanding in biology: consciousness is a perfectly ordinary evolved capacity that regulates actions in more complex ways than can be done otherwise. My sense is that "the self" as you're talking about it here is some kind of social leveraging of that underlying biological capacity to allow large groups of humans to self-organize in ways that are not otherwise possible, but that's mostly a guess. It would follow from that, as you describe, that stepping back from that kind of self-hood would leave one increasingly disconnected from those shared projects, including the identities that are among their most important organizational principles.
As always, I appreciate how clearly you express yourself on these questions. I've read a lot of the "spiritual" literature on this, including some of Sam Harris' stuff, and not seen "the nature of the self that's supposed to be an illusion" put anywhere near as clearly as this. At least nothing else has been this clear for me, whose experience of that kind of "self-hood" is limited to a few occasions when I was really drunk and operating my body by what felt like remote control, separated from it and my perceptions, as the "self" in this duality of "self" and "other". Thinking about those experiences in the light of what you've described here I can begin to get a sense of what "dual awareness" might actually be like.
I truly enjoy reading about your spiritual journey. So much wisdom insight. And, you do so well to communicate practically the practically incommunicable. Thank you for sharing. I am grateful for your articles.