Stumbling Across God

From absolute doubt to the witness within (Part 3 of "My Search for Certainty")

Dear Living Dark reader,

Here is the second post in a three-post series in which I publish, for the first time anywhere, a long essay that I wrote in 1996 at age twenty-five for a friend and philosophical sparring partner who had endured many months of my quote-laden conversational style, in which I offered an unending stream of references to and quotations from a multitude of books and thinkers. He finally asked me to state what I, as Matt, really thought and believed on my own. “My Search for Certainty” was the result. I only ever shared it with him, and then I lost it. Or so I thought, until recently I found it stuffed in an old folder. For a full account of the essay’s background and origin, and to read its first two parts, see the first post in the series, “The Abyss of Doubt.”

In that first post, 25-year-old Matt describes the condition of “philosophical schizophrenia” that had afflicted him for several years after college, undermining his inner experience and even his outer relationships, and generating significant suffering.

In this second post, younger Matt continues the story by explaining how an earlier shift of consciousness during adolescence, which had spontaneously revealed an uncanny-feeling potentiality of consciousness to fold back upon itself and become self-aware, returned and became the basis of an epiphany about the core certainty of a transcendent selfhood that was free of anxiety and doubt. As stated in the notes at the beginning of the first post, I now recognize just how deeply locked into an intellectual/conceptual mode of approaching these things I was in my mid-twenties, which made the whole thing less of an actual awakening and more of an attempt to convince myself (and secondarily my friend) that it had happened. But it’s also true that the position I was describing and grasping at in verbal-intellecutal terms still tracks in its most important aspects the more authentic recognition of these things that occurred later on.

Warm regards,

My Search for Certainty

Part 3

“With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the drift-wood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“No feature of our nature is more undeniable than its duality: we have a “me” that is circumscribed and an “I” which, in its awareness of this circumscription, gives evidence of being itself exempt from it. . . . And as noncircumscription is its essence, there is nothing that separates it in principle from the infinite.”

—Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind

When I was an early teenager, I had an experience whose implications didn’t strike me until many years later. I was lying on my bed reading, and when I put the book down I suddenly experienced the strangest sensation I had ever felt. It was as if I were in the room with myself, almost as if I were two minds. I seemed to be looking into a mental mirror. The best way to describe it is that I was regarding myself regarding myself. I became aware suddenly of myself as existing, as a presence.

I was so struck by the feeling that I lost it almost immediately, and there I was, no different than usual. I ran to the bathroom to look in the mirror and try to recapture it, but it seemed to be like an unused muscle that had worn out and now refused to respond. I tried again later with a small degree of success, but again it went away almost immediately.

Since that night I have returned to this attitude of mind many times, although for several years I forgot about it completely. It always requires great concentration, and I can never hold it for more than a few seconds. It brings with it a sense of imminent discovery, the feeling that its prolongation will reveal a great secret or mystery. I was gratified several years ago to find out that I am not crazy, that in fact this ability of consciousness to “fold back” upon itself has been experienced and described by thousands of people throughout history. I even discovered a name by which to call it: the faculty of self-awareness.

Self-awareness is what sets humans apart from animals. In our bodies we are not qualitatively different from apes or tigers, but our experience of life is light years from theirs. Animals are not aware that they exist in the same way that we are. No animal is embarrassed or holds a grudge. Dogs don’t plan their days ahead of time. Horses don’t remember yesterday except as a set of conditioned responses. As far as we know, we are the only creatures on the planet which are aware of themselves as selves. Our attention can be focused not only upon our environment, but upon ourselves as part of our environment. Because of this, we have the ability to choose and act, unlike animals, which can only react. Our self-awareness is the factor that has elevated us to the position of masters (physically) of the earth.

Throughout history there have been men and women who have testified to the capacity of human self-awareness to be pressed to greater intensity than is normally experienced. According to these individuals, it is in introspective moments of great clarity that we realize our true identity. We find that we are not what we thought we were, and our whole outlook on life is changed. These individuals also assert that this new outlook is the essence and purpose of human life on earth.

When I was at my lowest point of despair it occurred to me (I don’t know why) to ask myself what was the one constant in all my doubting. The idea had been growing on me for some time that I was certain of something but had managed to hide it from myself, and now I determined to uncover it.

It didn’t happen all at once. I doubted and second-guessed myself every step of the way. I told myself that I was a fool, that I was better off believing nothing because then I couldn’t be disillusioned. But without my even meaning to, I began to understand that I was the constant. Me, my own doubting self. Even when I was feeling certain of my uncertainty, I could not deny that I was uncertain. I might not be able to believe any theories or philosophies or worldviews, but I couldn’t help believing that I didn’t believe them. Like Descartes, I found that I had to begin with the fact of my own doubt, and then hopefully find my way to a more pleasant certitude.

The next step was to consider just who it is that doubts. It was firmly established that I could know nothing but my own thoughts, so where else was there to go but to consider the thinker? This led to the most important question a person can ask himself: Who am I? What is the locus of my identity? What kind of creature am I, that I can even consider myself as a creature? My own sense of self-awareness, of standing apart from myself and regarding myself, came back upon me, and I began to realize some very interesting things.

The first was that there is indeed an invisible, non-physical reality. I myself am witness to it. The very fact of my considering the issue is witness to it. Other people are witness to it, by virtue of the inescapable truth that there is more to know about them than their physical aspect alone. It pained me to realize that this truth, so basic and so simple—indeed, so obvious that it would seem to require an intentional self-deception to deny it—had gone unrecognized by me for so long.¹

With that truth understood, the next question was: Which is more intimate, my physical or non-physical aspect? From what vantage point do I consider these things? From within my invisible aspect, of course. My thoughts are not visible to those around me, just as theirs are not visible to me. So my identity is most definitely located within my invisible aspect. An easier way to say this is that my identity is somewhere within my mind.

Here it was that my slight ability for directed self-awareness helped me greatly. For when I say that I am my mind, I have said what most people already believe. They hold themselves to be a ball of thoughts and emotions located between their ears and behind their eyes, a sort of chauffeur driving a body, and consider the matter no further.² I forced myself to go further and ask the next question: Am I identical to my mind? A moment’s consideration proved this to be impossible. What constitutes my mind? Thoughts, moods, emotions, memories, perceptions, sensations, attitudes, intentions—the list could go on. Am I any one of these things? If not, am I a combination of them, or the totality of them? The answer on both counts is resoundingly no, for I am able to observe all of these things within me, and observation implies separation: An observer cannot be identical to the thing observed. Even my thoughts are subject to my own scrutiny, in layer upon layer of “meta” thinking (thoughts about thoughts). So I am not emotion, or sensation, or memory, or even thought. I am whatever is doing these things. And what, pray tell, is that?

At what point does the falling back into ever deeper levels of objectivity stop? What state, what level of objectivity can I conceive, beyond which there is no other? Such a state would be one of absolute transcendence.

At this point I realized that the easy locating of myself within my mind was turning out to be a lot trickier than it had first seemed. Somehow I stood in a position of objectivity to myself, for every mental vantage point from which I considered things turned out to have another behind it which comprehended it and was “one up” on it, and then that one had another one behind it, and so on, in a seemingly infinite regression. Was I just chasing my own tail, or was I realizing a truth about consciousness? Locating the center of my identity was turning out to be a little like rowing backwards up a stream in search of its source.

I also began to notice an apparent contradiction in my thinking. The fact of self-awareness, the ability of a person to reflect on him- or herself, had been the very cornerstone of my method, yet now I was proceeding from the premise that the observer must be separate from the observed. How could this be? I knew self-awareness to be real because I possessed it, but for the first time in my life I realized that logically it should not exist. If I can observe and consider something, then that thing must be separate from me. As C. S. Lewis noted in Mere Christianity, it is a fundamental law of logic that a standard of measurement must be separate from what it measures. Thus the reality of self-awareness somehow implies that people are separate from themselves, which is absurd.

But then voice after voice began to parade through my mind, voices from books I had read and people I had known, voices speaking about the presence in the human soul of something not human, of something superhuman, of something infinite buried at the center of our finite selves. I thought back over all my thinking (thereby reinforcing the fact that I am somehow separate from my thoughts) and saw that the ability to be self-aware had carried within it from the beginning a principle of self-transcendence. As I had pushed back the envelope of my identity, I had found that there was a corresponding increase in objectivity. At what point, I wondered, does the falling back into ever deeper levels of objectivity stop? What state, what level of objectivity can I conceive, beyond which there is no other? Such a state, if it existed, would be one of absolute transcendence. It would be a state above thought and sensation. It would be characterized by, or more accurately it would consist of, pure awareness, separate from the objects of awareness and imbued with the potential to comprehend any of them. Whatever existed in that state could not be comprehended, because it is that which comprehends. It could not be observed, because it is that which observes. It could not be seen or heard or tasted or thought, because it is the one doing all these things. It would be the self at the center of my self, the experiencer behind all experience.

Finally I gave in and accepted that such a state must exist, because I had proved to myself that every moment of my existence bears witness to it. I accepted that within my being I contain something that is me and yet not me, something that is a part of me and yet beyond me. In fact, it is more appropriate to say that I am part of it, because I am comprehended within its infinite span. And if it is indeed the ground of my being, then it must be the ground of everyone else’s as well, since we all share the same basic makeup. Anyone could repeat my inner explorations and reach the same conclusion. This was confirmed by the many testimonies I had heard and read.

It wasn’t long before I made the connection and understood that I had stumbled across God.

To be concluded next week in the third of three installments.

1. The line of thought in this part of the essay, and also in the preceding section on self-awareness, is so thoroughly suffused with the influence of E. F. Schumacher in his A Guide for the Perplexed, which I had devoured and revisited multiple times in the previous couple of years before writing this, that I really should have noted it. For two other essays where I do note Schumacher’s influence as I contemplate the mystery of self-awareness, see my “Loathsome Objects: George Romero’s Living Dead Films as Contemplative Tools” (in What the Daemon Said) and “Awakening from the Nightmare: The Horror Film as a Tool for Transcendence.”

2. The influence of Alan Watts is also central here, as anyone who has read his books or listened to his recorded lectures will easily recognize.