Darren Allen - Self and Unself

Published by Expressive Egg Books

www.expressiveegg.org

Copyright 2021 Darren Allen. All rights reserved.

Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective
licensing agreements, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First published in 2021, in England

Darren Allen has asserted his moral rights under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Front cover illustration by Ai Higaki.

ISBN: 978-1-8384073 3 9 ( hardback )

ISBN: 978 1 8384073 0 8 ( paperback )
ISBN: 978 1 8384073 1 5 ( ePub )
Also available for Kindle.

Disclaimer: the author and publisher
accept no liability for actions inspired by this book.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to the memory and spirit of Ivan Illich, Arthur Schopenhauer and Barry Long.

I would also like to thank the people who generously donated to my fund-raiser to help me take the time to write this book.

Particular thanks to Antony Floyd, Scott Newman, Jake Reilly, Jeanne Campos, Philip Cade and, of course, Ai Higaki.

Imagine a large castle on an island, with almost inescapable dungeons. The jailor has installed every device to prevent the prisoners escaping, and he has taken one final precaution: that of hypnotizing the prisoners, and then suggesting to them that they and the prison are one. When one of the prisoners awakes to the fact that he would like to be free, and suggests this to his fellow prisoners, they look at him with surprise and say: Free from what? We are the castle. What a situation!

Colin Wilson, The Outside

People can be very different from each other, but their dreams are not, because in their dreams they award themselves the three or four things they desire, sooner or later, to a greater or lesser extent, but they always get them, everyone does; there is no one who seriously dreams himself empty-handed. Thats why no one discovers himself in his dreams.

Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhner

Introduction

Ego made this world. Ego and world are each a metaphor for the other, with a common origin which, when consciously experienced, can free the individual self from both. This experience is neither objective nor subjective it is what I call panjective which means it can neither be literally described nor solipsistically moodied up, only gestured towards; by critically exploring what it is not and by metaphorically describing what it is like. This is what the present work does.

To put this another way, reality is ultimately mysterious, a mystery that is everywhere you look because it is that which is looking. This doesnt mean that unmysterious thought the kind that reasons about subjective impressions and objective things is useless, or that the facts that it handles are illusions. It means that such thought reaches a limit beyond which it cannot pass. Something else has to cross over, a something else which, obviously enough, cannot be expressed with the thought it had to leave behind. If it does think, or reason, or attempt to express itself, it has to do it in another way; through the means of expression we call metaphor. And again, this is what this book aims to do.

Although it has to be presented as a linear a-to-b account, every part of the book is both connected to every other part, and also connected to the whole. This means, firstly, that it should be read twice, as only the linear account will be grasped the first time while, the second time, knowledge of what is to come will inform what is bringing the whole into focus. Secondly, some ideas presented at the beginning, particularly those referring to unself, consciousness and context, will initially appear rather hazy ( or confusing, or even unpleasantly abstract ) . This is because the key terms in this book cannot be literally defined, or at least not all at once, and must either appear later, or reveal themselves implicitly, gradually, in the whole. On a second reading, the difficult earlier sections will feel clearer and realer and erroneous objections and, worse, opinions will not get in the way.

Opinions have almost nothing to do with experience. You can have an opinion about love and death, but only while youre not experiencing them. So it is with everything of importance that I cover in this book. Please put your opinions aside as you read, not in order to blindly accept what I have to say, but to ensure that your experience is not filtered by second-hand ideas, as so often happens, particularly when reading a critique of that filtering mechanism.

This filtering mechanism is the self. It is a kind of psychological tool which has taken over the consciousness of mankind and become what we call ego. Ego doesnt like to be criticised and employs various strategies to deal with the threat of criticism. Its usual response is to ignore the threat, ridicule it, drown it out with opinion or attempt to refute it with some kind of reasoning; an avalanche of facts disconnected from the point. But because ego is not merely conceptual, but also affective, it will start to feel under attack before it has discovered the intellectual reason why. Something will feel off, something not quite right here. Ego will then start looking for reasons why it feels uncomfortable. It will find sentences it does not understand and accuse the author of being pretentious, or deliberately obfuscating, or a poor stylist. It will look for and find evidence that the author is not properly qualified to speak, or it will look for, and again find, inconsistencies in the system here presented and dismiss the whole thing as factually incorrect woo, or it will take ideas out of context and accuse the author of being racist, sexist, homophobic, hypocritical or downright evil. Ego will find these reasons, and it will then declare that the reasons have created the feelings, when the opposite is true, as it nearly always is. Nobody ever reacts negatively to a truthful philosophy because of what it says, but because of how it makes them feel.

Some parts of this book are quite difficult. It demands some effort, particularly at the beginning, where I have had to outline the metaphysical foundations and explain the key terms that follow in the [lighter, and more entertaining] main body of the work. Metaphysics is, actually, straightforward and enjoyable. One reason it appears, particularly for us in the West, difficult, dense and abstract, is because we are forced to talk about it in a language that has been degraded by thousands of years of unconscious use. This language has to be unpicked or reimagined, which doesnt always make for easy reading, particularly after a hard days work.

I have been forced to use some ordinary words in a new way chief among these self and ego ( and selfish which has a much broader meaning here that it usually does ) but also various value-laden words, such as beauty, truth, sanity, love, quality and so on, along with a few less common technical words, such as physicalism and solipsism, all of which also have here a much wider meaning than they normally do. I have also invented a few new terms, such as unself ( that which is not self ) , panjective ( that which is neither objective nor subjective ) , and nous, soma, thelema and viscera ( terms taken from Greek and Latin and adapted to describe the various fundamental elements of the self ) . Once you get a feel for these terms, the reading will be more agreeable.