Chapter 15 - Viagnostic

Who we are or how we see ourselves is very much dependent on how we define the self. However, long before most of us reach that arbitrary age when we are supposedly knighted as adults within our respective societies, our identity or set of identities has already solidified to participate formally and jointly in a socioeconomic system that sustains our livelihoods. Although our options and opportunities vary based on the diversification and specialization of our organizational structures that operate that system, our adopted roles and identities that we unconsciously assume about ourselves become an integral part of the constructs that shape our entire worldview and our response to reality along with the unique and common facets of our personalities. Moreover, the associated responsibilities of adulthood and the pressures we face at this stage of life can be so overwhelming that we are less likely to question what appears to have always been accepted as normal, compulsory and appropriate. But as we enter into a seemingly open arena competing to attain some expression of socially defined success, we realize that we are judged based on conspicuously prejudicial tendencies concealed behind the densely packed seats of nameless spectators uninterested in our concerns. Some of us may experience these realities early in during childhood years while others have these arduous demands deferred for many years with the added buffer of parental support. But all of us eventually will be lowered or thrown into the lion’s den of life where we find out who we will become regardless of who we really are.

We generally feel the pressure to compromise our inner nature and sometimes sacrifice what we are to fit into a story that is not really our own, and one where many of us come to believe that we are actually the characters we were unwittingly coerced into playing. But when we trade our souls for counterfeit identities and relationships to subscribe to a fabricated lifestyle that does not come with guarantees or refunds, we lose part of ourselves in exchange for what we hope to gain. Although we may not incur its costs immediately, we will eventually feel the repercussions of our choices regardless of whether we accept or reject their linkages because these unpaid debts will expose our insignificance in the grander scheme of life. In the meantime, we remain obliged to state who we are before we truly know ourselves by confronting our vulnerabilities to minimize their risks and realizing our potential.

While we may all depart from the same starting line of our mutual rat race, we inescapably begin at different times and with uneven advantages. Although we may acquire resources along the way to tip the balance in our favour, we also face unexpected tragedies that weigh heavily on the load we already carry from our childhood. Consequently, too many of us commence our journeys feeling shorthanded by life, and we tend to use what we think we have been denied as an excuse for being selfish or demanding because our minds are calibrated to compare our realities with one another. And since we are trapped in an ambiguous existence, we starve for even the leanest portion of certitude with a craving for raw fairness in a universe where karma does not align to our definition of justice. Hence, it rarely occurs to us to take stock of what we have and utilize our assets to contribute back to the world that made it possible for us to fret over our uncertainties and inequalities in the first place. Although our daily confrontation with reality can diminish our belief in how much we can do and what we can become, we need to remember how much we have grown from the very little that we were.

Learning is the foundation on which we build our sense of independence, and the freedom of a sentient being is attached to an inborn responsibility to live and cannot be severed until its death. However, as we transition into adulthood, our illusory separateness from our environment increases along with misconceptions of liberty that are entombed in a very concise but circular argument that we seek freedom to be free. We believe that we will only be free when we are truly independent while dismissing the fact that we will never be entirely autonomous. It is therefore unsurprising that many of us struggle with depending on anyone for anything despite knowing that others give us reason to live even when we implicate them in depleting our will to leap forward. Nevertheless, we only genuinely reach adulthood when we find confidence in the smallest measure of what we are that is always waiting to redefine its boundaries not in terms of our individual power or wealth, but based on the inclusion of who and what we outline as being part of us. The independent stage of life is a period of expansion of the self through our self-awareness and empathic consciousness of others.

Many of us unfortunately reach physical maturity without developing a stable and integrated sense of self that can assimilate our incongruous psychosocial interactions and vary the roles we need to play in adapting to our socioeconomic realities. This misalignment is tied to our accumulated biosocial trauma that crosses generations and it decouple us from our intrinsic sense of value to externalize our self-importance while our underlying insecurities trigger our maladaptive fears of emotional attachment and societal dependency. This often arises from the conflict and tragedy we encounter such as the loss of a loved one and the experience of deep betrayal, which can lead us to distrust society and ourselves, especially when our competence or desirability along some self-relevant measure comes into question. Since our whole perception of reality is always vulnerable to disillusionment, we need to be fluid in how we relate to the world and define ourselves instead of believing in on our indomitable independence that contrastingly follows unequivocal rules. Yet too many of us remain preoccupied with how things should be rather than acknowledging how they are in order to focus on how to liberate what we are.

We are largely taught to regard dependency as being equivalent to unpleasant states such as slavery or futility as well as to insignificance and a perceived burden on others. Regrettably, our views of freedom distract us from the real meaning of independence that we often misconstrue as being interchangeable with complete control or autonomy where we interpret attachment as being harmful and detachment as an ideal state. This prematurely and perilously divorce us from the world we misperceive as a threat rather than facilitate our inclusion within it and strengthen our relationship with our surroundings. While we may initially need to distinguish ourselves as individual entities, we only truly mature by expanding the definition of self, which is a process we initiate when we broaden our perspective to amplify our comprehension beyond where we are in an effort to envision what we can be. This begins by unravelling our subconsciously influenced beliefs about what our culture says we are.

A TRUE STATE OF INDEPENDENCE

There is no such thing as pure independence because we are all fundamentally dependent on the world around us; this includes our own bodies, which we do not fully and deliberately command or even understand their functioning. In fact, our bodies and surroundings operate rather independently of us without our direct knowledge or intent, which is why it is important for us to remember that there is no such thing as having complete and impenetrable autonomy over one’s life. Instead, independence develops as a relative degree of self-reliance in that we are able to do specific things without the direct aid of another, while being constantly dependent on others in ways that are often invisible to us. For instance, feeling empowered by driving an automobile requires us to ignore the vehicle, roadway and energy grid that all had to be constructed, maintained and provided to us. It is a fantasy to believe that driving makes us more autonomous compared to riding public transit. We clearly depend on the people who designed and manufactured the vehicle, who built and maintain the roads and who established and support the infrastructure that distributes the fuel or energy needed to operate a vehicle in the same basic way that a commuter train service needs to be designed, constructed and sustained as well.

Our means of transportation exemplifies our fundamental dependency quite easily and further expresses its complexity when we consider that we also need a social system of governance to approve our right to build, sell and operate a vehicle to minimize all things, including ourselves, as safety hazards. Undoubtedly, the vehicle itself like any other tool, along with our ability to operate it and the road system to enable it, offers a kind of empowerment because it can be utilized to perform other useful functions. However, this false separateness of self fortifies the misperception that a person who drives alone is more independent than someone who relies on public transit by boasting a greater freedom of movement. It seems irrelevant that every bridge and tunnel had to be planned and funded without using any of the occupant’s own resources as a driver or passenger to make this possible. Regardless, we know this inescapable necessity extends to all facets of life, where we can only imagine how terrified and helpless we would feel if our food, water and power supplies suddenly ran out. We are always at the mercy of a world that we deceptively and mistakenly think we can outwit, outrun or outmaneuver because all of our freedoms persist within an intricate system of natural and engineered addictions.

Arguably, our obsession with independence aims to conceal a deep denial and fear of our dependencies that we all share to one degree or another. And we evade the evident irrationality of this obstinate belief by influencing others to serve us in some way with or without compensation or by acquiring tools and assets that endow our bodies to meet our needs without direct reliance on others. Our bias towards expedited convenience supports our growing desire to access increasing bits of liberating technology that maintain the illusion of autonomy and minimize our interaction with people in the negotiation of common resources to fulfill our needs or desires. This partly explains why some of us behave like we own the road when everyone has indirectly contributed to its creation, including those of us who have little direct use for it. The point is that we continue to hide, ignore and even reject our fundamental dependency even though we can never stop being dependent. Some of us only care about being perceived as independent and severing our ties to others, especially those who helped us initially become independent, but we are all concerned with these relationships because they had and continue to have tremendous influence on how we define ourselves.

Independence involves outlining and extending the boundaries of who we are through what we can do. And accepting that we are essentially dependent on the world and others permits us all simply focus on exhibiting a relative degree of self-reliance within the limits of what we can enable or control on our own with the skills and means at our disposal to solve significant problems and achieve personally defining goals. Only those of us who dispense with omnipotent notions of absolute autonomy will realize what a true state of independence really means. It is not the impossible state of being purely autonomous, but rather our capacity to overcome limits and release ourselves from the bondage of our programming, which begins by questioning our beliefs and habits so that we do not live as unconsciously imprisoned automatons that operate with a false sense of deliberate control. While we cannot escape our nature, we can train and guide the beast it animates towards our intended states as long as we do not deprive it of its own basic needs. If we fuel or nourish the body, it will focus the mind to question and see beyond its code to free the soul. And having an emancipated spirit means that our choices become our own decisions, which are not directly or unknowingly dictated to us. It is to purposely exercise free will not for its own sake but to seek the underlying meaning of our viagnostic narratives.

True independence primarily focuses on being who we really are or naturally being ourselves. It is when our own individual identity or individuality is expressed through a conscious degree of regulation over our actions. But more importantly, it is when we take ownership of whatever happens as receivers of events, regardless of whether or not we are their instigators. It involves liberating our own selves while confronting the realities of life. It does not mean that we are without influence but rather that we own our influences in the choices we make and actions we take to manifest our essence in the world, which includes accepting help from kindred beings especially when it is most needed. The more we focus on proving something to others or trying to be free of them, the more we distance ourselves from understanding the point of our journey through life. While we may uniquely seek to find our place in the universe to play a significant role, it is not to draw attention to ourselves but to act in alignment with a world where we can fill in missing pieces of the cosmic puzzle by serving either exemplifying or linking them together through us. Hence, it is not as much about knowing our purpose as it is about finding a place where we feel we belong and fulfilling what we recognize as needing to be appeased.

When we are young, we often dream about being like one of our heroes or role models. But as we come of age, almost all of us aim to be our own person. Even when we mimic others, our decision to imitate is still an expression of ourselves through a versioned image of another. This, regardless of our chosen representations, it is always our intention to be our own person and not someone else. Even if we do not like what we were or have become, genuine elements of our individuality always seek articulation by thinking freely and making our own decisions. However, to be who we really are in terms of actualizing our potential requires our own ability to listen to our inner nature and to guide us to the crux of what we are as well as bring balance between our conformity to secure social cohesion and our eccentricity to retain our sanity and unique identity.

Thinking for ourselves may be a demonstration of cultural independence, but the autonomy we truly seek is the ability to change our habits or redirect our tendencies. If we are conscious of our desires but unable to alter our course of action or deflect some of our influences, we will feel trapped inside our programmed bodies and live like an animated puppet aware of an alien master. The fear of a robotic existence lies in our awareness of it like being awake during an invasive medical procedure and feeling completely helpless to respond. Although much of our learning and behavioural patterns occur largely outside of our conscious awareness, it is our ability to learn and act on that learning that permits us to grow into relatively self-governing organisms. And by tapping into our higher intelligence, we can reprogram our behaviour to align better with who we are instead of blindly trying to exercise control. This means that our sense of autonomy also derives from our self-discipline, or self-regulation, which is the power to tame our emotions, focus our thoughts and direct our actions.

However, while self-discipline may reflect the maturity we associate with adulthood, it can also easily signal the managed appearance of our socially approved yet false identities that ultimately betray us. When we respond in ways that fundamentally conflict with what we tell ourselves that we wish or plan to do, it is due to the incongruence that emerges between our inner nature and our professed values or goals. The more we work against our essence that is deeper than our biology and culture, the more likely we will diminish our capacity for self-control and unshackle the mythical creature inside us to run wildly on the outside.

We will always face physical limits to our independence. And while technology will continue to help us surpass or manage our limits, it will never conquer them. Alternatively, we can overcome our cognitive barriers that affect our self-reliance and self-regulation by challenging the beliefs that threaten our development, especially when our pride stubbornly promotes an autonomous image we cannot maintain. Our beliefs reveal our inner struggles, particularly when those of us, who hypocritically oppose reliance on others, seek to conquer, influence or help others in our own society or other communities foreign to us. These actions are not only diversions but also fortifications of beliefs we want to uphold to evade realities we do not want to face about our lives and to prevent our anxieties from surfacing to our direct awareness, particularly when we appear dependent, insincere or misguided in our ways.

Our extreme views towards independence signal the fear we have of others telling us who we are, who we should be or how we should behave, especially when we are trying to answers those questions for ourselves. In terms of escaping basic social dependencies or obligations, this behaviour exposes our inability to trust or rely on others that often stems from being betrayed, abandoned or disappointed in others not meeting basic expectations, or most horrifically, from being a witness to or a victim of terror. Our distrust can also arise from being held to suffocating familial or societal demands that are contrasted by cultural intergenerational shifts that may advise us to do the opposite of what our parents or grandparents did or had to do. But regardless of the reasons, we have implicit fears of losing our sense of self, security and significance in the universe. And consequently, we appropriate and develop a complex network of beliefs to protect or conceal ourselves from the parts of our world that we associate with our existential distress as well as our unfulfilled desires whose ambiguity keeps us questioning what we really need or what we should prioritize. This is where we discover that the final expression of independence lies in the practice of self-reflection. If we want to subdue our anxieties and disquieting uncertainties, we need to break through our pretentious beliefs to get to the genuine truth especially about ourselves as mortal beings. And this begins by addressing our accepted yet misleading concept of responsibility that has remained relevant throughout the history of civilization.

A LIFE OF INTRINSIC RESPONSIBILITY

In many contemporary cultures, if not most, we treat responsibility as being equivalent or a close match to accountability or culpability. This is evident especially in political and organizational governance structures, where overall accountability moves up the leadership pyramid and we delegate select duties down the chain of command. Unfortunately, this is mostly true in theory since those of us more subservient in our roles to those who are more accountable are typically used as scapegoats. Those in power redefine risk management as the practice of minimizing accountability while maximizing authority within a closed system of control, which is built on the rapidly growing economic and legal complexities of our alienated societies that tear into the social fabric of the psyche and instill an ethos of culpability where individual responsibility must always be assigned. Since we are culturally enclosed in a collectively imperfect but highly dependent system, we find ourselves locked in accusatory stances and defensive postures that spiral out into an endless blame game to become so intolerant that no one would dare to be remorseful knowing that others would never reciprocate by accepting fault as well. This is especially indicative of cultures where so many of us are inculcated with the belief that life consists only of zero-sum scenarios.

The source of this condemnatory mindset originates in our interpersonal politics where we first interpret and adopt our moral codes. Our initial and closest dependencies on family and community often determine when we begin to take responsibility based on the latitude they afford us to make the necessary mistakes to learn about life. However, many of us are taught to mimic preapproved characters in our stories with positive performance records, which are skewed to maintain appearances. This makes us absurdly vulnerable and inclined to defend a morally mature image by falsely accusing others of the deeds we commit to deflect any negative attention away from our irresponsible behaviour. Nevertheless, we expose our immaturity by continuing to employ adolescent tactics as we disguise the fragility of our simulated happiness and try to absolve ourselves of any liability for our poor judgment.

It is unfortunate that the definition of responsibility has lost much of the meaning inherent in its root words. But if we remove its societal context, we can translate it directly to mean the ability to respond, which is more closely related to the quality of responsiveness. And it is precisely this meaning that needs to solidify in our minds and replace its pre-legitimized connotation in order to complete our understanding of independence. Adulthood is fundamentally about responsibility in that we are able to accept and respond to the realities of life, regardless of whether or not we are culpable. Hence, while we may attempt to renounce our collective duties and run away from individual accountability, we are mistaken to think we can abandon our immutable requirement to answer to life and its realities. As sentient beings, we cannot relinquish that inherent responsibility if we intend to live. Even as children, we learn very quickly that we must be responsive to our surroundings to function, while hypercriticism and overprotectiveness can only obstruct our natural path to genuine responsibility.

Since accepting responsibility has mutated almost purely into accepting blame or admitting guilt, we need to relearn how to confront the consequences of our choices or actions as well as play the cards that life has dealt us. And while it does not mean ignoring our accountability or escaping the negative outcomes of our actions, it certainly does not mean we should assume we live in a world where nothing can be done, changed or rectified. Although we cannot truly reverse anything even if we could go back in time, we can enhance or remediate many things and we do have the capacity to compensate in some way for past actions and their outcomes. The point is to acknowledge the reality of things as they are and recognize that it falls on us to respond willingly and accordingly, regardless of our power or accountability. Our responsibility lies in our awareness of events and the choices offered to us.

Not surprisingly, it is the awareness of our existential duties that naturally terrifies us. Since many of us are born into socioeconomic enslavement and driven by our fear of futility and deprivation, we work ceaselessly against the gradient of power and prosperity to improve and sustain our personal circumstances while expecting everyone to be held accountable in a system that is only fair to those who do well within it. But constrained by our own rules of conduct and unable to act with impunity, we often neglect our true needs and overlook the valid concerns expressed by all political sides and cultural shades of our grey moral landscape. Although some of us find security and clarity through our religious or ideological affiliations and try to apply tradition or other justifications to impose arbitrary standards on those whom we perceive as a threat to our false sense of order, power structures pit us against each other through divisive issues and social injustices to maintain civil unrest and distraction. In addition, we tend to seek out mythical enemies or attribute blame to evil forces that are somehow responsible for our discontent and for reducing the likelihood of a future we desire or expect to have, but this is an unconscious ploy to shift responsibility away from ourselves and delay facing the inevitable.

Since the dawn of civilization, we have been unknowingly trying to evade a life of intrinsic responsibility by sacrificing real freedom to gain false security and by violating our basic duty to respect one another. Any of us can manipulate our thoughts and filter out conflicting evidence, especially if we combine this with our ubiquitous access to prefabricated arguments with decontextualized information that we can present in our favour. And while this is part of a psychological survival mechanism that we use to both physically and morally distance ourselves from anyone who threatens the stability of our assumed identities where we are without reproach, it also causes us to contract rather than to expand our sense of self. If we truly want to derive meaning from our stories, our inherent responsiveness to the world must remain unobstructed and our beliefs about reality and ourselves need to be questioned so that we may discover the truth embedded in the whole of life as we attempt to actualize who and what we really are.

THE BREADTH OF OUR IDENTITY

Our sense of responsibility is intimately tied to our personal awareness and individual identity, and hence, how we define the boundaries of the self ultimately has an impact on what we include within the scope of our responsibility. As we progress through our adulthood, we expand our sense of self or the breadth of our identity across three domains or layers of existence. They include (a) the self as an individual being or living organism, (b) the self as a member of a community or set of roles within multiple social settings, and (c) the self as a distinct element of a boundless universe along with all other things. The first and core layer is where our consciousness initially emerges with the pain and pleasure of being alive or rather to our sensitivity and responsiveness to our surroundings that trigger our cognitive separation and distinctiveness. The second domain captures our immediate relationships, which have a mutual significance to all parties in those relationships and which may define or describe our identity with a wide range of labels and feelings. The third and final layer or domain of our identity relate to the whole universe, which includes all other sentient beings and lifeforms that animate the world in relation to one another and to all matter and energy that fill in the space-time continuum.

At minimum, our identity begins with our own lives even though we develop it through our interaction with others, and it comes with a basic responsibility that we have in common with all living creatures. However, that responsibility is distributed or reciprocated among familial or social units that typically include significant others such as parents, spouses and children, but can include our close relatives and friends as well as individuals like a teacher or other guardian who played an unmistakable part in shaping our identities. We build our core identity and sense of responsibility based on role models, and they can consist of living and deceased heroes as well as fictional characters that influence how we behave and how we want to perceive ourselves or hope to become gradually with experience.

The span of our self-awareness and concern inescapably extends to our broader community membership, where we share a collective history with other members of our society to move beyond our personal account of life and align naturally with the temporal elements of our narratives. For instance, our communal past consists of our elders, ancestors and all of whom signify where we came from or where we were, including our parents or former guardians, grandparents and the departed. But our present social reality is expanded by our colleagues, fellow citizens and all active members of our community, including the able-bodied and the despondent, who all simultaneously and interactively carry our narratives forward. In the meantime, the continuity of our stories is dependent on our youth, descendants and all children in our community who represent the future generation of our society. Hence, whether we are friends or strangers, we all in some way serve to define each other’s lives.

Of the three layers, the second domain encompasses much of the complexity we associate with our identity and diversifies the roles we play in our overlapping narratives. However, we can only identify with those who enter into the realm of our awareness, which for some of us may exclude those less fortunate if we have never seen signs of poverty, illness or old age. Moreover, our identity is both personal and social. Since we are intricately linked to the whole of society and beyond, it remains a perplexing task to distinguish between our qualities and our influences, which also obscures the line between our personal commitments and civic duties. Finally, this implies we are inseparable from the animate environment that sculpted who we are while being more than our own retrievable memories.

If we broaden the definition of the self to extend beyond our individual physical bodies, then there are no bounds to its meaningful delineation while being a sole instance in the infinite expression of existence. We are among the countless participants experiencing reality, who jointly piece together the greater story of life in the vastness of the cosmos that is our home. And as the limitlessness and potency of our conscious presence momentarily overcomes our delicate inadequacy, we see the self as both the inconceivable everything and the insignificant something that emerge from nothing while always in the process of returning to their absence. Some would say that we are the manifestation of God while others would argue that we are merely transient beings on the verge of reverting to dust. But in essence, we are the sentient universe expressed in a petite and ephemeral speck of animation.

When we combine all of these domains, we can reassess our entire perspective on identity in the greater context of life to realize that we are more than performers in our viagnostic narratives. Through our consciousness, we are the lenses of the universal truth and our base value is independent of social determinants. Although the individual and the collective are integral to one another, we do not have to confine the characterization and appraisal of the self is to the valuations and judgments of a hierarchical system whose rules merely serve the hierarchy itself rather than its constituents and where status is measured primarily by monetized assets and compensated performance. However, many of our minds are immediately programmed and gradually configured from an early age to believe that the boundaries of our relevant universe extend no further than our sociopolitical borders, within which a narrow view of our value is gauged based on a societal definition of success. And although the momentary relief of being accepted on a grander scale deceivingly feels like freedom, it only ensures that we lose ourselves indefinitely, especially when we attempt to appease those who can neither find real peace in life nor appreciate who we really are. Unfortunately, many of us gravitate to those who partake in our meaningless charades to project fantasies of our marketed selves, while rejecting those who surface who we secretly are or want to be as we neglect the importance of quality over quantity in our relationships where we try to maintain civility when we prefer to receive love.

Our freedom inevitably depends on our capacity to question our beliefs about the world and our identity because what many of us consider to be the self is a pure work of fiction that resembles an apparition we pointlessly try to grasp or apprehend. To be genuinely free, we need to cultivate our unique sense of self despite living in a socially fabricated world that decrees how we should be. And while we know that what we really are already exists regardless of how we are categorized, ranked and rewarded, many of us still allow our ever-present public camera to discerningly follow us everywhere we go and preserve our fictitious identity and pretentious life. We will never mature as long as we echo our external assessments that we have internalized since we were children and continue to ceaselessly judge or debase others as a means of comparatively raising our own inner evaluations. Hence, independence requires the courage to be what we really are without being constrained by the inherited opinions of others, especially of the censorious kind voiced by the pathologically insecure and by the self-righteous who hypocritically benefit from a system that mostly serves the few.

Given how essential it is to weigh risks and make crucial decisions, judgment itself is not the issue but rather our unnecessary obsession with constant personal judgment that only defends our lies and prevents us from expanding the discovery of our true self. If there is one key lesson that we should learn during our adult phase as the turning point of our stories, it is that less is more. We overcomplicate our lives with insatiable wants and illusory concerns while we oversimplify our major challenges with ineffective and unsustainable solutions. But if we judge less, we will appreciate more. If we need less, we will enjoy more. And if we ruminate less, we will comprehend more. By removing the blinding clutter and tuning out the deafening noise in our lives, we can better focus on what really matters and who we really are that seeks expression and fulfilment. Our true self grows beyond the rapacious ego we indulge as we build upon our basic reliance on the universe, and it increases in real value not based on what our society measures, but on our own deliberate contributions to the world that made our lives possible.

A WILLFUL CONTRIBUTION TO THE NARRATIVE

Being aware that our identity consists of different and expanding layers does not mean that we are responsible for all of them in the same way that we are directly accountable for ourselves as adults. However, our consciousness of these existential domains that encompass our presence, history and potential does empower us to develop our narratives with everything else that shares the same origin as our own. It also triggers an intuitive sense of responsibility that goes beyond our own corporeal selves, but generally, we are taught to ignore our seemingly innate awareness based on entire philosophies and belief systems we invent to ensure we minimize any concern regarding matters that are not immediately relevant to us. And while this may appear to be a wise course of action, it will likely only move us further away from our essence and leave us too disengaged from life to derive its true meaning.

It is perhaps ironic that we spend our young adult lives trying to find our place in the world while simultaneously trying to separate ourselves from the very things and people that enable us to conduct that critical search. Many of us focus on how well we can demonstrate desired talent or intelligence as we try to appease or attract others in accordance with our popular culture as well as our censored subcultures. However, we intrinsically want our skills and associated knowledge to produce something beyond ourselves for the world to consume in order to find our place in it. This is unknowingly our inclination to bring something back into the world after we have taken so much from it because it is an inherent operating principle of the universe. But many of us cannot determine what to do because we also need to align with our inner nature and not with an unchosen itinerary. We want to exercise our volition and makea willful contribution to the narrative of our lives rather than being forced to play out someone else’s story that diminishes or sacrifices our own, and we want that contribution to actualize our potential so that it reveals who we really are. Nevertheless, we have doubts and fears that both hide and expose our sense of self, and how secure we feel regarding its description and valuation determines how great the burden we carry in finding our path through the darkest moments and spaces of our lives. Our conscious effort to contribute is vital to moving the viagnostic narrative forward, but we will remain trapped in its crevice until we see through the illusions of our identity and beyond our programming.

Hence, as long as we are faithful to our essence in the face of all other obligations, we will find the meaning we seek through what we invest in our stories and how we live the life we are afforded, however fortunate or unfair it may appear to be. We cannot escape the mythical void, but we can permit the synchronicity of experience and those who unexpectedly expand or complete our identity to kindle the inspiration we seek or rouse the moral guilt we hide to remind us of how we got to where we are and what we can do. In the film Saving Private Ryan [15], in his final dying breaths at the end of hellish combat and human slaughter, Captain Miller instructs Private Ryan to make his life worthy of this carnage. Although we can never truly compensate for the sacrifices of others, we need to remember that we are nothing without others and the world that sustains us. The least we can do is to stop being shamelessly self-indulgent and convincing ourselves how everything great we achieve is our own doing. What we should be thinking and saying is that we owe this as much as we own it. And it is our greater responsibility to receive and carry the baton passed onto us by our ancestors and all those who have touched our lives to nurture the present into a more meaningful future for our descendants and all those whose lives we have enriched as well as for a greater self and the whole of life it embraces.

A GREATER SELF IN A LESSER EGO

As the complexity we encounter in our world becomes more pervasive, we respond by building up relatively weak psychosocial immunity against ambiguity and persuasion because we are defenseless in dealing with imperceptible threats that absorb or steal our will. The seemingly impenetrable walls of our psyche that we erect around our biosocial identity actually segregate us from one another while feeding the illusory ego, which for many of us becomes increasingly difficult to unmask the true self. And given how vulnerable we feel as we enter adulthood and face societal pressures to present a stable identity as a sign of our maturity, we hastily and stubbornly convince ourselves that we already know who we are. Furthermore, we devise and deploy multiple strategies to discourage, suppress and redirect any questioning of our authenticity. However, the less genuine we are, the more insecure we feel. And the less secure we feel, the more aggressive we become in defending our façade. We experience a greater need to compensate for our anxieties and irregularities by appearing overly confident and behaving compulsively consistent about what we want to project about ourselves.

Contrastingly, there are those of us who acknowledge, at least to ourselves, that we do not know who we are. We are lost and unsure about whether there is something to understand or whether we have the capacity to understand it in the time that we have to live our lives. Although we may feel we do not know who we are and what is the extent of our potential, we still realize it is in the act of expressing ourselves in any situation that this discovery occurs. We progressively sense when things feel right or wrong to us in relation to how they fit with our inner nature until we are fortunate enough to stumble upon a set of conditions that aligns well with the essence of what we are. But this is not easy to perceive because much of what we were taught in our youth and continue to be told directs us away from recognizing that there is an essence while focusing instead on the benefits of our programming.

Although culture is supposed to help us prepare and transition through the stages of life, it primarily serves to inaugurate us into our communities as valued members by promoting the level of competence, yield and conformance required to predict and coordinate socioeconomic activity. The unexpected danger of culture is that it can legitimize the moral positions and immoral acts of our society that are motivated by our dominance, status and greed or decadence, while suppressing our intrinsic need for self-discovery and our deeper alignment with life including other sentient beings. Although it conditions us to compete with one another, it also persuades us to be subservient to the social order by rewarding us for achieving narrowly defined instances of success and displaying unquestioned obedience. This easily fosters complacency, which ensures we unwittingly sacrifice our enlightenment and fail to discern the mounting tension between our inner nature and our indoctrinated beliefs. Our societies also persuade many of us to search for the autonomy we already hold and then compel us to demonstrate it within their own prescribed standards. And although we do attain additional liberties and corresponding duties as we become adults, true independence is reflected in our applied capacity to question in the pursuit of truth especially when it is dismissed or it disturbs the false order of things.

If we can be honest with ourselves about our lives, we are more likely to examine our choices and surface the person that each of us is trying to articulate and integrate back into the world. Achieving this to some satisfactory degree depends on gaining perspective on life, whether it is higher, deeper or broader. Without perspective, we cannot identify our influences, uncover our deceptions or challenge our assumptions. We risk misinterpreting the meaning our unconscious conveys and revising its message to match our cultural doctrines that measure our net worth and determine our assigned status in society. Since the ego screens for what is relevant to us or serves our interests, which includes ignoring information that does align with our assimilated beliefs, we focus on inflating our relative position in an hierarchical system rather than realizing our value by finding our natural place in the universe. It is in the shift and expansion of our perspective where we discover and develop a greater self in a lesser ego. This means growing a genuine self by returning our attention to the universal truth and our contribution to the greater story of life, which will effortlessly diminish a fictitious ego that fabricates its own reality.

We will only derive the meaning we seek through the continued evolution of our viagnostic narrative, which requires that we complete this third rite of passage as a contributing societal member through the independent discovery and individual expression of who we really are. As we begin to dissolve the ego by confronting the imprinted histories of our vulnerability, the identity of the greater self can extend further through our interpersonal relationships beyond the dependent and codependent types experienced in our youth. This is where we can truly experience intimate bonding with other sentient beings, but these relationships are not confined to those found in traditional matrimony or civil union or to those of a sexual nature. They can include any social interaction or spiritual devotion where we enter into a sacred joining such as a supportive friendship or a devoted partnership, personal or professional, to create something beyond ourselves through a steady commitment to a person, project or principle. Unfortunately, too many of us lose sight of this meaning and we give ourselves permission to break our vows or promises and ultimately render them worthless in achieving greater value. Nevertheless, the feeling that something would be missing without these relationships always haunts us and makes us feel closer to death than to life when everyone seems alien to us.

We can also experience gaps in meaning when we are in close relationships. Our relations with one another frequently come and go precisely because we are constantly struggling with our emptiness and distrust as we try to shape our identity and recognize our worth. We often use our relationships to distract us from these fissures in our confidence or to attribute blame to each other for our own misgivings, but true independence demands that we confront our circumstances when something does not feel right and that we accept responsibility for who and what we are. This often means exposing the fictional identity behind the false personas it exhibits and the monstrous characters it unleashes to hide our existential void. The risk is that we may discover someone we may not like who resides within us, but ultimately, it will compel us to face the decision to dismantle or reset the life that nurtured our ego.

We cannot escape from the unwanted parts of ourselves because they have become integral to our psychological makeup and survival, but neither avoiding nor dwelling on the negative will make things more positive. Hence, the only sensible approach is to channel the negative into the positive and focus on the value we want to explore, create, protect and restore. Naturally, there are many ways for us to express what matters in what we are, but the key is to exemplify the core lessons we have extricated from life, whether they were unearthed from deep within our inner nature or decoded from the celestial patterns of the universe. The great discovery of the self is that when we open ourselves up to the universal truth and bravely face the crevice in our viagnostic narrative, we realize that both the truth and the self instantly converge to be one and the same. In the end, the choice is ours to determine whether we use the truth to expand or constrict what we are and ultimately decide whether we resume or disrupt our story in reaching its meaningful conclusion or its terminal insignificance. It is in that moment that light may emerge from darkness or descend back into the abyss.