Personal Introduction

What *I'm* all about.

Last time, I dove right into the issues I want to discuss without any kind of a personal introduction. This was intentional. Not only will I be unable to rest my arguments on any personal authority (which is quite limited, as you’ll see), but they simply can’t rest on any authority aside from one’s own contemplation and practice. Why? Because beyond any particular thing I may argue, I am arguing for the necessity of continuous questioning. All of the particular dangers I’ll discuss on this page are a result of some or another false or unexamined certainty, not to mention the egos for which such certainties are the means of self-preservation. Given the massive challenges we face, simple pragmatism demands that we question how we ought to proceed, what changes we must make to the way we live our lives, and how we can even know these things.

So, I am arguing for the necessity of questioning, and the necessity of questioning what it might mean to question. Anyone can, and everyone should, do this. I do not claim to have special abilities or any ownership of these ideas. I could leave things there, let you decide for yourself about what I say, and exclude myself to the extent that I’m possibly able. But sharing my personal experience might be useful in some respects, so I’ll say a few words. My hope is that it’ll give you a sense of who I am so you can judge my words by the good intentions of the person behind them.

My name is Bryan. I was born in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. My parents met in Hawaii, but moved to LA before I was born. Way back on my mom’s side, I have Hawaiian ancestors, and I spent a lot of summers at my grandparents’ house on O’ahu. My parents consciously raised me with the cultural outlook of the islands, with its emphasis on inclusivity and communality, and its relaxed outlook on life.

My family was middle class, so I never wanted for the necessities of life and I enjoyed plenty of luxuries. However, my parents had to work extremely hard and go into debt to support this lifestyle and, especially, my education, on which they spared no expense. Partly as a result, at every stage of my education I was surrounded by people whose families had more money than mine did. I was never bothered by or even particularly aware of this fact, but my parents were, and in retrospect this seems important.

When I was nine, my dad moved to San Francisco for work. From then until I left for college ten or so years later, I traveled up and down the coast to see him, often by myself. When my mom and I visited him, we often attended the Zen temple at Green Gulch in Marin County. This was the beginning of my conscious engagement with Eastern culture and philosophy.

Because my parents lived in different cities and were both very busy, I spent a lot of time by myself, which I quite enjoyed. I was always a good student, always in all the honors courses, and never really got into trouble. I didn’t drink, do drugs, or party in high school, mostly because it never occurred to me to do so. I’ve described myself at this point in my life as something of an achievement automaton, which is an oversimplification, but probably not an inaccuracy. I played a lot of video games.

I went to Columbia University in New York for college. For a while, I studied both computer science and East Asian languages and culture (specifically, Chinese politics), but eventually majored in the latter. But my heart wasn’t in any of it, and, looking back, I was incredibly depressed and aimless. This is maybe the first time I wondered what I was supposed to be doing and found the answers that were closest to hand - the life paths pursued by my professors and classmates - to be inadequate. But I could not find an alternative, so I drifted.

After I graduated, I moved back to Los Angeles and lived with my childhood friends. I started working at the Apple Store because I was handy with technology and had personal connections to the place. It was easy. I moved with Apple back to NYC a few years later, and then parlayed my tech skills into an IT position at Columbia University when Apple became too much. I finally went to therapy, started taking medication for depression and anxiety, and moved in with a group of incredible friends I’d make in the city. I started taking philosophy courses at Columbia - free for me, as I was an employee - and was exposed to vocabulary that helped me articulate some of the questions I’d grappled with for my whole life, questions of ethics, purpose, and meaning.

A few months after the pandemic hit and the George Floyd protest movement erupted, I realized that I simply could not continue as I had been, working my 9-5 IT job from my apartment, while the world seemed to be burning down around me. I felt that the right questions about how to make our world better were not being asked or, indeed, that not enough questioning of any kind was taking place. It seemed that we were just hurtling ahead on the disastrous course we’d placed ourselves because we blindly assumed that things like “national security” and “the economy” were worth the countless lives sacrificed for them. 

I resigned from my job and joined a Master’s degree program in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. I already had the suspicion that a better way of life would have to flow from a deeper understanding, a deeper questioning, of the nature of reality, so I gravitated immediately to a course on Spinoza’s Ethics. Some have claimed that the title is a joke, since the work itself is a deterministic metaphysics that arguably precludes even the possibility of ethics. How, one might ask, can there be ethics without “free will”? But for me, it was precisely this collapse of ethics and metaphysics into one, indeed everything into the One, Spinoza’s infinite God, that finally began to answer my questions. A study of Hegel, who elaborated Spinoza’s position, followed.¹

Two related things that I learned stand out to me as particularly important for clarifying the questions I brought into the program and determining not only the course of my future study, but my entire approach to life: the nature of certainty, and the concept of self-difference. What could a certain answer to any particular question actually look like? If there is some truth, and the certainty of that truth is something other than the truth itself, then there will always be some gap between the two into which doubt can insert itself. This is the essence of skepticism, and it can be applied to almost anything. Take, for example, Descartes’ famous skepticism (even if it was purely hypothetical and not actual) about the existence of the world and even of his own self. He may not have been certain of the existence of the world, but he found he could be certain of his own existence. Why? Because there was no gap between the knowledge of the thing and the thing itself - the knowledge was the thing. In his existence, being and the thought of it were immediately one. Now, he may have overstated what he could actually be certain of when he supposed that he as a particular individual existed, but this much was and is irrevocably beyond doubt: thought is. There is in fact only this one certainty, that one point where thought and being, knowledge and what is known, are the same, but self-different. 

This certainty recontextualized all the experiences I’d had to that point, all of the seemingly aimless questioning, the lack of answers to be found in the mainstream with all its false claims of certainty, the essential truths of the mystical traditions that I’d encountered in my studies but hadn’t understood. In completing this circle in which the result of my search was also a new beginning and in which this new beginning recontextualized everything that had come before, I not only saw how my own experiences hung together in a unity, but also how the relationship between particulars and their context, between the individual and the universal, was another expression of the only possible certainty: a unity that contained its own difference. The thought that knows itself, the thought and its own being, are/is a single thing that divides itself, and so it is with everything. All of existence is an example of this principle, this certainty. I found that everything is rooted in it, but I also found the consequences of failing to apprehend it, in believing in real separateness.

I finished my degree, but declined to continue on to a PhD program, at least for the time being. Purely “pragmatic” reasons aside, the path that the integration of Hegel and Spinoza’s ideas into my life and questioning didn’t seem to be leading me deeper into academia. I wanted to study their ideas more, and to teach them, but academia didn’t seem like the right place to do either. About a year ago, I sold most of what I owned, which was not very much to begin with, bought an old work van, and drove it back to Los Angeles to be closer to my friends and family. I’ve been living in that van quite comfortably ever since. I work in cafes, and spend as much of my time as possible reading, writing, and meditating. I am 36 years old, and I have never been happier.

This is because, in learning about certainty and self-difference, I also learned about freedom and love. Freedom, because in knowing real certainty, I am more able to articulate the falsity of so much of what we’re told is important. If it is rooted in separateness and not wholeness, it is not only uncertain, it is certainly wrong, and I need not let it inform my decisions. For example, we are told that we need to sell our labor for enough money to secure ourselves from a hostile world and hostile people. However, in doing so, not only are we alienating ourselves from the world and people who are our very self, not to mention alienating ourselves from the moments of our own lives, we are naively enriching those who profit from that alienation. If we understand this, really understand this, we needn’t fear for ourselves for any reason, because ourselves are everywhere and in all things.

And I learned about love, because what else is love but self-difference?

Freedom and love. They’re all I need, all I want, and, out of love, I want them for you, too. I hope you’ll read what I have to share with this in mind.

Next time: something a little more concrete. Probably. Thanks for reading.

1.  There are many philosophers who would disagree with this characterization of Hegel, and many others who would agree with it. That’s fine.