Who Are We and What Is Good for Us?

Infinite Self-Reflection

I’ve written that our society values the wrong things. But what are the right things? And how can we know what they are? We ought to ask: what even is value? What does it mean for something to be valuable or useful or good? We say something is good for this or that, or that something is good for someone but perhaps not for someone else. Does this mean that goodness is purely relative, and that it’s a word that can mean anything at all depending on the context? It is relative, yes, but in the sense of a relation between two things. It is not relative in the sense that it ultimately means nothing at all, points to nothing, is founded on nothing. That is, it is not a relativism that prevents us from discerning between better and worse in an objective sense. It is not nihilism. Rather, goodness and value are words that denote orientation, that signify infinite disparate points being drawn to a common center. Something is good or valuable when it points to that center, toward what we might call The Good, which is reflected in all the infinite goodnesses we encounter in our lives. But this single Good is not anything other than those many goodnesses, just as Being is not anything other than all the infinite things which are. And it turns out that The Good and Being are the same thing.

When we say that something is good for us, we mean it will allow us either to continue to be what we are or to empower us to become even more fully ourselves, more capable of action and expression. This is why we say food is good and money is good and power is good: these things ward off our annihilation and preserve our being. But this is also why we can be so catastrophically wrong about what is good for us, because we can be catastrophically wrong about who and what we are. This is understandable, because the nature of our own being is one of those things to which we’re standing too close to see properly, or the kind of thing that’s so familiar that we don’t realize how little we actually know about it. Foremost among our misunderstandings about our own nature is the belief that we are fundamentally separate individuals, or even that we are nothing but our bodies. This seems to be because we have two broadly different kinds of experiences: subjective ones “inside” us and objective ones “outside” us, the latter of which others seem to share. We seem to deduce from this a more complete isolation between inside and outside than is actually justified, because despite the differences between these subjective and objective experiences, they are all experiences. What are we? Experience. Consciousness. What you experience isn’t happening to you—it is you. But if even your experiences of yourself are experiences, you have to ask yourself: who is experiencing all these experiences?

In fact, I’m fairly convinced that there isn’t actually any particular “experiencer” of our experiences. As Kant said, all our thoughts and experiences have a subjective form—that is, they must imply a subject for whom they are—but that doesn’t mean that there really is such a subject. Rather than the universe having an objective form, the form of being a “thing” “out there,” it seems more likely to me that the universe actually has a subjective form. It is not only an object, but the subject to which that object—its own self—appears. An infinite self-reflection. Consider: at first glance, there is no way to determine whether I am having an experience or that, instead, an experience of myself experiencing something simply exists, in which case “I,” the person writing this sentence, don’t exist outside the realm of the experiences that happen to include me. For whom are these experiences that include me? For no one, for God, for themselves. By all these things, I mean universal consciousness, an infinite field of subjectivity, of experience that takes its own various qualities as its objects. We are used to saying “I see a chair” and thinking that there are two objects—a chair and “I”—in some sort of objective world “out there,” and that “I” means a particular kind of animal whose organs create images “inside” its head. In fact, there is much greater reason to believe that the only “thing” here is an experience that has the quality of “I see a chair.”

If this is true, then “I,” the experiencer of all “my” experiences, is not the person writing this sentence, but consciousness itself, the same “I” that’s reading this sentence. Your “I” and my “I” are the same thing—what differs is the content of its experience. This changing content of experience happens even for our apparently unified selves when we move through time or space. Now, I am “me” writing this sentence; now, I am “me”, looking around the room. If, in the next moment, “my” experience is of being “you,” reading this sentence, how could you be certain that, a moment ago, “you” were not “me”?

But what does any of this have to do with values, or how we actually live our lives? I claimed that goodness amounts to being more fully what one is, so it is essential to understand what we are in order to be able to act accordingly. When you play a video game, you may control a character that in some sense represents you, but it would be a terrible mistake to identify so completely with the character that you forget the rest of your life outside the game and start to believe that your character is you. When we dream, we are rarely aware of ourselves as being contained within some “higher” perspective, that the person we believe we are in our dream, as well as everything else we encounter, are actually all just figments within a higher mind. Our waking experience of selfhood may not be so different, and the conduct and quality of our lives will change dramatically to the extent that we identify ourselves with the dreamer instead of the dream.

What could be good for such a being, for an infinite, universal mind? If goodness and being are ultimately the same thing, then what is best for the infinite mind is to become conscious of itself, to see itself for what it is and to know everything that it could be. I think this shape of awareness turning back on itself, of subject becoming its own object, is at the very heart of existence, and especially of the phenomenon we call life. It shows us how life can seemingly arise from non-life, and it points to what might be beyond life, to things we have likely only encountered in myth and scripture, to the divine. We know from physics that there are various features of what we would call inanimate matter that makes it react to itself under certain conditions. This is chemistry. And chemistry that reacts to its own reactions, sustains itself as a metabolic system that resists dissolution, is biology, is life. And life that reacts to itself? Self-consciousness. We can guess at what comes next: self-consciousness that reacts to itself, takes itself as its object, and realizes that, all along, it has been everything it thought was other than itself. After all, it’s not that chemistry isn’t physics, or that biology isn’t chemistry, or that self-conscious life isn’t life; it has always been the same unitary thing—reflecting, reflecting, reflecting.

So, what is good for us? To experience this unity. To pay attention to our experience, which is ourself. To be the mirror upon which God is reflected. If there is a meaning to life, a direction toward which life and the universe grows, this is it.