Escape From False Ideas About Yourself (and most of them are….)
Greetings everyone. Let’s get started. If we are going to escape, we’ll need a plan. We’ll also need to know what the hell we are escaping from.
Many people want to escape from many things. For example, some people want to escape from childhood while others want to escape from the supposed tyranny of old age. Some want to escape from their bills and their work, while others want to escape from life on the street.
Me being a self-styled Escape Artisan, I find the most important thing to escape from is false ideas about myself.
Escape Into the Rising Sun!
The trick here is to realize that ALL ideas I have about myself are F-A-L-S-E. Oh, you might say, “I have blonde hair. That is true.” No. What is true is that someone came up with a category called “blonde” and then you willfully fit yourself into it. Your hair could be sandy blonde, strawberry blonde, white-blonde, or some other description I have missed. The point here is that you do not REALLY have blonde hair. “Blonde” is an agreed upon convention for the sake of communication.
How in the hell does this relate to escape?
You are not really the name you call yourself. Every idea you can possibly have about yourself is F-A-L-S-E. The more of these ideas you can escape from, the more loving, adventurous, and creative your life will become. Everything you thought was old will be new.
How do I know these ideas to be false?
Simply. You have a brain and a body (bear with me, again, I must use conventions in order to communicate…J). In fact, these two are forever intertwined with one another. Inside this structure, ideas take place. Inside this structure, there are massive idea complexes related to who you think you are. In fact, there is no way to know for sure who or what you really are. All you can know is that the thing playing host to all of your ideas is much, much larger than any of the ideas themselves.
Why escape from false ideas about ourselves?
Because it gets you off auto-pilot, which means just nesting, congesting, and digesting. It helps you stop being lived by your habits and drives. It helps you bring yourself back from the dead.
What do I mean, ‘back from the dead?’
You are a dynamic fractalization of chaos. You are a living, flowing, evolving, breathing creature (again, bear with me, I know these little ideas don’t encompass it all…). When you convince yourself that ANY idea about you is true, you turn yourself into a virtual gravestone. You become an epitaph of some former tiny slice of description about some experience you went through or something you did.
By the time you finish expressing an idea about yourself, the you you are attempting to describe has already changed into something different.
All you can describe is the past. You are the present.
Escape from the past. Escape from false ideas about yourself. Live a dynamic life.
Want to know some ways out? Check out my blog, Escape Plans Unlimited.
Enjoy Everything!
-Garrett Daun
About Jack Wild
I think that (at times) it’s interesting to view yourself, and everything around you, as false, because questioning usually leads to learning. But, at other times, like, say,when we need to eat dinner or receive a paycheck, it’s best (necessary?) to accept that this is the world we live in…false though it may be.
“By the time you finish expressing an idea about yourself, the you you are attempting to describe has already changed into something different.”
I think this goes deeper than simply “expressing” an idea – but also extends to merely UNDERSTANDING an idea about yourself. By the time we understand anything about our ‘selves’, we have already changed – not simply because of the time that passes in reaching the understanding – but also because by the very act of realizing something about our ‘self,’ we have become a different ‘self.’ I refuse to even use the term “past self” because, as a Buddhist would claim, the self is inescapably transient (you note this well in the post, Garret) and merely an illusion. It’s not that “most ideas about the self are false,” as the title suggests, it’s that the very notion of the self, itself, is false.
It’s similar to the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, where you can never know (exactly) the position AND momentum of a particle. The more we study one, the more information we lose about the other.
Applied to the self, perhaps we can know where we are OR where we are going, but not both. The more time we spend thinking about where we are, the more information we lose about where we are going (the “rut” or “box” that several escape posts have mentioned). The more we focus on where we are going, the more we forget (and forget to enjoy) where we are. Be here now.
bravo, this post (obviously) got me thinking…
…and apologies for using the term “inescapable” in relation to this topic… but it’s the last day of the month!
~e.c.r.
Thanks much for the comments, folks. I ascribe to an “In-The-Body” perspective. This means that while I don’t really know much of anything about life, I can always dive into my own biology sitting underneath all of the thoughting.
The only place to enjoy and to move around in is the present. In fact, the always changing eternal moment is all any of us ever really have, if that.
The notion of “escape” is itself a false notion. There is no real way to escape from our situation. But, we can certainly escape from falsehood, illusion, and waking sleep. This kind of escape is more like a “breaking in” than a “breaking out.”
Breaking in to a deep and profound bodily experience of all that goes on in and around me. I need not define it all or draw conclusions about what any of it means. Instead, I can swim in it, and identify near and distant shores I want to play upon.
Mmmmmmm.
It’s amazing how we re-discover the same truths in every age. Your ideas reminded me of what I read in a philosophy class last year.
According to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, the even more ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that “You cannot step into the same river twice, because nothing is the same from one moment to the next.” Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who was a stoic philosopher, said that “it is only this present, a moment of time, that a person lives. All the rest either has been lived or might never be.”
It’s all true. And that, at least, hasn’t changed in the last 3,000 years. 🙂
Loved your post, I can only add that the urge to escape could be built into us to drive growth…an essential aspect of the process of becoming.
[…] an earlier article for 30pov.com, which you can read by clicking here, I encouraged the suicide of all false ideas and false selves. False selves arise from ideas and […]