The following is essentially a summary of some of the main ideas in the book 'Self and Unself' by Darren Allen. If you ever feel like there is something interesting in what you are reading but that it feels incomplete, then you will very likely find a much more thorough and coherent description of the nature of the self in Darren Allen's book.
We experience the world from our self, which gives us a sense of separation from the things and people around us. This self is much more than just an identity we have to learn through childhood and start clinging on, because separation is a felt experience, not merely an idea or narrative that our culture gives to us.
For instance, our experience of space, and the separateness of things, and of time, the change of Reality around us, are much more fundamental than whatever ideas we learn, which is why, no matter how whimsical our ideas of what Reality consist of, we still act, feel and think within a spatio-temporal framework. We can bend our mind and adopt entirely different ideas outside of our usual frame of reference, but it's not easy to see how we could experience non-spatiality, or non-temporality, or non-existence, which highlights that these aspects are quite a bit more subtle than that.
Self is an extremely important part of our lives, it is what allows us to interact in the world, through our body and will, which we can strengthen and which confront us with our own limits, and experience internal states, through our mind and emotions, which can guide our decisions and help us to relate with others.
But self is not all there is to the story. Even though our mind and our will like to pretend that they are in charge, there is a conscious I which 'precedes' our self, which is how we can experience anything in fact. To experience anything is to be conscious, a consciousness which is 'always' 'there', but which gets 'filtered' through the 'lens' of my self, which is why our pre-conceived biases can make us blind to something that clearly happened—it couldn't have happened because it would contradict the Science!—or our emotions can make us interpret someone's actions as malevolent when they were simply clumsy or ignorant.
The trickiness of relating consciousness to self is that fundamentally, the former cannot be reduced to literal ideas, which have their limitations. When we use words such as 'behind' or 'precede' to talk about how consciousness is more fundamental than self's experience, we are introducing an implied spatiality and temporality, which 'come' from the self and not Reality or consciousness themselves. In other words, we can relate the conscious I and our self through metaphors but not literal ideas, which systematically create divisions, or dualities, in what is ultimately a united whole.
This doesn't mean that consciousness is "complicated", after all we are all conscious Is, which means that we can all know what consciousness is through being, which is more fundamental than knowing and does not require any intermediaries. The trickiness comes rather from the fact that self is constantly interpreting things around it, and wants to convert the ineffable into something effable, something which it can understand easily and then use for its own survival, or pleasure, or power.
In other words, the conscious I perceives Reality, but 'then' self only experiences representations of it, through its mind and emotions for instance. A representation can be accurate, meaning that someone's concepts can match up very well, given the right context, with Reality, and allow them to make reliable predictions. This is what gives us Science, which despite its limitations, has evidently given us much understanding about our world. But it has given us understanding of a represented world, one of matter we can intellectually grasp, measure and describe, not of Reality itself, which is consciously experienced directly. This is why, as mentioned in the piece about the self-referentiality of the mind, scientists tend to answer away, by referring you to more concepts, because they are not rooted in direct experience.
What are the people we can turn to when it comes to direct experience? For that, we can turn to the greatest artists across time, who had aspirations to convey Reality and its emerging qualities through their respective medium. Even if a canvas, a poem or a piece of music are all finite separate things shaped and experienced by an individual's self, they point to a vivid Reality which we can consciously experience, and which gleams from the works of Rembrandt, Baudelaire or Beethoven. We could say that they allowed their self to 'step away' to experience a vivid Reality through their (access to) consciousness 1, which they then brought back in the familiar world of the self, a self which they had to develop through harduous practice in order to reach the technical mastery necessary to honor the qualities that their conscious I experiences.
The best artists have this amazing combination of a self in service of a greater Whole, a conscious and united Reality, whether it is the Truth we get from Dostoevsky's novels, a Truth which like the best jokes, cannot be summarized to a few set of ideas, because it is found in the whole, or the Beauty from one one of Monet's painting, which despite being on the surface 'not realistic', strikes us as far more vivid than how we typically view the world around us. This is why we rightfully call those great artists geniuses, because few develop in their life this combination of conscious depth of experience, with the self-mastery necessary to put it into a beautiful form.
What happens when an artist cannot reach greatness is that they tend to follow two seemingly opposite paths, one obsessed with mere technical mastery, but hollowed out of any conscious quality, which is how we get the myriad of contemporary photo-realistic artists who depict scenes which are utterly boring, but which get incredibly popular on social media.
On the (seemingly) opposite side we get those who tell us that art is entirely subjective, meaning that they can make whatever they fancy, whether it is a banana plastered on a wall, or puke splattered on the floor, because they tell us that form is irrelevant to "true art". They are not very keen on telling us what this "true art" is though, either through words or better yet, through their own art, because they are ultimately not interested in conscious qualities, only in their masturbatory subjectivity and their solipsistic ideas.
The two sides of obsessive technician and self-absorbed modern artiste seem opposites, but they are ultimately united in their lack of (access to) consciousness, which not only means that their work is empty of any conscious quality, but that they do not even notice what is missing. The technician sees what he doesn't understand as fanciful invention, whereas the artiste sees masterful technique as irrelevant to "bigger" ideas.
Which leads me to perhaps the most fundamental point about the self. There is nothing inherently wrong with experiencing separation, representing the world, or acting on it for one's own benefit. We must do all of those as human beings, which is why a crude interpretation of spirituality as being about "killing the self" is incredibly misleading and in many ways antithetical to living virtuously. We do have a self, and it is valuable to develop it, but the real problems occur when this self becomes self-informed, when all that we have are separation, representations (mind), likes and dislikes (emotions), pleasure (body), ambition and power (will).
In such a state, which I am going to refer to as 'ego', it only makes sense for the self to violently cling to what it has, because there is nothing else in Reality that could inform it to do otherwise. Ego is alienated from consciousness and everything which depends on it, which makes it fear it, such as how modern people are afraid of silence and immediately reach out for a screen to distract themselves, because they do not want to consciously sit with anything, or how they can be afraid of interacting with other people without any script or specific reason, because they are afraid of intimacy and spontaneity.
The selfishness of ego, and the length it will go to preserve itself and hide its wicked nature from itself and others, might appear incredibly irrational to the outside, but to itself it is always, always rational. Its drive for self-maintenance exists because it fundamentally only experiences itself, which implies that only more can make sense to it, more power, money, safety, intelligence, ambition, pleasure, which also means that less or qualitatively different are at best irrelevant, or at worst, utterly terrifying such as in the case of its own death.
This drive for constantly more culminates in what we call addiction, which can take the form of pleasurable substances, sex, narcotics to numb the pain of the body, an obsession with acquiring ever more money and status (will), an addiction to the roller coaster of drama (emotions), or masturbating over an idea of someone (mind).
Addiction looks monstrous, empty, and utterly self-destructive on the outside, because it is, but on the inside, it feels to the ego like freedom, like elation, because again all it understands is its own solipsistic bubble of experience, not the greater whole in which is it embedded.
The self-informed nature of ego means that it will always play a game of rationalization with itself. It will always come up with justifications about its own selfishness, cowardice, lovelessness, disinterest in things, because fundamentally it resists change, particularly surrender to something greater than itself, at all costs.
This is the tragic existential nature of ego: it is impossible to convince an egoic person to give up their ego, because any such reason would be grounded in a broader conscious reality which it does not have access to. Love does not convince ego because it does not experience love, only the pleasure from having sex, or the stroke to its own self-esteem, or the reassurance of a safe relationship, but never the self-softening experience of loving someone and experiencing, even for just a moment, someone else's consciousness by looking into their eyes.
Thus ego is committed to, not as a decision but as the nature of its own blindness, a life which torments it in ways it cannot solve. It runs away from conscious reality and then craves more self-satisfaction (pleasure) and self-augmentation (power), but nothing can fundamentally fill its emptiness.
Ego would prefer to rationalize its existential fears and start building an entire world which can shield it from conscious reality than face the Truth. This is not just insane because it's an attempt to go against Reality, but also because even that project cannot satisfy the ego.
The building of the world is juxtaposed with a building of the ego, rooted in existential fear, and this project initially seems to create a prodigious armor for the self which can be used to ward away any danger, any uncertainty. Things seem to work at first because the resource base of any early civilization is abundant, because the complexity of operations is low meaning that things can quickly change and adapt to new problems, and because exploration and figuring out new challenges is exciting at first.
Eventually however, exploration gives way to routine, monotony and bureaucracy, simplicity to complexity, and abundance to scarcity, which forces a self committed to civilization to double down and fight other selves over scarce resources and over ideologies, and violently coerce other people to keep working for the failing civilization.
This cycle in rise and fall has happened many times, the main examples revolving around Europe being the Bronze Age collapse, the fall of the Roman Empire, and currently the decline of the Modern World, which is most evident in the poorer parts of Europe and America, but which is coming for the developing countries too eventually.
The most interesting thing about such a decline is that the combination of the complexity of our world, and the ever-present divisions found in it, implies that there will always be a justification as to why things aren't working out, a justification which allows ego to not look at itself. Ego can always blame a group of people for the failures of civilization, or this or that trend it has identified—religion, secularity, feminism, toxic masculinity, capitalism, intergenerational trauma—which are all true from their limited perspectives, but miss the deeper reality of the fundamental alienation at the root of ego and civilization.
Just like an addict will examine everything but their own addiction to explain their own problems, ego will go through an endless list of reasons to justify why it currently feels joyless, loveless, tense, passionless, enslaved, and why the world around it is complicit in such a state. Fundamentally, ego cannot solve its own problems, because to change would require a surrender to a conscious reality bigger than itself, which it rationally equates to death.
This dynamic as a whole is not a problem, an isolated thing which a mind could grasp and work on solving. It's an existential impasse because to describe it in literal terms would reduce it down to the language which ego can work with and thus co-opt so as to assimilate it. Which is to say, if you believe that simply meditating will make all the problems in your life go away, your ego will co-opt meditation so as to render it impotent, you will for instance start to meditate in a mechanical manner, the exact opposite of being more conscious, or you will use meditation as a tranquilizer for the problems in your life, or you will turn meek passivity into a virtue, or you will erect a hierarchy of states which you can work your way up there and attain "higher" states, all as a distraction from ego itself.
Only unity can dissolve ego, and the lens of problems is fundamentally one of shatter and control. This unity cannot be captured in literal means, which is why our plans for happiness always make us unsatisfied in an important way, why real cultures cannot be engineered into existence, why you cannot reduce the writing of a good novel into following a few principles, and why all attempts to make people more loving have fallen down to the state of dogmatic religions, which end up becoming the justification of countless wars and other atrocities.
And this unity is not some "thing" out "there" to reach out for or figure out, it is expressed through the conscious I reading these words right now. And even if my self is be too rigid to allow much of it to come through, it is still here and will always be here, even when the self which calls itself 'I' dies, it will be here, because only fear dies. 2
1 To say "one's consciousness" is rather misleading because consciousness does not belong to anyone, since it is not finite or spatial. But each individual certainly has a different access to consciousness, which is a capacity we can develop, or in the case of most people, let wither away, which is why children tend to be so curious and alive, whereas most adults nowadays are dead inside, 'living' as bags of habits, prejudices and tension.
2 The title of a book by Barry Long.
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Ego Separation Problems Existential
2025-10-24