The Tyranny of Self

Letter from the prison of mind

---

The core reason why I have decided to vigorously seek self-transcending experience is what I am calling the "tyranny of self": the overpowering part of you that so often locks you into a state of terminal insatiability and prevents you from experiencing life in its purest form.

When the self is exercising its tyrannical control over your mind, it does so in a remarkably sly fashion. It destroys your experience, but it doesn't quite hijack your senses. Your visual field, for example, remains the same. You still see the sky and the trees around you and the flowers in the garden.

But you don't, really.

Your mind is plunged into a hurricane of anxiety, self-hatred, guilt, feverishness, rage, or the like. The seemingly catastrophic events of the past or the quixotic imagery of the future supersedes anything in your visual field, taste buds, or other sensory perceptions.

Everyone's been there. You're eating a delicious meal but it lacks all flavor and enjoyment because of the rude comment your best friend made yesterday. The sunshine outside is gorgeous and the garden is glowing with a sheen of luminosity one is rarely exposed to. But you're unable to appreciate it because you had placed all your hopes in this one job and you didn't get it and now you feel hopeless and demoralized.

There's of course one obvious way in which these mental blockages can be alleviated and one can temporarily return to the present moment: these problems are externally resolved. Your best friend can sincerely apologize or suddenly you get a fantastic job offer. Wouldn't that be amazing! Then you can finally be happy - or so you think.

But what if these things don't happen?

What if another friend deeply hurts your feelings next week or now that you have your dream job, you are struggling to balance work with family and it is resulting in spousal conflict?

The point is, attacks - or more like vicious ambushes - on your well-being by the external world are unavoidable. You can resolve to fix your problems one at a time, and you absolutely should, but challenges in life will never go away. And without any trained habit of mindfulness, your inner tyrant will ceaselessly continue to react and fire back in ways that are extremely unhealthy and toxic.

In his wonderful book 'The Untethered Soul,' Michael Singer refers to the incessant agitation of your mind as your “inner roommate” - the most reactive, annoying, and insufferable person you’ve ever met. It seeks to degrade your waking experience at every corner. 

In his meditation app, Sam Harris similarly analogizes mental chatter with some creepy, stalking entity that endeavors to destroy your well-being any chance it gets:

"Some maniac walks through the front door of your house and follows you from room to room and refuses to stop talking...this happens every day of your life."

To make matters worse, the tyranny of self seamlessly devolves into the imposition of tyranny on others. When emotions take control, all ethics and values are abandoned and hell breaks loose. When lust tyrannizes a man's mind and hijacks his moral value structure, he violates a woman's autonomy and rapes her.

When a large number of people are governed by their power-hungry ego, epidemic violence besieges their communities, often victimizing innocent bystanders. More bullets (18) were fired into Samir Jefferson than years he's lived (14) in Philadelphia two weeks ago. A 7-months-pregnant woman was fatally shot after unloading gifts from her car at her own baby shower in the same city last month (read my full essay on Philadelphia’s record-shattering homicide wave here).

In Pulitzer-prize-winning rap artist Kendrick Lamar’s song “FEEL,” he submerges the listener into the darkest depths of his imagination. He reveals his capability of enforcing a monstrous autocracy:

I can feel it, the phoenix sure to watch us

I can feel it, the dream is more than process

I can put a regime that forms a Loch Ness

I can feel it, the scream that haunts all logic

That the unrestrained mind can corrupt the outer world - and this capability resides within all of us -  is a truth so many of us evade out of fear of confronting our most ferocious impulses, as suppressed as they may be. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." The last line in Kendrick Lamar's song is even more ominous: the malevolent forces within can haunt our normal waking consciousness ("logic").

On a more quotidian level, liberally giving the remote control to your emotions so often leads to needlessly yelling at one's kids, vociferously sparring with one's spouse, or conversely, neglecting one's kids or ignoring the needs of one's spouse. Though one hopes this is far from normal, it is not rare to come across people who have contemplated suicide. For my generation, this is increasingly the case as the outer world during the pandemic has unfortunately robbed our inner well-being.

Most of us don’t want to be tyrannized by the unassailable forces of anger, lust, greed, and obsessiveness. But the way the mind has been programmed through millennia of evolution makes it very difficult to overcome our worst impulses.

This disease that afflicts humanity is so pervasive, no amount of wealth, material success, health, and general life stability prevents it from spreading. As soon as you get your dream job, all your attention shifts to getting your dream girl. And then your dream car. And then you'd love to have three kids. And a few years down the road you start craving freedom in its purest form when you weren't constantly surveilled by your wife and shackled to your kids' playroom. At one point this was a dream. And now you're living in tyranny - or at least that's how your mind views it.

This is the hamster wheel we are all running on, trying to quench our insatiable desires.

And the root cause of this universal pathology is the tyranny of self. The needling, perpetually unsatisfied, and manipulative voice in your head that conspires to derail your state of contentment any chance it gets. From this place, saints and sages throughout the ages - from East to West - have given birth to our most sacred doctrines and rituals that seek to temper our worst impulses (that is, faith in its best form - though sometimes, its rare form).

And from this place, I have decided to embark on a journey of spiritual exploration and self-actualization. Whatever it takes, ecstasy-induced revelations, month-long meditation retreats, communion with interdimensional jesters, I'll do it. And you get to join the adventure.

***

Now that we've established what it feels like to live under the guise of tyranny, this begs the ultimate question:

How can one attain freedom?