Redefining yourself is more about undefining yourself and less about "instead of being this person, I want to be that person."
The meditative perspective is one of becoming aware of what we are. That's it. Nothing else to be done.
The Socially Constructed Sense of Self
What does that actually mean in practice? Human beings perceive themselves as a set of axioms. An axiom is a statement that can be taken as true. It's a logical construct.
The axioms related to the self all begin with "I am" and can cause suffering if we believe we fall short of expectations. Anything you fix in your mind about who you are is likely to cause suffering at some point. Because it is either how you're perceived by somebody else or how you perceive yourself, that's because we live in a consumer society. Who I am becomes my age, my height, my colour, my intellect, my experience, my knowledge, my level of whatever, my hair, my skin — it goes on and on and on.
Notice the axioms all begin with "my." Now, if you aren't those attributes, then what are you? If you look into your eyes in a mirror, just into your eyes, there's no judgment, there's nothing to be done, nothing to be constructed, nothing to be believed. You will see that is who you are.
The Witness
You are that which is the witness of your experience.
When you look into your eyes in a mirror, you're witnessing yourself witnessing yourself. Instead of looking at how you look through a social filter, you look at yourself looking at yourself.
In time, you will experience the same when you observe others.
But the problem is that because we've learned we are a list of social attributes, everyone we meet also sees us as a list of attributes. This is the heart of modern life, and it goes a long way to explain why there is so much misery in otherwise affluent cultures.
If we feel something is missing from this list, then we can spend our lives creating our own Instagram persona. A tension arises between who we are and who we believe we need to be.
One of the problems with the self in the modern world isn't that the attributes we seek to be are right or wrong or anything like that. The attributes are real.
The problem is that the social concept of self is a category error. We are using the wrong frame of reference to describe ourselves.
Throughout history, personal reality has been constructed to sustain the status quo. The modern world is no different. The consumer society has attributes that it values, which form the illusion of a socially constructed sense of self defined by what we consume. or by what we can consume.
The Observer Problem
I keep coming back to the word witness. And the reason is that witnessing is a passive act. Observation implies a specific focus. I'm the observer of something on purpose.
Think about how we use the word "witness". We tend to use it in legal cases. A witness is somebody who just happened to be walking down the street when something happened. So they are passive observers of what happened. They haven't gone there to watch the burglary. They didn't know there would be one. And so their observation of the burglary is passive. They observe whatever they observe, then, hopefully, report it, and the witness statement is taken from them, often presented as an unbiased, non-judgmental account of what happened.
We can train ourselves through mindfulness meditation to become mindful, to become an aware being who spends their life with a level of awareness. And that awareness, that witnessing of our internal and external experience, is the beginning and the end of the changes we need to make. From that place of being aware, you increasingly become the silent witness of your experience — all the attributes become more meaningless over time.
This is how we escape the hamster wheel of modern life and the modern mind. This is how we escape the internal narrative of "should," where I "should" be someone I am not, or someone else "should" be different or act differently.
Cutting the Bonds
The power of the narratives subsides, and we become aware of them as what they are, stories in our minds.
You're not denying the existence of the reality that the narratives describe, but you're recognising that that's what's happening. And the more you recognise, the more you become aware. The moment of recognition, when you become aware, applies to any narrative running in your head and to any emotion that results from it.
Each time you recognise this internal process, you're cutting the bond between you and the expectations that's keeping you squeaking away on the hamster wheel.
The result is calmness.
The power of awareness is one of the layers of benefit that mindfulness meditation brings. It is a deep and powerful benefit that grows over time.
