The Ontological War

Someone asked me what “degrees of being” are, and the best way to describe them is to show them in action—to show them as a person actually experiences them.

(A short definition of “degrees of being” is in the Glossary above, and much more on degrees of being is in Being and Life . Also, in this blog I use the nouns “being” and “realself” synonymously, just as I do with “degree of being” and “degree of realself.”)

A young woman starts to feel that she isn’t sure anymore who she is and what she believes. She also feels that in some way she is not in the real world, even though she does not know if that is actually true, and if it is how it could take place. She tells her friends “I sometimes feels as if I am an actress on a stage, going through life being someone I’m not in a world that isn’t reality.” At various times she also feels that she is losing her self and everything that goes along with it.

These feelings and thoughts distress her, especially because she hasn’t always had them. When she was younger, she felt that she was being her self, she felt that she knew who she was, and she never questioned the possibility that she was not living in reality. She also felt then that human relations were “human-sized,” that is, she felt that they were full, complete, and authentic. Now, though, she increasingly feels that she is not connecting or communicating with others as she was before and that something important is missing from her relationships.

She also worries at this time that she might be becoming neurotic, or worse.

This young woman is reasonably smart and she has a mind of her own, and so she spends a lot of time thinking about her situation and what might be wrong. She reads books and talks with her friends, but as time goes by fewer and fewer of her friends seem to understand what she is experiencing.

She thinks about many ideas, but with most of these ideas she eventually realizes they do not answer her questions and so she moves beyond them. Finally, however, she reaches the conclusion that the answers she is looking for are at the very center of her, since in the back of her mind she knows she has always felt that that is where the self she truly is is.

One morning she decides that she will start thinking about the self she senses at her very center. She decides that she will start that afternoon. But two or three days later she realizes she has not spent any time thinking about her innermost self, and so she again decides to start thinking about it later in the afternoon. But two or three days later she realizes that she has done the same thing: She has not spent any time focused on understanding who and what the self is at her center.

This process of deciding to think about her self and then not doing it eventually goes through five or six cycles before she finally starts thinking about it, and these cycles occurred because she was afraid of what she might find when she fully faced what a part of her fears she truly is.

At about this same time, she also decides that instead of staying at what she now feels is outside of herself and looking in to the self at her center, she will go to that self and become it.

So after considerable hemming and hawing she finally sets out on the journey to become the self she now believes is probably who she is before everything else.

On first beginning this journey, she has all kinds of thoughts about everything. New emotions are always “popping up” within her, and from these new emotions come new thoughts and ideas about them. She knows she wants to go to the self at her center, but in the beginning of her journey she is not exactly sure where the path to that self is. Because of this, she goes in one direction, only to find that it is the wrong direction. She then tries a another direction, only to find that it too is wrong. She then thinks of a new idea that might be the way to go, and she discovers that it is—it does take her a step forward.

As she thinks about all of this, day in and day out, she slowly refines her understanding of what she is experiencing and where she is going. The further toward her innermost self she goes, the better she is able to tell which ideas and emotions lead in its direction and which don’t.

She continues moving forward toward her self, but at this beginning stage she still knows little about it. It is still mostly a “feeling” to her at the center of her. But one day she is thinking about it and the emotions and ideas that are a part of it—as she has done for hundreds and hundreds of days before—when suddenly and out of the blue she consciously sees her innermost self within her.

Before this moment, she felt she was moving toward an almost nebulous area within her, but now she clearly sees that a self exists there and that it truly is who she is—before everything else. But even though she consciously sees her self within her, she knows she is not being it completely. She knows she is being only the outer edge of it and that her journey to it still has a long way to go.

After she becomes conscious of the self within her, her understanding of herself and of others changes considerably. She starts to realize that the self she had been before—the unexamined self she was as a girl and the self she felt she was losing before she started her adventure—she now thinks of as her “socialself.” She thinks this because she is becoming more aware that that self never was who she truly is. It was, in fact, little more than a self she had become because it was the self of the world into which she had been born. At this stage of her journey she also starts to think of the self at her center as her “realself” or “being.” She thinks this because in all the time since she became conscious of it—and even before then: when she sensed it but was not fully conscious of its existence—she has never had the slightest trace of a thought or feeling that it might not be who she truly is.

This woman’s adventure continues, but turning back to the subject of this post, each of the steps or stages in her ontological journey represents a “degree of being.” When this young woman looks back to when she was a girl, she sees that the only reason she thought the self she was being then was her “self” was because she was completely unconscious of and unaware of her realself. She also sees that she started to feel she was losing her self not because she was primarily doing that, but because she was unconsciously becoming more her realself, and by doing that the selfhood of her socialself inevitably diminished.

She can look back over her life and see that among other things her adventure has been a continuous increase in her degree of being. When she was a girl, she was at her lowest degree of being—she was being her realself very little—and that made it possible for her to fool herself into thinking that her socialself and socialself-to-socialself relationships were normal, natural, and complete. Following this, she went through the degree of being where she felt she was losing her (social)self and her beliefs and values. Still later, she learned that those feelings and their thoughts came from her having reached the degree of being where her realself, which she wasn’t conscious of at the time, was making her aware that her socialself was not her self and the beliefs and values that were an integral part of her socialself were not her beliefs and values.

And now, she knows she has reached the degree of being where she is conscious of her realself’s existence, and she knows she will progress through many more degrees of being as she becomes even more her realself.

After the seemingly thousands and thousands of different thoughts she has had about all of this, this young woman knows every ontological thought she has had—regardless of whether she felt it moved her forward toward her realself or not—did in fact move her forward. She knows that probably every ontological idea she has thought about has increased her understanding of her realself and of realself life, and so they each represent a degree of being: they each made it possible for her to be more her realself. Of course many of the smaller ideas did not move her forward very much, and individually they did not increase her degree of being to any noticeable extent. But after two months of thinking about them she would realize that cumulatively they had increased her degree of being: She had become more her realself than she had been two months earlier. The ontological ideas she later realized were wrong also moved her forward because she learned from them that they were not a part of her realself and of the life of her realself, and that knowledge improved her understanding of who she truly is and of what she now knows is Life itself.