The Ontological War

On first hearing about them, some ontologically insensitive people may think that the socialself is the same as the realself, only a little deeper. This is not true. The two selves are structured differently, and because of their different structures they perceive themselves and all of human life and existence in different ways. The socialself has a strong ego boundary around it, and because of it all of the healthy people in the socialself world have come to believe that good people have only good qualities within them, and it’s only bad people who see negative, unpleasant, harmful, sick, or evil qualities within themselves.

This delusion then ends up reinforcing our alienation because as people start to increase their degrees of realself and thin their ego boundaries they see qualities within themselves they don’t like or think are wrong. They then repress these qualities because of the belief that only bad people have them, and they go back to being their “healthy” socialself, all the while never becoming conscious of the fact that they have also repressed what may be their only chance of ever living human life as it is supposed to be lived.

Turning to the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape, it begins with Ann telling her therapist what she has been thinking about:

Ann: Garbage. All I’ve been thinking about all week is garbage. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Therapist: What kind of thoughts about garbage?

Ann: I just … I’ve gotten real concerned over what’s gonna happen with all the garbage. I mean, we’ve got so much of it. You know? I mean, we have to run out of places to put this stuff eventually. …

Therapist: Do you have any idea what may have triggered this concern?

Ann: Yeah. Yeah. You see, the other night John was taking out the garbage, and he kept spilling things out of the container, and that made me … I started imagining, like, a garbage can that produces garbage. And it doesn’t stop, it keeps producing garbage. And it keeps overflowing. And, you know, what would you do to try to stop something like that?

Several thoughts come to mind about Ann’s comment:

• She has been looking into herself, and she senses qualities there she doesn’t like, which at her present ontological state she calls “garbage.”
• She is beginning to sense what a realself-to-realself relationship and life in the realself world might be like, and this awareness makes her think that the overflowing garbage is coming out of John because of his socialself talk and his socialself relationship with her
• She may also feel that the garbage is overflowing into the world as a whole, which is more of a subset of her feeling that the garbage is in her: she may be feeling that the day-to-day world is wrong in some way, that it is “garbage.”

It’s impossible to say for sure which of these is right, it’s probably some of all three. But this statement by Ann does show that she is in the beginning Transition, and therefore her “garbage” problem is not a psychological problem, but an ontological one.

As people increase their degrees of realself even more, they become aware of even worse qualities within themselves, and so they might start describing themselves, others, or the world as “full of crap” or “rotten to the core.” But this will be the subject of another post.