The Ontological War

I started this blog mostly to explain the battle between those who think we should become more our realselves and those who think we should reject that self, but I’ve come to realize that I also need to spend more time explaining what the basic ontological terms mean.

To digress for a moment, I live in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, just above where the oaks of the valley change to the pines, firs, and cedars of the mountains. After living here for about 5 years, I thought I knew all the native trees, and I told neighbors that madrones trees didn’t grow in our vicinity. But then someone showed me a madrone tree, and in the next two weeks I saw probably half a dozen madrones in the five-mile trip into town. They’d always been there, I just didn’t see them.

My becoming conscious of madrone trees parallels somewhat my becoming conscious of my realself.

I had spent between two and three years looking into myself when, one afternoon when I was living in Pacific Grove, California, I suddenly and consciously saw my realself within me. It was as if a door had opened, when a second earlier I hadn’t known a door was even there or that there was anything behind it. Prior to that moment, I had always thought that I was moving forward toward my somewhat nebulous center.

In the two months after that moment, I realized that my becoming conscious of my realself had also revealed a framework into which many of my earlier thoughts fell into place:

• From the moment I first saw my realself I knew it was who I truly am.
• By consciously seeing my realself, I then knew that my previous thoughts about how the self I had been being wasn’t truly me were true. Later, I would call that other self my “socialself” and the self I saw within me my “realself.”
• By consciously knowing that my realself and my socialself existed, I was then able to see that each of these selves had its own ontological world, and so all my thoughts such as “the day-to-day world doesn’t feel 100% real to me” and “sometimes I get a much greater sense of what human existence should be like” fell into place.
• Looking back, I think the reason I didn’t become conscious of my realself until that moment is that I had to become my realself to a certain degree before I could consciously become it, since my seeing my realself within me wasn’t just a matter of my seeing it within me, but the beginning of my consciously becoming it. If I had seen my realself within me when I was being much more my socialself, I wouldn’t have known what to make of my realself because I wouldn’t have known anything about what it feels, thinks, and understands.
• Like the madrone trees, before I became conscious of my realself I didn’t see the realself anywhere in life, but after that insightful moment I started seeing expressions of it more and more.

For those who are not yet conscious of their realselves, two other things can be learned from all of this:

• If men and women want to become conscious of their realselves, they will each have to spend the time increasing their own degrees of realself; no one will ever be able to explain it well enough to them, as their socialselves, for them see it within themselves. Other people can help them forward ontologically, but everyone has to walk every step of the ontological journey by himself or herself.
• It is important to become conscious of one’s realself, but realself ontology has never been about racing forward as fast as one can to open the greatest Door Prize in the world; instead, it has always been about slowly and consistently becoming more who one truly is.

Perhaps what we can also learn from madrone trees is that the more we become aware of our realselves, the more we become aware that the realself is the center around which all human existence revolves.