4 Problematic Pillars Of Personhood

Written by: Alexis Knight, Executive Contributor

Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.

Every person who feels themself to be real experiences everything else as real. In the story of their apparent life, they are born, live, and will die. The individual experiences separation from everything that they know, this is regarded as the subject-object world. A sense of ‘me’ knowing ‘my’ body, ‘my’ mind, and the world around ‘me’. This is duality or twoness.

This individual is sometimes called ‘I am’ or the ‘Separate Self’, and within that dualistic story of myself and everything else, comes deeply problematic foundations for its apparent existence. Because it feels separate, it feels incomplete, unfulfilled, and agitated. Due to this agitated and contracted energy of I am, it simulates a story of ‘my life’ and attaches four fundamental aspects to it to give it a sense of direction towards wholeness.

1. Meaning

The agitated energy of separation is a deeply dissatisfying and disturbing existence in itself. It doesn’t understand that it is boundless energy appearing to be contracted energy. It simply cannot ‘see’ outside of its own limitations and so it imagines a path towards wholeness or liberation from separation. As the body experiences memory, ideas, and imagination, it seems to construct a linear path called time heading ‘somewhere’. This gives rise to the first fundamental pillar of personhood - Meaning. For its suffering, resistance, craving, and confusion to be justified, it applies meaning and purpose to everything. It cannot comprehend of a universal whole without meaning because that seems nihilistic, bleak, and disturbing. It is terrified of its own absence and anything that threatens its insubstantial existence and so it applies meaning, purpose, intention, and significance to anything it can so that suffering does not seem so unbearable anymore because ‘one day things will be better’ or ‘one day I will have arrived’. This of course is married to hope which is essentially a deep-rooted resistance to what is.

2. Hope

Hope exists for that separate self energy that seeks desperately for something better. It is so restless and resistant to the energy of separation that it depends on belief, faith, and hope that one day in the future far from now, everything will be okay, that all troubles and tribulations will be overcome, and that with hope ‘I can get through this’. The desire to get through this is based on complete resistance to what is, and so the hope, is the desire to be free from separation, and this hope that is connected to faith and belief is married with doubt, that things may not go ‘my way’, and so it is considered detrimental and yet seemingly perpetuating the agony of self-hood.

3. Morality

If meaning, hope, faith, and belief are all projections of a destination at a distance from what is, then morality is the path to that so-called destination. ‘If I am good and behave in the right way and avoid these behaviors and thoughts then I will move along the path to Enlightenment or liberation. As long as I stick to my code of ethics or someone else’s I am surely making progress towards something better’

This is complete duality. It is based on the experience that somehow what is, is not good enough, and that I need to construct my apparent life in such a way that I can stick to, to have direction. It is complete resistance to apparent thoughts, emotions, feelings, behaviors, relationships, activities, etc.

This contracted energy that is disatisfying also seems to influence the body and thoughts which creates a belief that if I don’t have purpose and morality, my whole life will fall apart and everything will be anarchy. It truly believes that without its own apparent story of meaning, purpose, and morality life simply cannot go on, and this is of course a complete delusion.

4. Freewill

It believes that it needs purpose, meaning, and morality because it believes that it has choice and free will in life. It believes it is in control of the body and thoughts and that with this control, it has the freedom to direct life in the direction of liberation. When all there really is, is liberation, and that includes the experience of feeling separate from it and looking for it.

The collapse of the pillars is the collapse of me

These pillars are just as much an illusion as the person they are apparently holding up. The whole notion that there is a real solidified separate self or soul in the body is completely unreal, and so are the pillars. There is no real hope, meaning, purpose, intention, significance, morality, or freewill, they are all constructs that the illusory person stands on to seemingly sustain its illusory nature, and because freewill is one of those pillars it can’t do anything about it, and it certainly can’t see itself for what it is; a dream!

However, when the whole simulation of separation or selfhood collapses, so do the pillars. When I am is no more, all there is, is simply nothing being everything, it is boundless, eternal, infinite, and beyond all limitations, it is so glorious and yet so totally incomprehensible and in that empty fullness there is no room or need for meaning, morality, hope or freewill because it is already so simply and obviously whole, complete and perfect, and there is no need for I am to collapse for that to be because separation is wholeness, contracted energy is boundless energy, relativity is absolute, emptiness is fullness, nothing is everything, duality is non-duality.

Everything is already whole.

For more information on the nature of Radical Non-Duality, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and visit my website for more info!

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Alexis Knight, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine

Alexis communicates Non-Duality. After recognising that all practices to get somewhere with is only perpetuating the search and the searcher, Alexis recognised that this is everything, it is already whole and complete, and the I is no longer sustained in this fullness. This is the message of Non Duality that is shared from here. Public, private and online meetings are accessed on this subject, as are videos and writings.