I believe that oppression is not (only) a complex interweaving of insurmountable institutional policies and practices, it is also a condition of mind. If we are able to decolonize our own minds, as everyone from Ngugi Wa Thiongo to Franz Fanon has implored us to do, then we can begin to navigate the landscape before us on our own terms. In Rock My Soul, bell hooks writes, “Used politically in a relationship to governments, the term decolonize means to allow to become self-governing or independent. In a personal sense decolonizing the mind means letting go of patterns of thought and behavior that prevent us from being self-determining” (69). To do this requires us to look within and examine our beliefs, and ultimately to abandon those beliefs that are limiting. This is a difficult but very worthwhile practice, in my opinion. To some this may sound like mind control. But I would argue that while we cannot control circumstances, we can exercise control over our reactions to them. We need not be at the mercy of our emotions. Through examining the numerous factors that contribute to our beliefs, such as culture, race, family, gender—to name but a few—I think we are able to observe our own beliefs with less attachment and more objectivity.
Identity is an umbrella term used to describe an individual’s comprehension of herself as a discrete, separate entity. I think of identity as primarily threefold, consisting of a personal identity (or the idiosyncratic things that make a person unique), a social or cultural identity (or the collection of group memberships that may or may not define the individual), and a psychological identity (or a person’s mental model of him or herself, comprised of self image, self esteem, and individuation). My work draws on the interconnections and fluidity of all three of these ways of looking at one’s identities, acknowledging the multiply-determined ways we identify with the world around us. Identity is not a fixed thing, but rather floating, adaptable, and contingent.
But identity is not just what we know; it is also how we know. If we call on intuitive powers, rational thought, gut reaction, dreams, if we are able to express ourselves through drawing, through dance, through words, through song, this is also a part of who we are and how we identify. From within our identity, from inside our world view and our complex network of identifications, we function. Our identity serves as the motherboard of our mental computer, the set of processing systems that tell us what to do with the information coming in.
If identity is the series of identifications that mediate how we know, the self is perhaps who or what we are striving to know. I see the self as being a multi-layered entity, and though I will try to give names to different elements of the self that I explore, one must bear in mind that these are fluid and contingent categories that are in no way hard, fast or definitive. Jiddu Krishnamurti writes his holistic version of the self:
You know what I mean by the self? By that I mean the idea, the memory, the
conclusion, the experience, the various forms of nameable and unnamable intentions,
the conscious endeavor to be or not to be, the accumulated memory of the
unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all,
whether it is projected outwardly in action, or projected spiritually as virtue; the
striving after all this is the self (126).
When I unravel Krishnamurti’s complex bundle, I see the self as having some identifiable key components. There is, for example, the Self with a capital “S.” I like to think of this as the spiritual, philosophical Self within us that observes. Rather than the one acting, it is the one observing the acting. It is linked, for some, to a concept of the divine, where this Self might be seen as our God Self, our innermost consciousness that is linked with all other consciousness. With the notion of the Self as God, where “I am” is God, our very existence indicates our godliness. For others, a better image might be that the Self is your primordial, foundational, or true self.
There is another self as well, the “self” with quotation marks and a lowercase “s.” This might be seen as synonymous with the ego. It is a gross accumulation of positive and negative beliefs about ourselves, from “My Auntie always told me I had a nice smile” to “I have my father’s temper” to “Women can’t be president” to “We are all born in sin” to “I’m a failure” to “Nice girls don’t give it up” to “Being poor is shameful.” Furthermore, it is the hidden beliefs that we do not even realize we have. It is what we think everybody else sees when they look at us. Our “self” is constructed around and within these various conscious and unconscious beliefs. Some of these beliefs come from our immediate society, from our parents, friends, or members of our race, social class, gender, or sexual community. Others are taught by our religions, schools, or by the media. Others are ideas that figure into our national identity, the ways in which we position ourselves globally and grow to embody on a personal level many of the things we tell ourselves about our nation. Still others function on a preconscious level and may be erroneous conclusions that we drew on our own based on the dynamics of our family.
Krishnamurti says that this identification process is the essence of the self (22). These messages are tossed to us by friends and family, pushed on us in school and in hierarchical social interaction, vomited on us by corporate advertising telling us what is and is not possible, and for whom. Our “self” is formed in relationship to these imposed beliefs. These beliefs end up creating the very limiting framework from within which most of us operate, similar to Marilyn Frye’s birdcage in her seminal feminist essay, “Oppression.” She writes:
Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot
see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic
focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere... It is
only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take
a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go
anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental
powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically
related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by
their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon. It is now
possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one
can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will
without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to
understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged,
whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced (176).
This is what happens to us all. All of us began life as children, bursting with beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is the state of wonderment and awe that comes from experiencing things for the first time (or as if for the first time, but more on this in Chapter 2, “Beginning with Beginner’s Mind”). Within beginner’s mind is the joy of an unmediated interaction in and with the present moment, the dizzying stimulation of something genuinely new. We begin life thinking that anything is possible, full of beginner’s mind, full of joy, but day by day, instance by instance, circumstance by circumstance, we are taught and re-taught limiting beliefs about who we are and what it means to be who we are. Wire by wire, the birdcage is constructed. There are mysteries and magic everywhere for a child, but these slowly disappear as we grow up. As we grow out of our natural beginner’s mind, we begin to think we know “how things are,” we know “how it is,” we know “how it goes.” We become “the ones who know,” who have figured it out. Wire of experience by wire of information, we construct our world view, our understanding of how the world works, and our identity within that world, who we perceive ourselves to be in relation to that world. From money to relationships to war to our own bodies, we decide upon a personal meaning for everything in our universe, based on our experiences and what information we have at the time. We make meaning. Our powerful drive to understand and make sense of the universe is the reason we abandon the awesome magic of beginner’s mind.
There is a third self I would like to define: the self, lowercase, no quotation marks. I see this self as both the Self and the “self,” everything that falls under the heading of “who I am.”
The relationship between these selves is well articulated in Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsh. In response to the question “Who am I?” God responds:
Whomever you choose to be. Whatever aspect of Divinity you wish to be—that’s
Who You Are. That can change at any given moment. Indeed, it often does, from
moment to moment. Yet if you want your life to settle down, to stop bringing you such
a wide variety of experiences, there’s a way to do that. Simply stop changing your
mind so often about Who You Are, and Who You Choose to Be (21).
John Dewey once wrote that “What man does and how he acts, is determined not by organic structure and physical heredity alone but by the influence of cultural heredity, embedded in traditions, institutions, customs and the purposes and beliefs they both carry and inspire. Even the neuro-muscular structures of individuals are modified through the influence of the cultural environment on the activities performed” (30). Our life goals are influenced by our view of who we are, what we are like, the way we would like to be (or would like to avoid being), as well as our perceptions of what is feasible. These perceptions impact more than just our goals, however. As psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr. Richard Gillett explains in Change Your Mind, Change Your World, “Our beliefs about ourselves and the world alter our perception, our memory, our hope, our energy, our health, our mood, our actions, our relationships, and eventually even our outward circumstances.” (13) Thus, the self as a construct has far-reaching implications for behavior, self-esteem, motivation, and emotions as well as for interpersonal relationships, society, and culture.
When we look at the world around us, we often see and process information that confirms our beliefs while rejecting or ignoring information that contradicts them (Gillett 53). It is hard to admit that our subjectivity is mired in the muck of our culture/s, our family/ies, and our own preconscious inventions. It is difficult to acknowledge that what we thought was objective thought is actually quite subjective. At times it is hard to even see that we participate by observing. As Gloria Karpinski explains in When Two Worlds Touch, “Since the 1920s when Werner Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle, science has been showing us that there is no such thing as purely objective analysis. Our observation of a thing is part of its reality—and our own” (25). Gillett points to physical and mental limitations to explain the futility of thinking in terms of “reality” or “truth.” He writes, “There is no such thing as seeing the world ‘realistically,’ because our very sense organs and brain mechanisms are highly selective in the extent and quality of information they handle” (27). Furthermore, as Gillett explains, “The way we see the world is based on our senses, our language, our innate prejudices, and our personal history” (27). But there is freedom in acknowledging that our truth is not the Truth, but rather it is simply one truth, and it can be a temporary one if it is not serving us. We might accept Antonio Benitez Rojo’s assertion that, “There cannot be any single truth, but instead there are many practical and momentary ones, truths without beginnings or ends, local truths, displaced truths, provisional and peremptory truths of a pragmatic nature” (151).
We cannot see the truth because we cannot handle the truth, quite literally. The so-called “truth” of “what is” contains too much information for us to rationally process.
Gillett gives some valid sensory examples:
We can see wavelengths of light only between about 400 and 700 millionths of a
millimeter. This is a tiny proportion within the vast band of electromagnetic waves, of
X-ray, gamma-ray, ultraviolet, visible light, infra-red, microwave, and radio wave. In
other words, most electromagnetic information simply passes us by…. Our hearing,
too, is limited by the capacity of our ears, which hear only wavelengths between 20
and 20,000 cycles per second, and have limited sensitivity and discrimination….
These examples illustrate the relativity of our senses… Since much of what we believe
tends to be based on trusting our senses, it reminds us to understand that our senses,
for all their magic, are limited and highly selective encoders of information (28-9).
The capabilities of our senses place limits on what we can know of the information present at any given moment.
Gillett also points to the distortions of language as a reason that we cannot grasp truth. “The divisions and generalizations of one language create a different picture of reality from the divisions and generalizations of another.” (Gillett 29) He uses another interesting example:
Richard Bandler and John Grinder tell of a Native American language in northern
Maidu there is a name for red, a name for green-blue, and a name for what we would call orange-brown-yellow. In English the rainbow is usually seen as divided into seven colors. So in English a yellow object and a brown object will be seen as different, while in Maidu they are the same color. In physiological reality, the human being is capable of 7,500,000 discriminations of color between different wavelengths of light. So where we draw our lines between colors is arbitrary (29).
Language simply becomes a coded frame, a filing system for the millions of bits of information hurled at us. It is very difficult to see and understand beyond the limits of one’s language.
Gillett makes another distinction about language—that there might be many words for slight varieties of a thing in a culture where that thing is seen as important.
Eskimos have many different words for different kinds of snow; in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India Uganda
Gillett points out that ultimately language functions as a handicap. “No matter which language you speak, the divisions are matters of convention which determine how we organize our thoughts and how we classify the world” (29-30). Language functions as an important lens that mediates our experience of the world around us.
Julio Cortázar’s observation was really quite astute, that:
Everything is fiction, that is to say a fable… Our possible truth must be an invention, that is to say scripture, literature, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures of the world. Values, tures, sainthood, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures (384).
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