Chapter 12
Goals and Identity
I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 12.
I’m going to come at the idea of goals at a slightly different angle to what we may be used to. I want us to consider, based on the upcoming idea of our manifesto, that our goals are value based, and not centred around the idea of definite outcomes.
It’s no surprise that we associate outcomes with goals - it’s what’s been ingrained in us since the days of school. Metrics, performance indicators, assessments. Definitions of our personal achievement and success.
It should come as no surprise now that we’ll be looking at goals from a much more holistic and esoteric perspective.
These old frameworks that we’re used to will tell us that an actionable outcome will be getting that better job, a bigger house, more money, more respect, or some other thing based in the material realm.
The issue I have with these frameworks is that, whilst they do help us move towards something measurable, they don’t capture the gamut of the human experience. They’re distinctly devoid of the emotional and spiritual motivators that often drive us. How do we satisfy the emotional and the spiritual when defining our goals? What metrics can we use to define these?
This is where things can get a little outside of the realms of what we’re used to. I spoke earlier about how we’re very familiar with definable metrics. Of course, if we have metrics, we can measure them. We can see how far we’ve come and review the aspects that have changed.
It’s in this maelstrom of numbers and records and statistics that we can become lost, however. We lose sight of the dimensions of our being. That’s the critical point to remember here. Being.
To quote Alan Watts, we are human beings, not human doings. We can’t measure ourselves in the same way that industry measures the output of a production line, or how a software development team measures the velocity of features that it delivers. The problem is that we try to, because it’s what we know. It’s our familiar way of quantification and measurement.
How do we measure the ephemeral self? Just take a moment to think about that.
When I first asked myself that question, it felt like trying to measure the circumference of fog, like wrapping a tape measure around a ghost. I had to lean on some thinkers of old to try and get my head around this problem.
As an engineer, I rely heavily on the rules of empiricism - if I can’t see it, measure it, or test it, then I’m not interested. This was a significant roadblock when it came to trying to define an identity against which I could set some goals.
My first port of call was the philosopher David Hume. This guy’s all about empiricism, I thought. He must have made some headway into solving the problem. Well, he did, but not to the extent that I was hoping for.
Hume was a Scottish philosopher, and renowned for his work in modern scepticism. He went so far as to have an existential crisis when he began looking at the nature of the self, so at first glance this didn’t bode well. I’ve already had enough existential crises in my life - the last thing I want is to fall into another so close to having this book finished.
As I dove into his work, I quickly realised that Hume didn’t believe that the sense of self could be defined at all. His idea was that it’s just a bundle of perceptions, constantly changing over time. This made sense. We’re nothing but the product of our experiences, and our experiences shape our reality.
Hume did say that if we were to turn that powerful light of consciousness inwards, we’d never actually observe anything that resembles a concrete identity. All we’d find are a series of different, fleeting perceptions. He alluded that the self isn’t something of substance, but simply a collection of experiences that have no fixed reality underlying them.
How, then, can we define goals to something so esoteric and ephemeral? It turns out it’s not quite as terrifying a task as it might appear at first glance. Our concrete identity might not be quite so easy to pin down, but we can be certain of our perceptions and how they influence our thoughts.
Some perceptions are going to work for us in a positive way, and some are going to hinder us. It’s only when we look at and understand the nature of these perceptions that we can begin to attach the idea of changing them.
That’s the fundamental idea here when we talk about defining our goals in such a cloudy, uncertain environment. We have to find the aspects that we can observe, and not concern ourselves with worrying about those shifting internal sands that we can neither see nor define.
For me, this distils down to 2 things:
Our perceptions, and
Our values
In order for us to observe our perceptions, we’re going to have to apply some of those self awareness tools that we spoke about earlier. Understanding where our perceptions come from (whether they’re from us or something external) and knowing the kinds of emotional triggers that fire off certain types of thinking.
Then there are our values. Again, if we focus the observing eye upon our thoughts, we can see what these are. They’re our motivators, the things that we assign importance to, and that drive our behaviour.
The question I had at this point was do our values shape our perceptions, or do our perceptions shape our values?
I spent a while rolling that question around in my head. I thought I’d genuinely managed to find something that I could use to benchmark our goals against when I decided on perceptions and values. Turns out, the deeper down the rabbit hole we go with this, the more complex it becomes. Explains why people have spent millennia battling with the idea of “self”, so that made me feel slightly better about the whole thing (despite the ever increasing frustration at trying to work out how to handle this).
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that they influence each other. Our perceptions are able to shape our values by influencing what we deem to be important. Our personal experiences and perception of societal norms can certainly mould our values when it comes to compassion, equality, and justice, for example.
On the other side of the coin, our values will shape our perceptions by acting as filters through which we interpret and infer the world. They’re part of what creates our bias, determining what we find important, how we evaluate the behaviour of others, and what we pay attention to.
So it’s a big, messy psychological feedback loop. One drives the other, which in turn drives it back. They’re continuously modifying and influencing each other. Not independent, but interdependent.
I feel like I’ve gone around in a circle. That in trying to define observable facets of the self, I’ve ended up at the conclusion that the self is just a combination of perception and values. I get why people have struggled with this. I’m feeling like I’m getting dragged into a recursive loop and I’m going to end up some broken machine, forever trapped in its own thoughts, smoke gently cascading from its open mouth.
For all intents and purposes, then, let’s use this:
The self is just a combination of perceptions and values.
The next question that arises is how do we measure change in the constantly evolving vapour of values and perceptions?
To answer this, or at least attempt to, I’m going to borrow from Buddhism. Observing our perceptions is a key component of meditation. It’s not just about focusing on our breathing and sitting quietly with ourselves. Meditation, from a Buddhist perspective, is quite an active process.
In Buddhism, we have this idea of the ego and the awareness. Our ego, of course, is our sense of “I”, the fountain of our thoughts. Very often we’ll consider our ego as this permanent thing, unchanging and independent. The source of all that we are.
But what if I were to suggest that our sense of self is an illusion? A construct conditioned by our experiences, emotions, and perceptions.
It’s a very challenging way to look at the self. Even trying to consider that the thing that gives us our identity might not even be real often leads to the mind blue-screening like a broken laptop.
The ego is seen as the root of all suffering. It clings to attachments and aversions (another important concept in Buddhism), craves desires, and ultimately chases pleasure and avoids pain.
In contrast, our awareness - referred to as anatta, or “no-self” - is the idea that we have no unchanging essence. Instead, what we consider to be the self is just a constantly changing flux of thought and emotion.
Meditation is our way of developing that awareness. It’s a process where we try to observe our thoughts and emotions without attaching to them and without any form of judgement. Simply noticing them and letting them go.
There’s a Jamaican spiritual teacher called Mooji who describes this concept in a much more relatable way than you might find in Buddhist literature.
He says that we should first imagine a clear blue sky. That’s our awareness, our anatta. Always present, and always clear. Within that sky we have the clouds. These come and go, and they represent our thoughts and emotions, the integral parts of our ego.
Like the clouds, our thoughts arise out of nothing and dissolve into nothing. Sometimes, those clouds are sparse and the sky is calm. Other times, they’re thick and dark and a storm rages.
When we’re in the clouds, we’re inside of our ego. Subject to being buffeted back and forth in the storm of emotions. When we are angry, for example, we become the anger. But if we move our attention to the sky above the clouds, we can observe them outside of that storm. We can see our anger, but we’re detached from it.
What I like about this analogy is that it recognises that, even though we can consider the self an illusion, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. How could it not? It’s the very window through which we perceive the world. Even if it were possible to remove it, how could we then function as a human being? We are defined by what we experience. Without it, we’d be nothing but an ethereal awareness, and I don’t even know where to start on describing that.
Looking at our sense of self in this way gives us a means of trying to understand those perceptions and values that make up who we are. We’re not trapped in the thick of them. No longer the observer futilely attempting to observe itself.
It gives us a point of abstraction. An awareness of mind looking back upon the construct of mind.
As that awareness grows, we begin to see the impermanent nature of all things. Our jobs, our material possessions. Even our sense of self. In time, we start to loosen our grip on the ego. It’s still there, but it becomes more distant, along with all of those attachments and aversions that drive our motivations in life.
That’s not to say that we’ll ever truly be free from them, but what we do get is a lowering of their volume. A bit of breathing room between our thoughts and emotions and the subsequent actions that we take as a result of them.
How can we possibly apply this idea to defining our goals? On the surface, it feels like a daunting task. At least it did for me when I first considered it.
The conventional approach to goal setting has always centred around the ego and external validation. When the ego is driving, we’ll often set goals based on a desire to prove our worth or to accumulate material wealth. The problem with this approach is that the ego is never truly satiated. There’s always the next milestone, the next achievement. Forever running on the hedonic treadmill and offering us nothing but perpetual dissatisfaction.
When we look at goals from a sense of anatta, from the awareness, we come at them from a place of detachment and equanimity. It becomes more about the process than the outcome, abandoning the traditional measuring stick of success and, instead, integrating all aspects of our being into the equation - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
Instead of aligning our goals with the external loci of attachment and aversion, we’re able to base them on our passions and our values. In this, we could argue that we’re living up to those lofty ideals of self actualisation that Maslow talked about. No longer driven by esteem or the facade that we feel we have to present to the world.
You will undoubtedly find, as you explore your goals without clinging too strongly to the wants of the ego, that surprising things will begin to emerge. You’ll see challenges as opportunities for discovery rather than blockers that stand in the way. You’ll notice a deeper sense of meaning in the choices that you’re making, and an interconnectedness between yourself and the wider whole.
You may notice that your aspirations include more of a sense of purpose and service once you loosen the hold of the little engine of want. Or perhaps you’ll witness a shift towards goals that are more focused on the internal than the outside world.
The only way that we can achieve any of this is to continually work on ourselves. To incorporate time into the practice of observing our thoughts rather than becoming them. Am I suggesting that you start meditating? Well, to be blunt, yes. And I say that because it’s the only tool that I’ve come across that’s been in any way effective for me.
It would be remiss of me, however, to not offer up some alternatives, because I appreciate that meditation isn’t for everyone.
Yoga and similar practises like Tai Chi that get you into a head space of aligning the body and the mind in a singular purpose. These are great tools because, when practised properly, they help us to keep our mind in the present moment. And what exists only in the present moment? You guessed it, our awareness, our anatta.
Creative expression is another good way of engaging with our awareness. Entering into the flow state where the mind, again, resides in the present. Aligned into a place of singular focus. When we’re fully immersed in the process of creation, that sense of self will tend to dissolve, allowing us to connect with something deeper. More expansive.
Have you spotted the pattern?
Activities that allow us to be “of the moment”, where the past and the future fade out of view, and we almost become the action that we’re performing. That’s the key to engaging with our awareness.
As you might expect, getting to this point is far from easy. It’s not a straight or comfortable road. I’ve spent years on this, and I’ve got plenty of work still to do. But I think that’s the point. As human beings, we’re never truly “finished”. There’s no defined end goal to any of it. We’re simply living a moment at a time, and choosing to try and better ourselves with each step.
I posed a question at the start of this section, and that was what metrics can we use to define the emotional and the spiritual?
The more time I’ve spent exploring the nature of identity and self, the more I am drawn to a singular conclusion, and that’s this:
The ultimate metric is that there isn’t one.
Our existence isn’t a discrete series of milestones. It’s not a set of KPIs that we have to meet. The real, raw human experience is a voyage of consciousness. We start at the spring and we end at the sea, and all we can hope is that, in passing through this world, we leave it a slightly better place than when we found it.
The book is available to buy from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book, if you want to add it to your book shelf.