I’ve been feeling more and more lately the desire to write an essay explaining my perspective, life stance, and some ideas I think we could all benefit from. This post series is an attempt to scratch that itch. This is part one and it focuses on oneness and schizoid personality disorder. Here’s my experience and general principles I’ve distilled from it.
I wrote On Mindfulness five years ago and it contains the seeds of ideas I’ll discuss more fully here. Read that first if you want to, but here is a brief summary: I was feeling depressed and detached, so I tried LSD, as I’d heard about the “spiritual” experiences it had given others and felt I needed such an experience. And it did help me reconnect with a vital part of myself: I gained more respect for the physiological components of well-being, exercising regularly, meditating, and eating better, instead of just trying to figure out what was wrong with me and why I wasn’t happy. It was spiritual, as I had hoped, and life was good for a while.
Spirituality is hard to define, but it always involves a big picture, and I think it’s fair to say spirituality is basically the big picture you subscribe to. When you zoom out and try to understand where you fit in the universe, what do you see? Oneness was the heart of the spirituality I found: I saw that everything is fundamentally one thing and one event.
There’s a distinction between knowing something and experiencing it as a perspective. Here’s a description of drunkenness: “you’re more likely to lose your train of thought, there’s a sort of gentle buzzing in your head, and your vision becomes more disorienting the more drunk you are, like everything is moving sideways.” If you’ve been drunk, you may agree that’s accurate, but it doesn’t do the experience justice. You can’t read that and truly know what it is to be drunk. No description can capture that. Likewise, descriptions about oneness cannot touch the experience of oneness that psychedelic drugs or intense meditation practice induce. To be clear, I’m not saying taking acid is like being drunk, only that, like drunkenness, you can’t truly understand it until you experience it yourself. There’s a gulf between thinking “if you break it down, we’re kind of all the same thing” and literally feeling yourself dissolve into Everything.
Oneness is the most significant common denominator in accounts of psychedelic use, which are otherwise very personal and hard to put into words. An experience of oneness, as a result of the dissolution of self, is what the phenomenon ego death is about, for example. I don’t like using LSD as an example because it’s not an experience many people can relate to, and because it’s a controversial and misunderstood drug in general. But it’s one of the most potent and reliable ways to experience oneness, and it’s the source of most of my own deep experiences of oneness, so I can’t get around discussing it. Other avenues to experience oneness are meditation practice and, to a lesser extent, exercise. I sometimes experience a runner’s high, the blissful zen-like state brought about by strenuous exercise, and it’s a similar feeling to being on acid, a fleeting glimpse into the deep and encompassing sense of oneness that psychedelics or serious meditation practice can immerse you in.
It was important for me to determine whether my experience of oneness was drug-induced mania or if the perspective could be separated from the drug. And I found that it can, because it’s logical. Psychedelics, or meditation practice, may be necessary to experience it, but you can understand it without them, the same way you can “understand” drunkenness without drinking.
The easiest way to grasp oneness in a logical sense is through thought experiments: the more you zoom into things and events, the more you are forced to see it. An illustration of this is the Ship of Theseus: “a thought experiment that raises the question of whether a ship—standing for an object in general—that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.” If you slowly replace all the components of a ship until none of the original ship remains, is it a different ship? At what instant did it become a different ship? One logical method to prove something is to assume it’s not true and then find a resultant paradox or absurdity that shows the assumption was incorrect. Here we have the absurdity, so look backwards to the false assumption: that things can be fundamentally different. The solution isn’t “yes, it’s a different ship” or “no, it isn’t”; the most correct answer is “it depends on how you want to think about it”. If it depends, the identity of the ship isn’t fundamental in the way it was presupposed to be, it’s arbitrary and subjective.
The wishy-washy nature of identity applies to causality as well. We agree World War II began in 1939, but can you say exactly when it began? Is it when the first shot was fired? When the first Nazi entered Poland? (the tip of his toe? his entire body?) You could say WWII really began with WWI and its aftermath, which means WWII was also caused by what caused WWI, in that big picture way. You can follow that reasoning back further and further and arrive at the conclusion that WWII (and every event) began with the beginning of the universe. That isn’t a useful way to think about WWII, but it’s true that nothing happens in a vacuum, and that every time you zoom in on an event, you can see the instants you designate the beginning and end cannot be objective or fundamental. Everything that happens is a story. Identity is utility.
The concept of an unbreakable causal chain is determinism: “the philosophical theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes.” Determinism makes a lot of people uneasy because it contradicts free will. Many people want to feel like they have a choice, or they can’t conceive of moral accountability without free will, so they reject determinism.
I looked for conceptual arguments against determinism (better than “okay, but we need free will”), and I found only one that really holds up in contemporary philosophy: there is indeterminacy in quantum mechanics (as in Schrödinger’s Cat) which adds uncertainty to subatomic events. Einstein believed this indeterminacy was due to our having incomplete models of quantum mechanics, but most physicists now seem to think he was wrong about that and quantum indeterminacy is fact. This challenges the supposedly inevitable chain of determinism by adding subatomic chance, to whatever extent that affects our reality, but it still doesn’t support free will, because everything we do is still determined by things outside our control, and quantum indeterminacy only adds randomness to that set of variables.
We know we’re not separate from our brains, because things that damage your brain can destroy your personality, like Alzheimer’s disease or physical trauma. We are physical things, like the Ship of Theseus, and subject to that same arbitrary designation of identity. We are the products of our culture, genes, upbringing, and life experiences, none of which we have a say in, because every “say” we have and choice we make is a product of those same circumstances. The point where the world ends and you begin is a matter of interpretation. It depends on how you want to think about it. The most objective truth is that all the lines we draw are illusory.
The idea that we possess fundamental free will, a special property that lets us make choices independent of external variables, has been dying a slow death over many centuries. The main things that keep the idea of free will alive are that it feels as though we have it, and it feels necessary for us to have it.
“But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.
In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.”
Leo Tolstoy (from War and Peace)
Free will is a very useful concept. Telling people that it’s wrong to believe in free will is exactly like telling people that it’s wrong to believe World War II started in 1939, even though that’s correct in a big picture sort of way. It just seems like dogmatic philosophical masturbation. Many people believe it’s more useful to believe in free will than to believe we’re biological machines that are entirely products of circumstance. Where’s the utility in that?
The answer, I think, is that fundamental free will and oneness are incompatible, and oneness is more logical and has more utility to offer. But I don’t think it’s wrong to “believe” in free will, in the same way it’s not wrong to believe WWII started in 1939, it’s just that it’s not objectively true in the same way oneness is. Oneness is the big picture. It has the highest, purest existential status. The idea that “we are the universe experiencing itself” is true, and it can be part of your perspective such that it’s experienced and not just understood abstractly. Scientific American recently published a post discussing new research about believing in oneness, which experience has inclined me to agree with:
“People who believe that everything is fundamentally one differ in crucial ways from those who do not. In general, those who hold a belief in oneness have a more inclusive identity that reflects their sense of connection with other people, nonhuman animals, and aspects of nature that are all thought to be part of the same “one thing.” This has some rather broad implications.
First, this finding is relevant to our current fractured political landscape. It is very interesting that those who reported a greater belief in oneness were also more likely to regard other people like members of their own group and to identify with all of humanity. There is an abundance of identity politics these days, with people believing that their own ideology is the best one, and a belief that those who disagree with one’s own ideology are evil or somehow less than human.
It might be beneficial for people all across the political spectrum to recognize and hold in mind a belief in oneness even as they are asserting their values and political beliefs. Only having “compassion” for those who are in your in-group, and vilifying or even becoming violent toward those who you perceive as the out-group, is not only antithetical to world peace more broadly, but is also counter-productive to political progress that advances the greater good of all humans on this planet.”
However, oneness isn’t a one-word answer to all moral problems. It’s a simple concept that comes with lots of loaded tangents. For example, what stops someone from thinking they can do anything they want since we’re all the same thing anyway? Or because it had to happen? That’s the same moral accountability hang-up that makes people want to believe in fundamental free will. The more you take in the big, universal picture, the more you detach from the humanity in your immediate existence.
I have a lot of experience with detachment in the form of schizoid personality disorder. “SPD is characterized by intense sensitivity, detachment, apathy, indifference to emotions, and a preference for solitude.” As far as personality disorders go, SPD is not well-understood or well-defined, and it hasn’t achieved the sort of mainstream awareness that narcissistic and anxiety disorders have, but, like NPD and anxiety, discussion about SPD applies generally to everyone in a way, because it’s sort of like an extreme version of something everybody experiences.
For me, the root of the struggle is empathy. For most of my life, my experience of empathy has been overwhelming. I felt like an exposed nerve every time I was around people. I could see a random woman crying in a grocery store, for example, and feel a stake through my heart. My brain would relentlessly light up with emulations of her distress, which would linger home with me. I could hear a stranger in the opposite corner of a restaurant being angry and suddenly I’d feel angry too, and then I’d feel his waiter’s anxiety, and they felt as real and deep to me as my own emotions. It was a strain to be around people, because it was constant effort not to zoom into them and lose myself. The lines around me didn’t seem solid enough.
I experienced some dysfunction growing up, which I’m sure is relevant to some degree, but in general I think the root of my struggle is more nature than nurture. I think there might be a genetic component, the same way introversion and extroversion have genetic components, and it may be something like a robust mirror neuron system. Mirror neuron research is mostly in monkeys, and the systems in humans are not well understood, but they may be what makes the emulation of another person’s perspective possible, which is what I’m talking about. For example, flinching and experiencing visceral discomfort when you see someone getting hurt; I felt that sort of imposing jolt of a reaction every time I observed anyone feel anything.
The bombardment on my mind and emotions was what eventually led me to discover and diagnose myself with SPD, because I was experiencing detachment, apathy, indifference to emotions, and a preference for solitude. Reactions to that extreme sensitivity and empathetic overzealousness. I’ve religiously isolated myself for most of my life. Physically isolating myself obviously wasn’t always possible, but I got better at being around people while being unaffected emotionally. It felt like a good thing, like getting it together, growing up, and taking my emotional experience into my own hands. And it was a good thing, but the reaction deepened further and at some point it became an over-correction to the opposite extreme.
“Sparky could not wag his tail because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters. He was lumpy with scars.”
Kurt Vonnegut (from Breakfast of Champions)
One of the reasons I felt compelled to write this is because of how often my introversion and rejection of others around me is interpreted as a sense of superiority or personal judgement on the people I’m isolating myself from. In the vast majority of cases, it is me wrestling with my nature and nothing more. On a good day, I’m the sort of person who “stares into your soul”, who gives all of my attention to whomever has it, who can make people feel truly seen and heard. But, more often, I’m emotionally cold, sequestered in my brain, preserving myself and my energy. When I’m like this, it feels like I’m doing an impression of myself — not inauthentic necessarily, but shallower, simpler, and more passive than my “real” self. I’m often treated as a blank to fill, and interacting with other people involves decrypting who they think I am and what they think I mean when I say and do certain things, and this process isn’t really successful the majority of the time. I almost never feel truly seen and understood, and I can’t even really hold it against anyone because I often find it hard to see and understand myself as well. I feel like I think in perspectives, which makes my “real” perspective very abstract.
“The psychoanalytic use of the term schizoid derives from the observations of ‘schisms’ between the internal life and the externally observable life of the schizoid individual. For example, schizoid people are overtly detached, yet they describe in therapy a deep longing for closeness and compelling fantasies of intimate involvement. They appear self-sufficient, and yet anyone who gets to know them well can attest to the depth of their emotional need. They can be absent minded at the same time that they are acutely vigilant. They may seem completely nonreactive, yet suffer an exquisite level of sensitivity. They may look affectively blunted while internally coping with what one of my schizoid friends calls ‘protoaffect,’ the experience of being frighteningly overpowered by intense emotion. They may seem utterly indifferent to sex while nourishing a sexually preoccupied, polymorphously elaborated fantasy life. They may strike others as unusually gentle souls, but an intimate may learn that they nourish elaborate fantasies of world destruction.
The term may also have been influenced by the fact that the characteristic anxieties of schizoid people concern fragmentation, diffusion, going to pieces. They feel all too vulnerable to uncontrollable schisms in the self. I have heard numerous schizoid individuals describe their personal solutions to the problem of a self experienced as dangerously fissiparous. They include wrapping oneself in a shawl, rocking, meditating, wearing a coat inside and out, retreating to a closet, and other means of self-comfort that betray the conviction that other people are more upsetting than soothing. Annihilation anxiety is more common than separation anxiety in schizoid people, and even the healthiest schizoid person may occasionally suffer psychotic terrors such as the sense that the world could implode or flood or fall apart at any minute, leaving no ground beneath one’s feet. The urgency to protect the sense of a core, inviolable self can be profound.”
Nancy McWilliams (from her essay Some Thoughts about Schizoid Dynamics)
I’ve thought a lot of sensitivity and empathy and their role in other personality disorders, and a common denominator in many of them seems to be experiencing oneself as distressingly absorbent. This is armchair psychology, but the disorders could be seen as reactions to this problem: the narcissist tries to control other people’s perspectives, making them sing praises and produce pleasant things to internalize — or, failing that, rages and viciously devalues others to protect their self. The socially anxious person tries to avoid other people and social situations altogether, or struggles through them meekly with gritted teeth. And the schizoid person detaches and becomes indifferent to other people and their perspectives, becoming also lonely, cold, and alien.
A further complication is the matter of how accurate the absorbed emotions are. The truth is that empathy can only be supposition. We may get close, but we can never truly experience anybody else’s experience, because our brains aren’t connected. Some of it will always be a mystery. This means it’s possible to mirror and experience falsely perceived emotions. This appears to be a big part of social anxiety especially, in that sufferers tend to experience more negative judgement than really exists. I’ve become very cautious of this, probably to a fault, in that I try to understand people before I connect with them emotionally. It turns out getting to know people in a personal way when you’re emotionally detached is extremely impractical.
Detachment was a part of the problem I talked about in On Mindfulness. I felt like a “robotic non-person” because I had become perpetually detached and unfeeling. I had felt overstimulated by other people, detached reflexively without fully understanding what was happening, and eventually detachment became the default state instead of the reactive state. When I took LSD, trying to confront this problem, it helped me by temporarily dissolving that sense of self and showing me how malleable my perspective can be. But here is a darker side of my psychedelic use: taking acid allowed me to experience a fulfilling sense of connection (oneness) without ever having to be around anybody. I could cut others out of the equation and feel fulfilled without having to navigate any of the issues I’ve been describing. So, for several years after I discovered it, I used acid regularly as a sort of substitute for human interaction. I isolated myself more and more and zoomed out farther than I had ever been before.
“… I have found it useful to think of the schizoid personality as defined by a fundamental and habitual reliance on the defense mechanism of withdrawal. This withdrawal can be more or less geographical, as in the case of a man who retreats to his den or to some remote location whenever the world is too much for him, or internal, as illustrated by a woman who goes through the motions of being present while attending mostly to internal fantasies and preoccupations. Theorists in the object relations movement emphasized the presence in schizoid people of a core conflict with interpersonal closeness versus distance, a conflict in which physical (not internal) distance usually wins out. In more severely disturbed schizoid people, withdrawal can look like an unremitting state of psychological inaccessibility, whereas in those who are healthier, there is a noticeable oscillation between connection and disconnection. Guntrip (1969, p. 36) coined the phrase “in and out programme” to describe the schizoid pattern of seeking intense affective connection followed by having to distance and re-collect the sense of self that is threatened by such intensity.”
Nancy McWilliams
There’s no chemical component in acid that causes addiction, but like anything that scratches some itch, it can be psychologically addictive. I don’t regret any of my experiences, but I have a complicated relationship with them. There was the bad kind of escapism present, but I also feel my nosedive into psychedelic use was more noble, for lack of a better word, than other types of drug-based escapism. It didn’t feel recreational at all, it felt spiritual all the way through, and changed my perspective in ways I don’t want to undo.
WWII, which keeps coming to mind, was one of the first and most significant things I noticed LSD had changed my perspective of. For the first time in my life, thinking about it could make me cry. It felt much less distant. I could viscerally imagine myself freezing in some forest, hearing enemy mortars fire in the distance, watching my friends screaming and losing their minds while being blown up around me, knowing chance was the only thing keeping me in one piece. I rewatched Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers and Schindler’s List, all of which I had previously regarded as very powerful and moving, and my new impression was closer to being thrown through the wall, like holy fucking shit, that was a LOT of suffering. It seriously blew my mind, and that’s the correct way to feel about it. It’s more of that distinction I mentioned earlier: I knew a lot about WWII before I took acid, but with the contents of my mind amplified by the drug, I came as close to experiencing it as my imagination could ever possibly accomplish. If mirror neurons are responsible for viscerally emulating experiences, then taking acid was like a mirror neuron bonfire. They were some of the most powerful emotional experiences I’ve ever had.
I never experienced a bad trip, which are characterized by the painful, unwelcome disintegration of the ego, the sense that you are broken in a bad way and you can never go back to who you were. That experience of disintegration is very similar to having my perspective pulled out from under me, which I’ve experienced relentlessly, so whenever I sensed what might have been the beginning of a bad trip, like I was losing myself in an uncomfortable way, it was followed quickly by a deep internal assurance that I would be fine, because I couldn’t be broken in that way, because I was used to it or maybe already broken.
I eventually noticed I was starting to feel a bit too zoomed out. Life was feeling more and more like a dream. Everything was a tiny wave in a tremendous ocean. Nothing in my own life really bothered me, or seemed worth feeling bothered by; I would think that’s barely suffering. I wasn’t quite depressed, but I felt increasingly lackadaisical about everything. Connecting to people was harder than it had ever been: I found it very hard to relate to the people around me and to care about their problems, which, like mine, were very small. Barely suffering. I went through my rituals, but as a puppet transfixed by the strings on my hands, finding it hard to take part in the performance I was a part of. I didn’t feel real and nothing around me felt real. Oneness felt valuable and True to me at the same time it was hurting me. When I could, in certain moods, I felt concerned for myself, but mostly it was hard to see myself at all.
And the solution to this problem of feeling too zoomed out was to zoom back in. It’s one of those things that sounds very simple but is tricky because it’s a matter of perspective. Healthy eyes can see up close and far away, and both functions are important to get the clearest picture of physical reality. It’s same idea for abstract perception: the sense of universal oneness complements the more personal perspective in the same way seeing far away complements seeing up close. They work together, not in competition, and the goal is to direct your focus mindfully, to what’s necessary at the moment. I find it useful to focus on oneness when dealing with flawed and immature people, for example. It provides much-needed breathing room from the hatred, pettiness, materialism, tribalism, and general bullshit in the world. You can look past all the nasty shit that goes on and see this amazing thing that’s happening, how life and intelligence and self-awareness emerged out of chaos, the bewildering privilege of existing at all, etc. It helps me with morale and with keeping a clear, rational mind.
Most religions prescribe a vision of moral goodness, and they all have a hard time overcoming the problem that it’s very hard to communicate a perspective. It’s one thing to know that you ought to be kind, and another to truly be kind. It’s the difference between doing math through rote memorization of formulas, and having the formulas come naturally to you through intuitive understanding. For many people, the promise of a reward in the afterlife, and the threat of punishment, is their motivation to be good. Should it be? Is there a better motivation? How can it be experienced?
I’ve described in this post a perspective I experience, through the lens of oneness, in which I sincerely want the very best for everyone, the same way I want the best for myself. But what is the best for everyone? That will be the focus of part 2: values and being a good person. Until then, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to share. Thanks for reading.
someone on something 