This is the second in a short series about the nature of existence. The purpose is to make some room in our thinking for a new possibility in politics. If you prefer not to think deeply, you’re welcome to skip this, or just scan the headings.

In the last post, we saw how elections don’t exist. At least not the way things exist. Instead, it’d be more accurate to say that we see things that we interpret as an election, so we then think (and feel) that it exists. And then the winners are announced and suddenly, we think and feel the election is over.

In this one, we’ll look at how “I”, as a character, don’t really exist (like a thing). People are much more a thing than an election is- there’s real matter here. But the interesting part of people, our character and capabilities and purpose and potential are all made up, invented, both by us and others.

I apologize that this one is so long (over 4 times the length of my usual articles!)

Do people exist?

It’s sort of like a person. We don’t see people. We see their skin, their clothing, their walk, their faces. We catch a scent of them. We hear their words. If we’re lucky, we might feel them in a hug. We see outward signs.

But in our understanding is a person. In our thinking is a character who has history, strengths, weaknesses, quirks, a characteristic voice, a look or style, a certain way of expressing herself or himself. We think we actually see people.

People seem to exist like things exist. They have solidity and weight. They have a look and a feel and odors. But those are really attributes of their bodies. At times we’re aware of this, so some humans think there’s a “soul.” Is there? Does the person exist? Or do they just seem to exist?

Who am I?

Am I the person I was at age 1? Age 30? We know the molecules of my body leave over time and are replaced. We know the muscles sag, the testosterone lessens, the hair turns gray. I can see my view of life has broadened. My ideas have become more mature. I’ve given up many of the petty concerns of youth. Am I the same person who has changed, or am I a different person with the memories, identity, stories and belongings from earlier years?

I’ve always found it interesting that people portray ghosts in a certain form, a certain age. Are these portrayals the true person? If there is a spirit, would it experience itself as the person at a certain age? At all ages? Their last age? (It’d be a bummer if my 89-year-old father died and woke up in heaven with the same stooped posture and vibrating hands from Parkinson’s…)

Can you experience yourself now as all the ages you’ve been? Even when you were asleep? In the womb? I can’t even remember what last night’s experience was while I was asleep. I have no experience of existing last night! But this morning, I occur to me as me. So in my experience I winked out of existence and back in. But my thinking fills in the gap. In my understanding, I was in bed all night. So I occur to me like a persistent, physical character.

If I’m the same person, why are my experiences so different?

To me, I seem to occur in different ways at different times. When hiking, I’m happy, joking to a friend, feeling strong and free. When sick I feel weak, bleary, wishing I could just sleep for a week- wanting to stop experiencing life until it’s over. On Friday, I experience anticipation, looking forward to the weekend. Or Sunday night, I experience resignation about Monday. I experience anxiety before an interview. And fear before sky diving, but exhilaration when the chute opens! On bad nights I’m restless and fitful, feeling alone and worried. On good nights I feel secure, cuddling with my wife under a warm blanket.

The experience of life changes. How I occur to myself changes. But I call all that me. So I get used to all these ways that I say are all me. Any time I experience something, I attribute it to “me”. Whether I exist as a single “person” or not, my brain certainly understands me as that. (But ideas are never as rich as reality…)

As long as there’s not too much contradiction, I attribute it all to “me”. It’s as if my brain rationalizes that “Rand’s character” is whatever it takes to include all those experiences.

At times, I seem to have been someone else

At times I think, “Not me!” I was cooking. I always turn off the burner when I’m done. This time, I came back ten minutes later and the burner was on, heating up air, wasting power! I thought, “What happened? That’s not me!” The “me” that I know would never do that. So I was out of character. Who was I? Or am I falling apart, deteriorating?

Occasionally I surprise myself by blurting out something I didn’t mean to say. Or I fail to suppress a rude comment. I don’t want to say that’s me. Is it me? If it was me, wouldn’t I be in the drivers seat? Wouldn’t my intention rule?

Some Americans think, “I was possessed by the devil!” I think that was just their reaction to the same kind of experience. At least, if they did something bad…

Yet all these behaviors were done by whoever, whatever occupies my body and brain. I don’t doubt that this is the same body and brain. And whatever “I” am, I’m the one responsible for them. Even if I don’t create all these ways of being intentionally, the responsibility is mine.

“Me” as a creation

When I look back at my life, my childhood, adolescence, teen and young adult years, and even middle age, I can see that the meanings about myself that occurred to me gelled in my brain as my notion of “me”. And then I acted consistent with that.

So my character was suggested by events. That includes people- I remember as a child, my mother mentioning to someone that I was shy. I didn’t have to accept that, but I accepted it. I wasn’t to blame- I didn’t know that I was creating myself by accepting these ideas. But I actually was. I was helping my character become those default interpretations by buying into them.

When I look at others, I see this dynamic, too. I see it in my kids and wife and co-workers. When I look at people with this new thought, that we create ourselves, it seems much more accurate than the idea that a character just is a certain way. Yes, it’s hard to change, but it’s not like we’re changing a thing. Changing your character is hard, but it’s just accepting a new role. Sometimes we do that when life throws it at us, like parenthood. And sometimes we do it because we want to, like joining a dance class. And sometimes we do it to achieve a goal, like I’m doing. And it begins by saying who I am.

I have the power to SAY who I am.

I started with the question: Who am I?

I seem to be the character who did the things I did and had the experiences I had. In fact, I seem to be the character who CAN have those actions, behaviors and experiences.

On the one hand, I’m a software engineer and problem solver. I’m pretty good at those.

But now I’ve committed to being the source of PeopleCount. I’m a visionary, a CEO, a product designer, a manager of all sorts of marketing efforts, a blogger, the manager of a software project. And I’m an evangelist and cold-caller and vision-pitcher and author (and soon a publisher). I’m also the, albeit poor, investor and accountant. I’m often a student of tutorials and of my coaches and mentors.

I could say, “I’m a sole entrepreneur.” But that’s just a description. What I really create myself as, who I say I am is: The source of PeopleCount, a new possibility for political accountability. Whatever abilities are needed, I have to come up with those, whether it means beg, borrow, buy or learn those skills. I am willing to become whatever character I need to be to get the jobs done.

I’ve mostly failed (and learned, I hope) at these tasks. I feel like I’m a failure. I often feel desperate and depressed. But then I remember, that’s just the way I happen to be occurring for me. My commitment is that all this awkwardness and bumbling and failure, and a bit of progress, is just what comes before success. I say, I’m a visionary. And my commitment is to keep creating this kind of empowering identity until I’ve at least made the beginning of the vision a reality. My commitment is to share it with the world. (That’s why I blog…)

I can be who I seem to be, or create who is needed.

This article was a demonstration of how what exists, in this case me and who I am, is just an interpretation created by the mind. I can accept it or not. I can realize my mind made all that stuff up. It’s true I failed a bunch. But I can say “I’m a failure, I don’t have this in me”, or I can say, “I’m learning. And if I keep working at it, I can succeed.” I can say, “I’m a lousy salesman.” Or I can say, “I’m a novice salesman, and I’ll keep improving.”

I can either accept who I seem to be, or I can take responsibility for creating myself. And when I seem to be one thing or another, I can accept that or not.

I am committed to transforming politics. I seem to be the only one on the planet with a real plan, a real system for making it work. Others have good ideas, but aren’t tackling the big problem of how to make them widespread and actually change society. I’ve done that,.

But, unlike Ben Rattray of Change.org or Matt Mahon of Brigade.com, I don’t have the resources or experience or skills (yet) to manage a project well or launch a company. I don’t even have the networking or team-building skills to gather and lead a good team. So I do the best I can.

I’ve taken on something that everyone seems to agree I can’t succeed at. To support my effort, I keep creating myself as a budding entrepreneur, and more. I keep creating that any day now, success will happen faster and more frequently. I’m not kidding myself- it may not happen. But I’m committed to keep creating this persona and context. Why? When I look into the future that I want to create, and see all the steps needed to get there, it starts with me being this persona.

So I create a context for myself, an interpretation of who I am, simply as another tool to support the goal I want to achieve. It’s pretty weird and uncomfortable and awkward at times. At times the experience seems horrible, even desperate! But I know that that’s just an interpretation of an experience. It’s a story that I can quickly get past (though sometimes it takes a few hours, even days, and some coaching.)

I’ve created this purpose for myself. At times I create that this is God’s purpose for me. Noah got through it, building a huge, ridiculous boat while others were planting drops. I’m not religious. I don’t believe in God. But we had books, TV and movies when I was a kid. I know how to pretend.

The point: There’s no “true nature”

This was a little journey into the nature of reality. The purpose was to show that the things that our minds assume exist really don’t, or aren’t so simple. There’s no “true nature.” Even “I” don’t have a true nature. The story I tell myself is malleable. My potential is far more than my usual story of me allows. The meaning of “me” is all made-up. Sure, there’s some reality behind it, but we don’t know the reality. Our brains make up an understanding. Our brains group the apparent meanings together and then draw conclusions about “how things are” and “who I am.”

So there’s no “true nature” to me, a physical, real human being.

A rock seems very real and solid. But a character, like “me”, is really an invention. An abstract occurrence, like “an election”, is just a societal invention. But we talk about it like a “thing” so it occurs to be a real thing that exists with fixed properties.

Next, we’ll look at how things change. Finally, we’ll look at “politics”, an abstract notion. It’s even less a “thing” than I am. It’s even less of a “thing” than an election. What will unfold is that there is a TON of room to change it, to create politics that’s peaceful, productive and completely workable.

Politics and Democracy occur, they don’t exist the way physical objects, or things, exist.

Hopefully, this won’t be too heady for you. Politics is based on convention, agreement. I want to just develop a sense of this concept in this article. We’ll look a bit more at it in the next article, and then we’ll come back to politics in the third one.

There are no elections

Elections don’t exist in the same way that physical things exist. Just like a birthday or an anniversary, it occurs because we observe it. Let’s look at two senses of the word “observe.” The first is to observe, like seeing or noticing. When the flags are placed outside the school and church doors, we see them and think election. We see the news and the letters of the word “election” and we think election. We are not really seeing the election. We are seeing physical things and thinking election.

The other meaning (#3 in the above page) is to observe them like one observes a religious holiday. We behave in a way that recognizes the election. We go to the poll and vote, or we “don’t vote.” Even by “not voting,” we acknowledge the election. If we forgot the election was today, it might not exist at all for us. And then we hear it on the news and think “Oh, right! The election is today!” Suddenly the election occurs.

There’s no election for a dog.

If you ask a dog if there’s an election, he can’t see it. Nor can he smell it or hear it. He might see and smell people, some with their dogs, walking to vote. But there’s no meaning of election to the dog. For the dog, It doesn’t exist. But it exists to us.

Often we think something like, “there’s an election, but the dog doesn’t know it.” Not really. It’s more accurate to say, “An election is occurring for us, but not for the dog.” There’s no such thing as an election. It’s a complex pattern that we recognize and agree on.

Things occur over time

On the evening of Monday, November 7th, 2016 no election will be occurring yet. But we’ll expect it. We’ll be ready to interpret lots of things as signs of the election. There’ll be actions consistent with the election, and ballots and flags consistent with the election, and news announcements and parties and celebrations and tears and TV and radio broadcasts consistent with an election. People will ask questions about who’s ahead. Has the party picked up seats, or lost them? Everyone will agree there’s an election. Even though there’s no thing which is the election.

The election occurs in phases, from the vote-by-mail envelopes being mailed, being opened and filled in and mailed back, to the first polling places opening on the east coast to the last ones closing in Hawaii. Did you notice that you didn’t really think about these parts of the election when you were reading the first paragraph, above? But as you read them, ideas about them occurred for you. As if the words conjured them into existence. You saw the string of letters and your mind made those into words and in your mind’s ear, the phases of the election occurred for you.

And then the winners are announced and with those proclamations, the election is over. It no longer exists, except in history.

It happens. Stuff occurs because we agree to it. In other countries things occur differently because they have a different culture, a different agreement.

We’ll continue this in subsequent posts.