Page 130 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

the journal of the krishnamurti schools no.25

If you look into the best current-day psychology and theoretical
neuroscience, you will find that there are two major mechanisms
by which the human self-model constantly recreates and stabilizes
itself, fragmenting the ever-fresh space of pure awareness and con-
tracting the primordial state of observation-without-an-observer
into an individual first-person perspective. One is mirroring itself
in another human being, projecting desires, hopes, and fears into
it, attempting to establish a dyad or even a larger social context
in which it can sustain itself. The self-model automatically tries
to couple itself with other self-models, as the node of a network
that helps maintain self-esteem and self-worth, and that, ideally,
provides some clever form of mortality denial. The second mecha-
nism has, metaphorically, been called ‘predicting oneself into exis-
tence’. By constantly hallucinating goals and making plans for the
future, the human brain continuously designs what scientists call
‘action policies’ and tries to change the world in order to make it fit
an internal model of reality—a process philosophers and neurosci-
entists today call ‘embodied active inference’. This process crucially
and systematically involves misrepresentation, attenuating bodily
self-awareness at the very moment of action initiation, redirecting
attention to a virtual self, and thereby losing touch with the pres-
ent moment. The inner experience we call ‘the conscious self’ is
created by exactly this process of trying to expand into the future.
It is an attempt to make the mind ‘temporally thick’, to successfully
predict and bring about future selves, by superimposing a self-
fulfilling prophecy onto the timelessness of the present moment. It
is an attempt to control an online hallucination. None of this is our
fault, there is no reason to despise ourselves in a moral sense—we
are this process, which in turn is a result of the process of evolution
by natural selection. However, the deeper philosophical point is
that as long as the self-model is ‘transparent’, as long as we do not
directly experience it as a model, it will create the phenomenol-
ogy of identification. We will feel that we are this, the content of

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