Who are You?

I’m putting this out not as an answer or conclusion, but as food for thought for the reader.

(CALGARY, Alberta) - We all believe we are individuals with free will. This is the second most dominant myth of our society (the first being that there is a physical world “out there”). These are topics that most people never think about and when they are raised, as I am doing here, the automatic, unthinking, reaction is denial. It’s a denial along the lines of: “Of course the sky is blue, who would even question it?”

But you don’t have to go particularly high, 100,000 feet will do it, to discover that the sky is not blue—it’s black—meaning it has no colour at all.

(This picture was taken at about 100,000 feet over Oregon by Justin Hamel and Chris Thompson using a 1500 gram weather balloon and posted on Wikipedia)

What the world is or appears to be depends entirely on vantage point. For creatures that live in the great ocean vents,there is no sky at all!

It’s a truism to say that everything is relative, which we automatically say, without thinking about or realizing the greater implications.

You are a person; so am I, or at least that’s what we think we believe. But the vantage point of personhood or individuality is the culmination of a series of relationships within which we experience the world. You are someone’s son or daughter; someone’s sibling; someone’s cousin...the list goes on. We are who we are almost totally in terms of our relationships to others, whether we are conscious of it or not.

This is succinctly illustrated in the movie Class Action starring Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. They play a father and daughter in continual conflict. Talking to her, Larry Fishburne sums up her filial relationship:

“The man owns you. Everything you are, everything you do, is based on driving him crazy. If he stands up, you sit down. If he turns right, you turn left, even if you don’t want to.”

This is the kind of unconscious relationship we all have with dominant others in our lives. Within that context, free will is a nonexistent concept.

There is, in quantum physics, a phenomenon called entanglement. It says that there are no boundaries and everything in the universe is interconnected. This refutes our commonly held belief that we are discrete psychological individuals.

Albert Einstein’s great insight was that nothing in the universe can go faster than the speed of light. Yet consider a particle that decays into two photons and each flies off in an opposite direction. Because of their initial interaction, these two particles remain forever linked. Whatever happened to one particle would instantaneously affect the other particle, wherever in the universe it may be, whatever the distance between them. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance,” which has been, despite his denial, experimentally verified.

The connection is called entanglement. This is because the two particles are not really two particles—they only appear that way to us. They remain forever parts of the single original system. Quantum entanglement, says Cornell physicist N. David Mermin is “the closest thing we have to magic.”

“your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body is in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing.”

People are psychically entangled in the same way. No matter where on earth (or, today, even into space) you go, you are still your father’s son (or your mother’s daughter) and vice versa.

Relationships that stay problematic or dysfunctional, do so because neither side is able to understand their entanglement or alter it.

This is where introspection and self-understanding are necessary. As in the movie example above, it’s essential that a person look at why they do things in relation to a parent, sibling or friend.

This is the functional aspect of therapy, if people go that route—understanding the dimensions of their entanglement and how it affects their actions is the first step to changing their actions and thereby changing the nature of the entanglement with another or others in general.

On February 7, 1970 my best friend, Brian Thomas O’Reilly, was killed by a drunk driver in a head-on collision just outside Douglas, Wyoming. He was 21. It was one of those what-ifs.

The collision occurred on an overpass. At 50 mph each, the cars were approaching one other at about 150 feet/second. If either driver had been delayed or quickened by only a few seconds, they would have met before or after the overpass and my friend might have been able to hit the ditch. On the overpass, there was nowhere to go and, in a moment, he was dead.

The killing event was one of those “isolated” events that is not isolated at all. If you think of all the events that occurred in Brian’s life (and the other driver as well) up to the collision, the most minute changes at any point in the long chain would have altered their lives so that they would not have met that night (about 230am) on the overpass. Looked at from that point of view, the collision and Brian’s death were inevitable.

Enough of that speculative road, and now on to what got me thinking about this article in the first place.

If we accept my original assertion—that what we believe to be ourselves is the intersection of all of our relationships—the most interesting of all speculations appears.

Who I am at this moment is the total intersection of all the relationships with others in my life—past and present. This includes Brian. Looked at from his point of view, who he was, was defined by all his interpersonal relationships including me. So, when he died, all those relationships ended.

But, here’s my far out speculation. He died, but all the people who defined who he was, including me (for now) lived on. So, in a sense, is Brian still alive in some sense as long as most (or certainly the most influential) of his relationships remain active?

I’m putting this out not as an answer or conclusion, but as food for thought for the reader.

Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class — a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably on a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves — writing and trying to make the world a better place