What on earth are you babbling about when you say, “my infinite nature?!”

Before wrestling with the concept of an “infinite self,” it seems most appropriate first to say a few things about “infinity,” then to say a few things about “self,” and finally to put them together.

There is a famous story about a scientist giving a lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said:

“What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles turtles turtles, all the way down!”

For the purpose of our infinity, we can imagine the turtles going all the way up too. Why not? But we don’t need to imagine any gigantic space turtles for the sake of infinity when almost everyone as a little kid has learned to take delight in the crazy stuff that happens with two mirrors.

When I was a kid, my parents often took part in our little community theater. I remember hanging around the green room, that had mirrors on all the walls. I was amazed by the vast corridor of little Noahs stretching off into the distance on either side of the narrow room.

At the time it seemed plausible to me that somehow I could switch off and actually experience being one of my many mirror selves.

Of course in this picture there are only so many thumbs before they curve away into the mystical depths of the mirror world, but I’m sure your imagination can extend the concept indefinitely.

Not all mirrors give you an accurate reflection.

Some are distorted, so you can hardly even recognize yourself.

With that, I will segue into talking about the self.

Not all of the self is something we like owning up to. One of the most notable things about the human mind seems to be its ability to lie to itself.

There are straight people who just aren’t interested in hooking up with the same sex, but what of outspoken anti-gay crusaders?

Phenomena like GOP party member Larry Craig, a defender of anti-gay legislation getting busted for indecent conduct last month springs instantly to mind.

In research conducted by the American Psychological Association in 1995, penis engorgement was measured while homophobic men were exposed to gay porn and the data was compared to a non-homophobic control group.

The results were a perfect illustration of the mechanism by which people attribute the things they disown about themselves onto the world around them.

And what of the scientist in the 1950’s who exposed the secret sexual messages in the icecubes of this liquor add?

I guess I can kind of see it, if I squint just right, but I really wonder just how hard that man was searching for sex in the ice cubes.

Carl Jung called the disowned portion of the self, “the Shadow.”

People can commonly take the place of a mirror by responding to and returning our facial expressions, adopting our pet sayings, or merely by just naturally possessing qualities that we also possess, even if only acknowledged on a subconscious level.

When interacting with people, the more you are able to discern what is a reflection from what is truly external, the closer you are to being in touch with your true self.

The closer you are to scrubbing the grime off of your mirrors by allowing yourself to re-own the disenfranchised aspects of your personality; that is when you start to touch infinity.

Come together, over books.

I like to do a lot of reading. I’d like to give you an idea of some books that have recently served to stir around the soup inside my brain. I will do my best to share what it is about each book that has left an impact on me.

Hofstadter is a proponent of non-duality. This book endeavors to explore the nature of the thing that people call a “soul” or a “self” or simply “I.” To him, those words refer to the same thing, which is not made of a separate substance from the material world. Rather, it is something that emerges from the world of subatomic particles swirling about, bashing into one another without any clear cut boundaries. The interplay of symbols we know as “I” comes out of a process of making simplified representations of things that exist on the exterior of sufficiently complex nervous systems.

Hofstadter says that the “self” is an illusion, but although thinking of it as real involves a magical jump, it is an illusion that our exquisite gift of experiencing the world as an individual is dependent upon.

Integral theory is an operating platform for your brain. For those of you who haven’t read Wilbur, I dare you to give this work a try yourself. I found the IOS, or integral operating system, to be an amazing and deeply penetrating tool to sift through information overload.
Also a proponent of the awareness of our non-dual nature, Wilbur makes a case for the truths of the worlds “Perennial Philosophies.” Integral Spirituality, among other things, is one of the most poignant attempt to salvage what is good in them against the searing valid criticisms lumped against religion from modern and postmodern thinking.

I am currently in the process of reading the Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck. A deeply personal account of his process to make sense of a chaotic disintegrating world, he seems very confident that all signs are pointing to light on the horizon.

Drawing on just about everything from science and religion to ancient mythology and psychedelic experimentation, this book so far seems like quite a promising read.