Via Reality Sandwich:

An excerpt of a lecture given by Michael Garfield at this year’s Burning Man: Self as City, City as Self.

The first part considers how we are already a multitude within ourselves:

“I’m going to speak for a couple minutes on two halves. First we’re going to go “Self as City,” and examine all the ways that each of us is an entire multitude; and then we’re going to go “City as Self,” and we’re going to examine all the ways that our communities and our ecological surrounds are internalized as well as all of the ways that we can regard our collectives as distinct individual entities. So I’m just going to do what William Irwin Thompson called a little bit of “mind jazz” here, and riff on different fields and what they have to say about this.

The place I’d like to start this tour is with biologist Lynn Margulis. She put forward in the 1970’s a theory called “endosymbiosis,” which is that the earliest bacteria living in competition with one another came into a mutual relationship, where rather than feeding upon one another they stopped somewhere in the middle of that process some of them became conjoined. Some of the little free-swimming spirochete bacteria, these little spiral-shaped bacteria that were swimming about in the nutrient soup, fixed themselves ontothe membrane of other bacteria and ended up propelling them through the primordial oceans. So all of a sudden, rather than just floating about aimlessly, these larger bacteria had a motility, with a bunch of these tiny spiral bacteria on them; it’s like when people are clapping their hands at a sports game and suddenly everyone is clapping in unison. There was this emergent property of all these tiny spiral-shaped bacteria on the surface of this larger bacterium that were suddenly moving like a single propellant force, and all of a sudden you have a new entity, you have this emergent whole. And Lynn Margulis’ theory was that all of us today with our nucleated cells – and each of our cells has a number of these different organelles in them, these smaller structures that perform various functions, like the mitochondria (which are the powerhouses, the metabolic centers for cellular processes) — that these were once free-living organisms, and that at some point this new holism emerged, and evolution started to operate on a new unit of selection. It started to operate on a new individual that was greater than any prior individual.

And the basic thrust of her whole theory was that even what we consider to be the basic units of our organization — you know, each individual cell — is actually an entire colony; it’s a collective of cooperating organisms, and that the evolutionary process, although in certain ways driven by competition, is equally driven by cooperation and in fact what we regard as cooperation and what we regard as competition have as much to do with the way we are perceiving them as the way they have to do with any kind of external reality. There’s this balance between the forces that drives organisms competing to survive in an increasingly complex environment into increasingly sophisticated forms of social cooperation. So it’s not really that you can say that nature is just red and tooth and claw — there’s actually this other side, which is that everywhere we look that we see competition, we can look at it in a different way, and find that it’s actually a collaboration of forces to create these newer, sustainable diverse holisms.

So, each of us are a multitude in that sense, physically. But psychologically, we can also be considered as a multitude. Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson’sresearch suggested that hypnotizing people and coaxing out different voices from them, that there are in the average person about thirteen to twenty-three distinct and regular sub-personalities. A lot of them are that person at a different age in their life, and there are all these little voices that each of us fall back into, that we pretend are us. They clamor to identify as whomever we call ourselves. But it’s really not one unit; it’s this conglomerate of sub-personalities. And this has been used really effectively in the last few decades of voice dialogue therapy, where people are actually asked in kind of a method acting to speak from the voice of the Skeptic or the Protector or the Vulnerable Child or the victim or the Buddha Mind, and the most interesting thing to me is this has actually been used as a contemplative practice by Genpo Dennis Merzel Roshi. His Big Mind process leads people through all of these voices within themselves, these voices that are in service to self, and moving fluidly from perspective to perspective he starts to sneak in asking people to embody the voice — for example — of Big Mind and Big Heart, and turns people on to the fact that enlightened mind is this everpresent perspective that he’s able to locate and have people identify as. And even with twelve-year-olds he has a 99% success rate for being able to get people into this.

So not just biologically, but psychologically each of us are this collective parading around as an individual. But we can also look at it throughout time and take the more contemplative perspective that what we regard as the continuous ego is actually a series of interactions, whether you look at it as a series of moments that we stitch together because of their similarity, or whether you regard it as a series of ongoing processes that are woven together in some sort of harmonic way. It’s true in time as well as in space as well as the more interior mental qualitative dimensions that each of us contain within this one identity, that we have adopted for the purposes of day-to-day convenience, an enormous number of participants.”