The siren song of nihilism has often left me wondering whether there is any grander purpose to my strivings. Why think, why feel, why act? Why do anything when everything will eventually find its end?

In search of an answer, I’ve had my perusals of self-help books and the unsatisfying answer I came to was that I should somehow find my “authentic” self. Perhaps I had understood a distortion of this advice, but what this meant to me at the time was that if I spent long enough in introspection, I would eventually find my “true” essence that knew all my future plans and had everything set in stone with absolute certainty and security. I thought I would find an absolute confidence in myself. However, no matter how hard I looked, I always felt what I found was lacking.

I had tried looking deeper and deeper, and all the while I never ever felt like I was getting closer to anything. I was spiraling in some kind of hazy fog, and my attempts to escape only led me deeper.

Indeed, what I have concluded nowadays, is that such an essence will never be found. Your “true”, “authentic” self is something that is transcendent, in the sense of being beyond all conception. It is not something that can be captured by a feeling or a thought. Not even in the largest and most detailed biography will you capture the entirety of one’s holistic self.

And I knew this intuitively, whether I understood it rationally at the time or not. I believe that it was this gap between my intuitive understanding of my transcendent self, and the understanding of my embodied, rational self that lead to this feeling of emptiness.

I’ve been trying to lean into this gap, trying to teach myself that this gap is normal and natural and above all safe. I don’t need to know all the answers any more. I trust that whenever I feel lack or worry, it is just my intuition’s way of revealing the potential my “true” self holds.

Of note, your “true” self is not necessarily bound by your body or mind. For example, your daily habitation is a natural extension of your identity. Furthermore, every action you take extends you ever so slightly. When you pick up a ball, that ball in a sense becomes a part of you. When you throw that ball, your self ripples outward as the ball bumps into things. Call it karma, or mutual dependence, or anything but what I’ve eventually felt is that you can blur the boundary between self and non-self. It’s not necessarily ego death in the stereotypical sense, where you have no concern for yourself at all. In a sense, you could say that you become completely selfish in that you see the whole world as an extension of yourself, as an extension of your causal capability, as interconnected with your karmic field, as an aspect within your locus of control.

It is this “extended” self that persists. Standing outside initiation and cessation, this extended self is engaged only in transmutation. Thus, concrete manifestations of phenomena may find their end, however the underlying “soul” continues on.

And for now, these mindset shifts have been enough for me. An earlier version of me would have liked something that was backed by something more “substantial” than metaphysics, but this makes me feel solid in a way that I haven’t in a while.

Logistically, I hope to start writing more. I have many inspirations, but chief among them as it pertains to this endeavor is Protesilaos Stavrou. Feel free to checkout his blog.