Journey toward the self

Journey toward the self — on the layers that speak through us — and the space in which we can begin to choose

I was washing dishes, on an ordinary evening, when someone dear to me said a completely banal sentence — something about the clean plates piling up on the rack. And I felt, instantly, a wave of defensiveness, out of all proportion to what had actually been said. As if I'd been accused of something else, something much older than the plates.

I set the sponge down and asked myself, not rhetorically but with real curiosity: is this reaction mine? Or is it something playing itself out, once again, through me?

I didn't find a clear answer in that moment. But the question stayed, and it widened. Because, thinking about it, many of my immediate reactions don't seem to be born only from what's happening in the present. They seem to carry something older with them — from a house I grew up in, from a culture that shaped me without asking, from a moment years ago that still sends out its echo.

How much of my reaction is actually mine?

I wrote, on another occasion, about the question "who am I, beyond my roles?" I don't want to return to it here — the answer, insofar as one exists, is already written there.

I want something else. Not what remains beneath the layers, but what happens the moment a layer gets triggered — unresolved past, conditioning received from our environment, the patterns of the culture that formed us, the mind's automatic reactions, what I project onto the people around me, thoughts I mistake for reality, attention that tricks me into seeing patterns where there are none. How much of what I feel, believe, and do in that moment is a reaction of mine, here and now — and how much is an old mechanism playing itself out, again, through me?

What follows isn't a list of personal-development techniques, and it isn't seven explanations of the same phenomenon either. Some of the perspectives below are spiritual practices, others contemporary esoteric systems, others psychological theories, others simple observations about how attention works. I'm not putting them side by side because they carry the same validity or say the same thing, but because each one, in its own way, calls into question something of what we spontaneously call "I."

The question I'm keeping open throughout this piece, and to which I don't think there's a simple answer, is this: are all these layers different versions of the same intuition — or do they only resemble each other on the surface, while underneath they're talking about fairly different things?

Recapitulation — unhooking from the past

Carlos Castaneda described, in his books, a practice called recapitulation, later developed in detail by his apprentice, Taisha Abelar, in The Sorcerer’s Crossing. In this contested shamanic universe, a person systematically revisits the people and events of their own life — with the help of a specific breathing technique — not to relive them, but to recover the energy still caught there and to release the invisible ties formed by each significant experience.

You don't have to take this cosmology at face value for the psychological intuition behind it to remain recognizable. And the intuition is simple: we can't change what we keep reliving without knowing it.

Each of us has a handful of scenes that repeat — a remark, a look, a departure — which the mind runs in the background, year after year, without ever resolving them through mere repetition. Recapitulation, beyond its specific technique, is above all a good metaphor for the movement of turning back toward the past precisely so the past stops steering, from the shadows, the present.

Human Design — deconditioning from environment

Someone walks into a room full of people and, without understanding why, suddenly starts talking more than they'd like, or falls completely silent, or feels abruptlyexhausted for no reason. They didn't decide any of it. It simply happened, through them.

Human Design — a contemporary self-knowledge system, born in the 1980s, which combines elements of astrology, the I Ching, and the tradition of energy centers — speaks of this kind of moment through a concept called deconditioning. According to this system, we have "undefined," open zones through which we would amplify or absorb the influences of the people around us, without knowing what's ours and what we've just borrowed from the last person we spoke to. In the Human Design tradition, the deconditioning process is associated with a cycle of roughly seven years, over which you gradually learn to tell what comes from outside from what truly comes from within.

You don't have to confirm the mechanism as objective fact for the question behind it to remain valid. You can look at Human Design as a contemporary map of a much older question: what remains of me when I stop functioning according to what I learned, from my environment, that I should be?

Krishnamurti — a map can become a cage of its own

Jiddu Krishnamurti spoke about conditioning decades before any contemporary self-knowledge system did — conditioning through family, culture, religion, education, nationality, experience, and, most subtly of all, through the very structures of thought. For him, true freedom wasn't a partial release from this or that role, but a radical freedom from all this conditioning, pursued down to its last roots.

Here's where it gets interesting. Krishnamurti was deeply suspicious of exactly the kind of map I just described. Not because maps are false. But because any method, any system, any set of steps repeated often enough can become, itself, a new conditioning — this time dressed in the clothes of freedom. At the center of his approach was choiceless awareness: seeing conditioning exactly in the moment it operates, not analyzing it later, map in hand.

It's, I think, one of the best questions this article can raise: can we use a map to get out of conditioning without turning the map itself into a new conditioning?

I don't have a clean answer for that. I just think the question is worth keeping alive, especially every time a map — be it Human Design, astrology, the enneagram, or any other structure — starts to feel truer than the direct experience it was only ever meant to illuminate.

Buddhism — the space between impulse and action

I won't use the word "deconditioning" as if it were the traditional Buddhist term — it isn't. But there's a real closeness, at the level of principle, between what I've described above and what contemplative Buddhist practices observe directly.

In practices such as vipassanā, attention is trained to observe the arising of sensations, emotions, and impulses without automatically following them. Someone receives a slightly unfair remark and feels, instantly, irritation rising — a tightening in the chest, a reply already forming on the tongue. The suggested move isn't to replace the irritation with something else, some "better" emotion. It's to see it arising, without automatically following it toward the gesture or the word that would give it free rein.

Between impulse and action, with practice, a space begins to appear. A small space, at first — a fraction of a second. But right there, in that space, the possibility of choice appears for the first time. Not the choice to feel nothing. The choice not to be blindly driven by everything that's felt.

Jung — what I put onto others without knowing it

There are people we see, at first meeting, as extraordinary. And others we see, for a reason we can't fully explain, as unbearable — even before they've actually done us any harm. The other saves us. The other threatens us. The reaction comes fast, self-assured, and rarely questions itself.

Carl Gustav Jung called this mechanism projection: the tendency to place, outside ourselves, in the other person, psychic contents that belong to us but that we haven't yet recognized as our own. That doesn't mean the person in front of us isn't actually behaving in a certain way — often they really are. But sometimes, the intensity of our admiration or our rejection can also say something about contents we don't easily recognize in ourselves.

Withdrawing our projections doesn't mean becoming indifferent to other people. It means gradually discovering how much of the map we draw of a person was, in fact, drawn from our own side — not the energy trapped in the past, as with recapitulation, but the pieces of our own inner world we've left, without knowing it, in someone else's keeping.

ACT and cognitive defusion — a thought is not a verdict

"I will fail." That sentence, said silently before an important conversation, feels like a fact. It feels like the future itself, already written.

Metacognition — the capacity to observe our own thinking processes, not just use them — makes possible a distinction that's small on paper but enormous in experience: having a thought is not the same thing as being that thought. There's a real distance between "I have the thought that I will fail" and "I will fail" — even though, most days, we live exactly as if that distance didn't exist.

ACT therapy (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) builds on this distance an exercise called cognitive defusion — changing our relationship with our thoughts, not their content. You don't argue with the thought. You don't contradict it. You simply look at it as what it is: a mental event passing through you, not a verdict issued about you — a move from identification to observation, not necessarily toward better thoughts, but toward a less suffocating relationship with the thoughts you already have.

Baader–Meinhof — when reality seems to confirm exactly what we already believe

The least spiritual of all the layers above, and precisely for that reason, important to keep in this piece.

The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon — the impression that, right after learning about something, it suddenly seems to appear everywhere — isn't a practice of inner transformation. It's, rather, a descriptive label for this impression, for which several possible mechanisms have been proposed — among them selective attention and confirmation bias. Once something becomes relevant, the mental filter that decides what deserves notice changes its criteria. What used to pass unnoticed suddenly starts to count — not necessarily because the world has changed, but because our attention has.

What does this have to do with recapitulation, Jung, or Krishnamurti? Perhaps more than it seems at first. Baader–Meinhof teaches us to question exactly what we believe reality is confirming for us.It doesn't, on its own, explain why certain relational patterns seem to repeat in our lives — that would be claiming too much. But sometimes the attention filter may also play a part: we become more sensitive to precisely the traits that earlier experiences have taught us to look for. It isn't only the past repeating itself. It's also attention which, conditioned by the past, has better odds of noticing exactly what confirms the old pattern.

The same intuition, in seven different languages?

I promised, at the start of this piece, not to breeze past this question. So, honestly: no, I don't think all seven of these perspectives say exactly the same thing. That would be a comfortable simplification, but a false one.

At least three of them — recapitulation, deconditioning in Human Design, and the withdrawal of projections in Jung — assume, in very different languages, a movement of recovery: of energy invested in the past, of the discernment between outside influence and one's own experience, or of psychic contents we've attributed to others. Buddhism and ACT's defusion propose something else, almost the opposite movement: you recover nothing, you only observe, without clinging to what appears. Krishnamurti regards all of them with suspicion, including the contemplative ones, the moment they become a repeatable method. And Baader–Meinhof isn't a practice at all — it's just a mechanism of the mind described, not proposed as a solution to anything.

There's something else worth saying, less spectacular than any tradition above: not everything we uncover, setting a layer aside, has a deep story behind it. Sometimes the layer we discover comes from an old wound or from a family pattern learned and carried forward. Other times it's simply a habit we've repeated so many times that we've started calling it personality.

And yet — beyond these real differences, which deserve to be kept, not erased — there's a thread that ties them all together, and I think that thread is precisely the core of the human intuition about letting go: each of these perspectives, in its own way, says that the first movement of a stimulus isn't the last word. That between what rises automatically in you — a memory, an impulse, a projection, a thought, a noticed coincidence — and what you do with it, a pause can exist. They're not all the same map. But they all point toward the same pause.

The split second in which we stop following the reaction

Everything above risks staying beautiful ideas, read and shelved, unless it also touches a concrete, living moment, right today.

Maybe all these maps become interesting exactly in such moments: irritation out of proportion to the actual situation, admiration too quick for someone you've barely met, a dark thought that feels like settled fact, a coincidence that seems to confirm exactly what you already feared. The reaction appears, as it always does. But, for a split second, we stop following it automatically. We watch it instead.

Not much changes on the outside in that moment. But, for an instant, exactly the space opens that all the traditions above were talking about, in very different languages — a dance in which you're no longer sure whose first step it is: yours, or the layers that spoke before you.

There is, of course, a bigger question beyond all of this: if I set aside everything I've inherited, learned, projected, and repeated without noticing — what remains? I wrote about that in "Who Am I, Beyond My Roles?" Here I'm interested in the moment just before: the instant in which what rises automatically in me stops, for a second, automatically being what I follow.

I stayed there that evening, sponge resting on the edge of the sink, for a good few seconds. I never did find a clear answer to the question from back then — whose reaction it actually was.

But I noticed that small space, just before the answer. And, for the first time that evening, I chose to stay in it a little, instead of filling it immediately with the first reaction that happened to pass through me.

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If you feel you want to explore more of what is happening in your emotional life, there is a space for that.