Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.

On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.

[…]

Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.

It may be that we don’t know how to look because we are looking as tourists — passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves — rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience — the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery.

Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity:

To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.

Couple with Pessoa on unselfing into who you really are, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir’s instructions to herself for how to have a life worth living and Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being.

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself. But what does it really mean to be oneself when the self is an ever-moving target of ever-changing sentiments and cells, a figment of fixity to dam the fluidity that carries us along the river of life, to soften the hard fact that we never fully know who we are because we are never one thing long enough. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion,” Iris Murdoch insisted in her magnificent case for unselfing, and yet we do live out our entire lives in it — the self is our sieve for reality, the sensory organ through which we experience love and politics and the color blue. How to inhabit it with authenticity but without attachment might be the great task of being alive.

The great Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) takes up these immense and intimate questions in The Book of Disquiet (public library) — his posthumously published collection of reflections and revelations partway between autobiography and aphorism, profoundly personal yet shimmering with the universal.

Considering himself “the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it,” with a soul “impatient with itself,” Pessoa writes:

Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.

[…]

Perhaps it’s finally time for me to make this one effort: to take a good look at my life. I see myself in the midst of a vast desert. I tell what I literarily was yesterday, and I try to explain to myself how I got here.

[…]

I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in far-away nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future.

A generation before the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh lost his self and found himself in a dazzling epiphany at the library, Pessoa recounts one such moment when the veils of the self parted long enough to glimpse the vastness of the unself:

All that I’ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I’d always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn’t I.

I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought… This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.

It’s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don’t know what human words could define it. I don’t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I’ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life. Yes, I repeat, I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now.

And yet, like Virginia Woolf’s garden epiphany about the creative spirit and Margaret Fuller’s hilltop unselfing into “the All,” such moments of revelation in which the soul contacts reality are but brief sidewise glances at some elemental truth we cannot bear to look at continuously less we dissolve into it. Pessoa reflects:

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.

Complement with Herman Melville on the mystery of what makes us who we are and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, then revisit Jack Kerouac on the self illusion and the “Golden Eternity” found in its wake.