Not the Last Word on Self-Observation
Pacman in the Mirror
This is not the last word on self-observation. I am compelled to tell you that. I am compelled to tell you that up front due to an overconscious, neurotic emotional fear I carry from school. Maybe from school. I am emotionally afraid (as distinct from “feelings afraid”) that if I say something or rather if I say anything with any degree of clarity about self-observation, and you disagree with me about what I have said, you will attempt to assassinate me. I am very sensitive to anything that even vaguely resembles an assassination attempt or any action on my part that could inspire an assassination attempt due to a legacy of past lives, no doubt, during which I was actually killed for speaking up clearly, and many of which I have healed, but whose echoes still remain as small charges scattered throughout my nervous system. I am telling you “this is not the last word” as a way to genially disarm you, to deconstruct any weaponry beforehand, to forestall assassination, and pre-invalidate your possible argument, if needed, because now that I have said what I have said, if you say, “Well, Devin, this which you’ve written really isn’t the last word on self-observation,” I can justifiably reply, “Well, yeah, I know, I already said that, confer supra (idiot), and point your pistol elsewhere.” This act of telling you “this is not the last word” comes from my Child Ego State, which makes me play small and uncertain and doubt myself to protect myself against your blows. Oh, and it is also my Gremlin Ego State attempting to pull one over on you, and I get off on that, but which I?, oh right, my Gremlin gets off on it, he has ecstasy about it, glee, I pulled one over on you. And I feel very sad about that. It is heartbreak. It is my heartbreak. I am hitting bottom. I am coming into reality about what I am really doing, 5-body reality. And the fear that I mentioned, I said it was just emotional, but now I can see, it is also a feeling of fear. And there is a meme in there, a memetic construct, something about not being allowed to ever be wrong, so then I have to qualify everything I say, so that I can never be wrong, but nor can I ever actually be clear or a Stand. And I feel sad about that. Sigh. And reader, I can already hear you fuming, thinking, “What is he talking about? Why doesn’t he just… say what he wants to say?” I hear you. I really do. But I feel afraid, and again, it is an emotional fear, definitely from school this time, a fear I discovered in the Heal From School Lab, that if I do not say clearly enough and in detail and with atomically precise diagnostic argot, exactly what the condition is of my survival strategy, then I risk you not understanding why exactly it is so hard for me to simply do what I have set out to do, which is to speak (or rather write) with some level of conviction [“conviction” implies belief, which is a bandaid over not knowing, which is not in reality; consider something more neutral, like “clarity”] clarity about something I have discovered only lately about self-observation, or rather, not discovered, but articulated. And if you do not understand me, then really, what’s the point in writing any of this at all. Oh, dear. Yes, I hear it already. Do you? The start of another memetic construct…
There is a phenomenon called “The Pacman Effect.”
This phenomenon was first articulated in 2025 by Anne-Chloé Destremau.
The Pacman Effect is a survival strategy.
The Pacman Effect plays out when a person encounters potentially transformational thoughtware, and rather than allowing their Box to be composted in the face of that new thoughtware, they use their Box to gobble up, regurgitate, and nullify the transformational power of that thoughtware. Like Pacman eating the white Pac-Dots (a real term… nom nom nom).
With the Pacman Effect, there is no liquid state, so there is no change.
Applied to self-observation, The Pacman Effect can look like the monster, neurotic paragraph above. I know all of my survival strategies. I can name them with accuracy. I can be navel-gazingly obsessed with the things about me that are “the problem.” I can play a fetish game of noting and naming, analysis, diagnosis, explanation. (Some people spend years in therapy doing just that…) But then, nothing changes.
Further considerations:
The purpose of self-observation is not so you can get to know yourself.
The purpose of self-observation is not so you can diagnose or analyze yourself.
The purpose of self-observation is not so you can explain yourself or justify your shortcomings, incompetencies, or limitations.
The purpose of self-observation is so you can disidentify from your automatisms.
Disidentifying from automatisms does require clearly experiencing the automatism with consciousness. “Clearly experiencing” is different than “knowing” or “thinking about” or “naming” or “mentally acknowledging” the automatism. “Clearly experiencing” is a multi-body (maybe even a 5-body) endeavor, wherein usually least importance is given to the experience of the mental body.
Nobody “knows” how to do this. But hints and doorways abound, and if you wish, you can become a researcher and experimenter of exactly how it goes for you.
Self-observation is the application of consciousness for the clear experiencing of automatisms—an activity which yields disidentification from those automatisms. Disidentification might not be 100%. A part of you may remain identified with the automatism even as another part of you is neutrally observing the automatism. Don’t worry about it. Disidentification strengthens with practice.
Disidentification opens a Gap between “you” and your automatism.
Repeated disidentification widens this Gap.
In the widening Gap between “you” and your automatism, Agency emerges. This Agency supports the possibility of choosing to do something other than the automatism. (This is not the first place you build the muscle of Agency. Applying your consciousness to your automatism for clear experiencing is already an act of Agency.)
Choosing to do something different than the automatism might mean going through an Emotional Healing Process or a Memetic Engineering Process or any of many other processes that deepens your disidentification from the automatism.
Choosing to do something different than the automatism might also mean doing an experiment that runs orthogonally to the automatism. But, careful. Often the things we self-observe first are the very things our Box finds most reprehensible about our Box. (The Box is full of such knots.) The impulse to change, then, is already an automatism rather than an action standing with both feet in authentic Agency.
What to do?
A possibility: Observe the automatic impulse to change, suspend yourself in the commitment to clearly experiencing, and “do” (read “react automatically”) not at all. Do that for a while. What else have you got going on? Probably a lot. But not so much that you cannot afford to split a chunk of your attention off and pay attention.
Your Agency will build. Without neurotically cataloguing every nook and cranny of your Box, without needing to name it all, you’ll find that automatisms loosen, and the possibility of choosing the liquid state and choosing to stay in the learning process will grow.