You’ve Been Pressing That Button Your Whole Life

How Mr. Meeseeks illustrates the cause of suffering as described by Buddhism and parts work

In the show Rick and Morty there’s a device called a Meeseeks Box. Press the button and a blue muppet pops into existence to accomplish a task, like opening a jar. The moment the job is done it dissolves in a puff of smoke, which it’s happy to do, because for a Meeseeks, existence is pain.

You’ve been pressing that button your whole life.

RomeoStevens@RomeoStevens76

The Rick and Morty episode 'Meseeks and Destroy' has probably the most incredible spiritual teaching I've ever seen on tv. Spawning goal seeking selves with an ill formed goal who thus don't know how to despawn and fuck everything up is a core insight of contemplative practice.

8:51 PM · Oct 5, 2021

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5 Replies · 20 Reposts · 281 Likes

You are not a single person. You’re an anxious committee that has agreed, for mostly legal reasons, to share a name. Most of its members are lovable idiots, still running the best plan they could think of when you were nine.

This is the operating model of parts work, a popular family of therapies, Internal Family Systems (IFS) being the best-known. It calls these mini-selves ‘parts’. For example, you might have a part that flinches at authority, or one that narrates your life in the worst possible terms, or one that reminds you that the librarian in Multnomah County still remembers what you did in 2007. Each thinks it’s protecting you, certain it’s all that stands between you and badness forever. In other words, the mind is a war cabinet that is also, somehow, a daycare.

People have been noticing this for a very long time. The oldest example I found is an almost four thousand year old Egyptian papyrus, where a man argues with his own soul, and loses. Fifteen hundred years later Plato saw inner conflict as proof the self isn’t single, “not the same thing functioning but a plurality.” By 1886 Nietzsche was calling the soul “a subjective multiplicity.”¹

Psychiatry rediscovers this and gives it a new name roughly once a generation. Pierre Janet described trauma as splitting off semi-autonomous “fixed ideas” in the 1880s. Jung called complexes “splinter psyches” that “behave like independent beings.” The modern textbook version, structural dissociation, puts everything from PTSD to multiple personalities on a continuum where “emotional” parts are fragmented from an “apparently normal” part.²

So what are they all pointing at? As far as I can tell something fundamental about human minds, and possibly minds in general. Years of meditation and parts work have made it obvious to me that Internal Family Systems is describing something first substantially mapped by the Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago. In Buddhism ‘rebirth’ isn’t about dying and coming back a strawberry; it’s describing a mental process where selves appear and disappear, being born and dying from moment to moment.³

Once you understand what Buddhism is saying the parallels are overwhelming:

In IFS you’re a bunch of parts. In Buddhism you’re a flash-mob of transient selves. In IFS you suffer when you ‘blend’ with a part and believe its stories. In Buddhism that’s identification and delusion. In IFS no part is the enemy. In Buddhism no state is the enemy. At some point you start to think these people are describing the same animal from different ends. In IFS you heal from capital ‘S’ Self, the calm, compassionate core present in everyone. In Buddhism the knots untie themselves when met with enough clear, kind awareness, also present in everyone.

IFS is popular with meditation teachers. One teacher explicitly told me that IFS Self is just the smallest touch of what the Buddhists call no-self. This matches my experience. After a meditation caused my sense of self to disappear for a few minutes I wrote:

“It felt obvious that the natural reaction to suffering is compassion and that this is especially true if you’re not tied up in knots with fear and anxiety about yourself.”

I’m not saying IFS and Buddhism are identical. IFS works directly with parts: you learn a part’s history, what it’s protecting you from, what it’s afraid of, then gently let it notice where it’s confused. Mainstream Buddhism doesn’t really care about working with parts or understanding their history. Their universal solvent is awareness and equanimity. Meet whatever arises with enough of both and the conditioning unwinds on its own. One of my meditation teachers called the difference “content versus context” - engaging with what is appearing, versus noticing that everything is appearance.

The ambitions differ too. IFS wants you to be a harmonious committee, Self at the head of the table. Buddhism aims past that, at seeing through the fundamental confusions in your model of reality that cause all suffering, particularly confusion about the nature of the self.⁴

I’ve watched dissatisfaction spawn selves. I’ve watched selves with wildly different desires and notions of the world come and go. I’ve even learned to dis-identify from a given self and watch it suddenly disappear along with its desires, beliefs, and discomfort. Seeing this can be shocking. In a 2023 essay I wrote:

“Amazingly, when I mentally labeled them as ‘part’ they disappeared like a soap bubble popping. When I discovered this I started furiously typing notes on my phone. After a few minutes I noticed a lot of tension around typing, looked at the part that was typing, said ‘Part’ and it dissolved so thoroughly that the phone fell out of my hands and my head slumped forward.”

Once you start dropping parts you learn how many there are and how insistent the brain is about launching new ones. The Buddhists call this proliferation (papañca) - the mind compulsively elaborating on experience until the stories obscure the thing itself. An early text (Sn 4:14) traces it to a single root, the notion "I am." A part survives by passing as you. Call it a part and the disguise fails.

Unrecognized, though, a part runs until its job is done. And some jobs can’t be done. Remember the Meeseeks Box? The entire episode is about what happens when the request is too hard. Jerry asks a Meeseeks to improve his golf game. It can’t, and it can’t vanish until it does, so it presses the button for another Meeseeks to help, who summons another, until a mob of them, eventually all tired of the pain of existence, decide Jerry is the real problem and the solution is to kill him.

That’s a part: summoned by a desire, dissolved by its completion, and deranged by a goal it can never complete, like “make sure nothing bad ever happens again.” One Meeseeks says “Existence is pain to a Meeseeks”. The first noble truth, roughly: suffering is inherent to being a self.

Anyone who’s watched their thoughts has probably noticed one thought driving the next as each suffering self spawns another to manage the last one’s distress: “Just apologize. No, apologizing makes it a bigger deal. Act normal so it blows over. Now I’m acting weird from trying to act normal. Okay, new personality starting Monday.”⁵

Why don’t we notice this process most of the time? Because unity of the self is an illusion maintained by cooperation. When the parts want the same things and believe the same stories, you can’t see the seams. The illusion starts to break down when some part of the mind stops communicating with the rest.

Split brain experiments show this clearly: cut the connection between the two halves of the brain and they start fighting each other. In the classic case one hand buttons a patient’s shirt while the other unbuttons it.

It doesn’t take surgery to see it. Trauma is a refusal to update, like an adult who was bitten by a dog at six and still tenses seeing a chihuahua at thirty. These frozen parts become increasingly out of sync over time, so our traumatized parts are the ones we notice.

Clinicians have been describing this for a century. Janet called them “fixed ideas,” Freud said the neurotic stays “fixated” to the trauma, Reich described them hardening into “character armor,” Levine called it a “frozen residue,” IFS says the wounded parts are “frozen in time.”

That’s how selves get stuck. The Buddhists also mapped how they get made. Their word for it is bhava, becoming. One surprising claim: a self never appears without a desire and a ‘world’ attached. Drop any one and all three go.

Which is exactly what I discovered for myself in dropping parts: both letting go of a desire and seeing that a part was not me would make the whole thing collapse, often dramatically, with a feeling like putting down a big rock I’d forgotten I were carrying.

“World” sounds like a mystical realm, but it’s just whatever desire renders interesting. At the same party if you’re anxious the room is all exits and people judging your shirt; if you’re hungry it’s just where the cheese is.

Desire, Self, and World give rise to action. You don’t have to attend many Bay Area houseparties to realize this sounds suspiciously similar to the definition of an agent from reinforcement learning: something pursuing a reward through a world model and a policy.

Once you have an agent, the hard thing is getting it to do what you want, instead of the cheapest thing that looks like it. AI researchers call this alignment.

They haven’t solved it. Neither have you.

The New Year’s resolutions that fade by February, the people you leave before they can leave you, all just your agents chasing their rewards in their confused little worlds.

“Solving alignment within yourself” is a pretty good description of the spiritual path. How? Not by force. Most people eventually realize that trying to change someone rarely goes well, usually because the other person can tell that what we’re really doing is asking them to solve our own discomfort.⁶ The motivation is selfish, and when people sense this, they resist you.

This rule is stricter and subtler than it sounds. Even a flicker of agenda, a hint that your curiosity is trying to get something, is enough to make a person or a part close a little. After the same experience of no-self, I wrote:

“I understand the causes of suffering much better now. I’d seen thousands of times in meditation how trying to manipulate or coerce parts, even if I did it subtly, made them push back, unless I listened to them or considered their welfare.”

Parts are like people. To try to ‘fix’ one is to ask it to give up on its desires or ignore its fears, for your convenience. This is why IFS teaches that the prerequisite of doing parts work is dropping your own agenda and bringing compassion and curiosity. It’s not a coincidence this is also the best way to connect with other people, who, after all, are also collections of parts.

* * *

The Buddhist suttas do this weird thing where they slide between talking about ‘rebirth’ as something happening continuously, within a single person, and as what happens when you die, as if there were no difference worth mentioning. I dismissed this as pre-scientific superstition. Then I experienced the absence of a self, and it started looking like sober analysis.

The moment you really catch identity in the act, a label pasted onto experience, made of the same stuff as an itch or a smell, something strange happens: ‘I’m everyone’ and ‘I’m no one’ suddenly feel like the same claim. Here’s how I described it at the time:

“What I’d taken to be me was just a bunch of circumstances that could easily have been different. None of it was essential. The only essential part was the fact that there was experience, that there was consciousness, and consciousness seemed to be a property of the universe. It made as much sense for me to be afraid as it would for gravity to be afraid. I was a fundamental part of nature.”

I’m aware this is the kind of statement that gets you a wide berth at parties. It was also just true. Philosophers have been picking at this scab for a long time: Can you step in the same river twice? If you replace every plank in Theseus’ ship, whose ship it is?

If you believe in something like open individualism, which is the philosopher’s name for the idea that there’s only one of us here, then reincarnation stops requiring mystical beliefs. If we’re in some sense all one, then being reborn isn’t something that requires the transmission of a soul, but a simple fact. I suspect this realization or something like it is load-bearing for Buddhist ethics.

Alignment is a new name for what economists call the principal-agent problem. Example: your dentist finds three cavities. His mortgage finds the fourth. Anyone acting on your behalf has their own reward function, and centuries of contract law show that no amount of fine print fixes this.

Buddhism’s answer is that if you see clearly enough, there are no separate agents. From there it’s a short walk to the rule every religion worth a damn converges on: do unto others as you would have them do unto you

At least one AI lab is actually betting on this. I didn’t set out to write about them, but here we are. Emmett Shear, thinks any alignment approach based solely on control is doomed. His lab, Softmax, aims instead at what he calls the justified golden rule: “Treat others as you would treat yourself, because to some degree they are you.” The papyrus guy would have understood.

Dedicated to my friend Rodrigo.

1. Descriptions of the self as multiple through history:

• Egypt (c. 1900 BCE): in a dialogue recovered from a papyrus roll, a man argues with his own soul, which tries to talk him out of suicide (the Dispute of a Man and His Ba).

• Buddhism (c. 5th c. BCE): the “process of becoming” (bhava) holds that we continually construct and inhabit transient selves, each arising around a craving and its own “world”.

• Plato (c. 375 BCE): inner conflict proves the self isn’t single, “not the same thing functioning but a plurality” (Republic).

• Montaigne (1580s): “There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others” (Of the Inconstancy of Our Actions).

• Nietzsche (1886): the soul is not a unit but “a subjective multiplicity,” “a social structure of the drives and affects” (Beyond Good and Evil).

• Gurdjieff (c. 1915): “Man has no permanent and unchangeable I,” only many small “I”s. “Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.”

• Hesse (1927): a man consists of “a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two” (Steppenwolf).

• Woolf (1928): a person “may well have as many thousand” selves, ones with “little constitutions and rights of their own” (Orlando).

2. Clinical psychiatry describing the self as multiple:

• Janet (1880s-90s): the first clinical model, trauma splitting off semi-autonomous “fixed ideas” that run outside awareness.

• Assagioli (1910s): founds Psychosynthesis around the psyche’s semi-independent parts, which he later names “subpersonalities.”

• Jung (1934): complexes are autonomous “splinter psyches” that “behave like independent beings.”

• Schwartz (1980s): his Internal Family Systems builds a clinical method around “parts,” holding that every one, even a destructive-seeming one, has a protective intent.

• Bromberg (1998): in relational psychoanalysis, multiplicity is health, not pathology. The unified self is “an acquired, developmentally adaptive illusion,” and maturity is “the capacity to feel like one self while being many” (Standing in the Spaces).

• van der Hart, Nijenhuis & Steele (2006): their theory of structural dissociation is the model behind much modern trauma therapy. Trauma splits the personality into an “apparently normal” part that runs daily life and “emotional” parts frozen in the past, on a single continuum from everyday PTSD up to the multiple-personality cases.

3. In India, when the Buddha taught, reincarnation was taken for granted. In Under the Bodhi Tree, Ajahn Buddhadasa argues the Buddha reused the popular idea of rebirth as a description of a process not about passing from one life to the next, but about the ‘I’ being born and dying many times a day. (He also gets into where the “multiple lives” interpretation came from.) This is a process that goes from mostly invisible to obvious if you do enough meditation or parts work.

4. No-self is close kin to “high equanimity”, which I’ve written about being a core ingredient for emotional healing. As far as I can tell, all non-equanimity is a function of ‘selfing’ - i.e. identification with some mental process, and if equanimity gets high enough in meditation, the feeling of being a self tends to spontaneously dissolve.

5. It’s worth reading Romeo’s thread about the remedy for this.

6. The best advice I ever heard for being with someone having a hard time is “It’s not your fault and it’s not your job to fix it.