How often does it feel like you just aren’t thinking anything? Does this occur to you?
Not often if ever for me. For myself, it’s pretty much never the case, but this is not necessarily a good thing.
Pretty often especially when observing things.
What is the self? How do you know who you are? How do you know that you are?
By your beliefs and boundaries?
I think therefore I am.
How do we come to believe things? How do we come to think things?
Teachings, research, experience?
Not sure, seems like clouds floating through. Maybe what we eat.
When you learn a new thing, do you lose your self?
No, we grow ourselves.
When we learn a new thing, do we automatically believe it?
No.
Can you point at your self? If so, what are you pointing at? If you lost what you were pointing at, and survived that loss, would you stop being yourself?
At times it can feel like it, but no.
It is interesting we point at our chest, not our arm or leg.
Do we ever really recall our first thought?
We recall a first impression and even find it hard to shake the first impression.
We experience them to come in a stream, a series of ideas and memories. So if our thoughts come like this to us, then why don’t we know what the first thought was?
No language yet to pin it down? That is a theory, heavily debated. I myself didn’t talk until age three, but I promise I was indeed thinking and I do recall it.
It’s like a growing thing and we forget it’s first form, like not seeing the child when holding the adult in your attention?
What I am leading up to is that the self is nothing. It is no thing. Your thoughts, feelings, and memories exist independently of any self, and yet we experience a sense of self, yes?
Yes. The fact that we have a self is sort of amazing, in a sense a miracle. There is no basis for such a strange and abstract notion as self in nature. Even the structure of biology seems to suggest more of a subsuming of individual organisms than the formation of anything like a self. The mitochondria in your cells are their own organism.
Sort of like how a computer generated world is really a no thing. Indeed, yet we still have this sense of self. Does anyone know what it is? How it emerges? Is it really just moral failing as some forms of mystical teaching would seem to suggest?
I heard one notion in a Buddhist talk once about borders. Perhaps the self is in the boundaries between us and our interactions with the world.
Everything needs space to occur in. Every observation, ever object needs it to come into formation, but why is something so empty so important? You would think nothing would be at the bottom of the ladder of importance, no?
It’s a form we hang everything else on.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~