WHO ARE YOU?
"Who are you?" the caterpillar asked Alice in ALICE IN WONDERLAND, to which she replied, "I hardly know, sir, just at present. I knew who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then."
Memory of the past, anticipation of the future, and consciousness in the present create the illusion of a self. Also there is the socially-conditioned ego that we see as a self. Indeed Krishnamurti asks, “Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego based on nothing but memories?” Eckart Tolle speaks of the ego as an "illusory sense of self" based on one's memories and thoughts.
"You don't exist," Alan Watts adds flatly. "When I say YOU, it is as you conceive yourself to be, that is your ego, your image of yourself. It isn't there. It doesn't exist. It's an abstraction. It's like Three. Do you ever see Three, just plain ordinary Three? No. Nobody ever saw it. It's a concept, a vikalpa, in Buddhism. So in the same way is one's self. There is the physical happening, the "suchness," yeah sure, you bet. But it is not pushing you around, because there is no you to be pushed around."
Hormones contribute to the illusion of the self. For males, it is not until testosterone recedes in our fifties that we see the extent to which we have viewed the world through a veil. Meantime, we are taught to view the world and ourselves in a certain light, which may be false. We learn symbolic thinking (e.g. thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates), and language (e.g. words about words and problems that words create). We don’t know what it is that we are looking at half the time, not fully, and then we go on to communicate about it using symbols which are mere approximations of what we mean. Alfred Korzybski notes, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts concluding, “nothing is really describable.”
We identify ourselves with our thoughts. We think we are our thoughts. This holds true for feeling states as well. We are conditioned emotionally to react to the world and ourselves in certain ways, which may be false. When we are lonely we miss our family and friends, for example. Loneliness, though, like all other feelings, comes from thoughts, Krishnamurti tells us, and thoughts are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. Feelings likewise then are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. Yet we identify ourselves with our feelings. We feel we are our feelings. We feel we are our moods. Our lives are just such smoke and mirrors, called “maya” in Buddhism, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound.
We know that we have a body and we know that we have consciousness. At the very least then, we are a conscious body, which answers not who we are but what we are, the better question.
Memory of the past, anticipation of the future, and consciousness in the present create the illusion of a self. Also there is the socially-conditioned ego that we see as a self. Indeed Krishnamurti asks, “Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego based on nothing but memories?” Eckart Tolle speaks of the ego as an "illusory sense of self" based on one's memories and thoughts.
"You don't exist," Alan Watts adds flatly. "When I say YOU, it is as you conceive yourself to be, that is your ego, your image of yourself. It isn't there. It doesn't exist. It's an abstraction. It's like Three. Do you ever see Three, just plain ordinary Three? No. Nobody ever saw it. It's a concept, a vikalpa, in Buddhism. So in the same way is one's self. There is the physical happening, the "suchness," yeah sure, you bet. But it is not pushing you around, because there is no you to be pushed around."
Hormones contribute to the illusion of the self. For males, it is not until testosterone recedes in our fifties that we see the extent to which we have viewed the world through a veil. Meantime, we are taught to view the world and ourselves in a certain light, which may be false. We learn symbolic thinking (e.g. thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates), and language (e.g. words about words and problems that words create). We don’t know what it is that we are looking at half the time, not fully, and then we go on to communicate about it using symbols which are mere approximations of what we mean. Alfred Korzybski notes, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts concluding, “nothing is really describable.”
We identify ourselves with our thoughts. We think we are our thoughts. This holds true for feeling states as well. We are conditioned emotionally to react to the world and ourselves in certain ways, which may be false. When we are lonely we miss our family and friends, for example. Loneliness, though, like all other feelings, comes from thoughts, Krishnamurti tells us, and thoughts are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. Feelings likewise then are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. Yet we identify ourselves with our feelings. We feel we are our feelings. We feel we are our moods. Our lives are just such smoke and mirrors, called “maya” in Buddhism, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound.
We know that we have a body and we know that we have consciousness. At the very least then, we are a conscious body, which answers not who we are but what we are, the better question.
posted by Donald L. Simons at
7:16 AM
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