Self creation and the identity

Post Reply New Topic

This is an essay I wrote on the subject of self-creation and the mind in general. It's not dry, as one of it's objectives was to hold the attention of the reader, and that it does.
What are your opinions on the subjects disscussed?

The restrictions of belief, and its potential

No doubt religion started because people take things too literally. A person thanks a metaphorical personification of the sun, and then starts believing that the metaphor is real. This is called psychotic behaviour, when people confuse what's in their mind with what is real. If that last statement is true, though, then we are all psychotics, all living in a giant mental ward called Earth. Don't go over to Big Larry, though; he hasn't taken his pills and he gave an orderly a black eye last week.

How can God be almost tangible for a fundamentalist, but be just a hollow cliché for an atheist? How could a pro-lifer die for the sake of a foetus, and a pro-choicer kill for the sake of the mother? Differing opinions, yes. But opinions are generally concerned about what to have for tea when one gets home from work; you'll need something else to force homicide from otherwise normal people. These are deeply held beliefs, so deep, in fact, that the very ego is built on them. The problem with having beliefs for a foundation of the ego is that they can be shaken. Sometimes the foundation cracks, and therefore so does the person.

Beliefs and prior experience define a person, like words on a page define a character. As an example, we'll use the cat metaphor: two people see a black cat in front of them. One of them strokes it, as he likes cats; the other circles around it in a wide arc since he's deathly afraid of the buggers because one clawed him as a child. One had a positive reaction to the cat, the other a negative. Like characters on paper, they obeyed their preceding characterisation perfectly. You can see how limiting it is to obey prior experiences, especially when there is no reason to doubt friendly cats.

You could even go as far as to say that belief and experience provide a man with his very reality. It's true: just look at the religious fanatic willing to die for his Lord, or the suicide cultists drinking their cyanide-laced Kool-aid. They probably wouldn't do that unless they thought it was perfectly rational. As a winning example, look at the Church of Scientology. And don't start snickering at the loonies, either; yes, I can hear you. No doubt you, reader, have embraced the same mass-produced reality as your peers. There's nothing inherently evil about that, but you can be so much more. For shame.

It starts, as previously stated, with a belief model. Then sensory experience is accumulated by the senses, to be assimilated by the brain. As forever complicated as the brain is, it can't remember every single thing experienced at every single moment. It has to filter. This means that meaningful information is stored, and useless information is discarded. It takes meaningful data as defined by the belief model; a depressed person would remember the rats in the sewers, and the optimist would remember the soaring birds. As an experiment, try to exist in the present for a moment. It's impossible; humans don't live in the present, we live a few seconds in the past. By the time we sense something, time's already dulling it. This has the uncanny effect of bending even objective reality to our beliefs. Different beliefs, different experience of objective reality.

In order to tap into the potential of belief and to change for the better, there needs to be a will to change. And in order for there to be a will to change, it needs to be in the personality make-up of the person. Actually, that's a lie. The Jungian collective-unconscious exists, metaphor or not, and the brain keeps everything it has ever processed. Nothing is wasted, and even though the 'I' of the brain can't access these archives freely, they still define it. An average person holds many personalities, and if the media have their way, most of them will be blood-crazed loons, but still, blood-crazed loons who have the will to change.

Is it turtles all the way down, or does God hold up the Nth turtle by an ethereal finger? How far does the mind go down? In order to think an English thought, the thought needs to be assembled into English by the mind before it's thought, which means you've already thought it at some level. In order to think about thinking, we use a separate thought process to think about thinking. Which of course begs a third level into existence. How far can we go down or up levels in consciousness? Infinity? What if our conscious thoughts don't alter our actions, but are the manifestation of sub-conscious thought processes that we don't control? What makes us so arrogant to think that a high level programming language of thought can defeat the pure binary of the sub-conscious? You’ll know the levels of your mind that aren’t yourself as your enemies. The trick is to flood the sub-conscious with things contrary to its beliefs, shake it a little, just so much that it gives up helm control to you.

Is freedom from illusions possible, though? Certainly, when you overcome a particularly toxic personality, the feeling of freedom is immense. Don't be mistaking those colourful things on your wrists as bracelets, though, as they're still fetters; they're just painted differently. Every time you break out of one prison, you land in a bigger one with more freedom; a new personality to break out of. Only the Zen psychotics have freed themselves from this, as their religion requires that their ego die, rather than shatter or mould itself anew. Action without thought is peaceful, yes, but as peaceful as the grave.

Rebel against something useful for a change: rebel against yourself. Stand up against the democracy of your many-levelled consciousness and impose a tyrant for life: you.

nice sand pit.

First response is to quote,.. who asked this .. "What determines the will?"

I agree with a lot of the ideas there. I disagree with the notion that attacking beliefs will free oneself though or that it is positive or negative. I will agree with the skeptical notions that can be found by doing this, but frankly, I don't believe that there is a self that is independent of our beliefs.

There is no harm in saying "I don't know", if there is no way one can know. Leave it open, maybe later on one can find something that will put them in the know about what it is they initially did not know.

I can't break down quotes the way others here do, so I'm just doing it manually, cutting and pasting.

Snake321, what are your beliefs? What are your ideas? Do you have any outside of critizing all beliefs, all values? You are not superior because you belief in nothing.