Reflection on the Self
What do you mean by “self?
This is a sticking point for many, and is worthy of clarification.
First examine the nature of language and concepts, learning their utility and limitations. We have been accustomed to believing and behaving as if language and concepts are true and fixed. They can appear to be and this can have great utility. They can also appear to be and involve great delusion and ignorance.
You likely have some understanding of this, which is reflected in your call for clarification.
The clarification is kind of difficult to make in language as apparent contradictions are easily generated.
The clarification can also be difficult on a ground composed of fixed conceptual assumptions.
Depending on our current actual level of understanding and insight, it could seem on the face of it to be utterly absurd to say there is no “self”.
Another perspective, acknowledging the structures and limitations of language and conceptual formations, sees it as a way to put into few words something that can’t always reliably be communicated in any words.
My own current understanding is that the separate personal entities we both imagine and experience, does not quite exist in the way we are imagining ourselves to be experiencing it.
Crudely put, the personality “self” is a host of conditioned mental constructs and emotional complexes.
Whatever “the body” is, we tend to tightly attach this mess of identification and emotional reactivity to it and call it “I”.
We think it’s congruent and persistent as a single separate entity, but observation proves that it’s continually rotating through various thoughts and states, hence the “self” doesn’t quite exist in the way we tend to imagine it does.
To paraphrase Samael Aun Weor, it is more like a collective of pluralized psychological aggregates.
Does it exist before or beyond the body? Are you still you if you are in another bodymind? What is the body and how does it exist? All to be examined and experienced individually, even though there is no true fixed personality “self”.
By Donald Williams