Followers

Monday 3 August 2015

The Crowded Self

(An exploratory sort of post -  thinking aloud, if you'll pardon me.)


Here's AL Kennedy reminding us wittily that each of us is a plurality, not a single thing. To function in society I need to feel I is one thing. I knows that I changes over time - the wrinkles, the memories of playing squash a long time ago - but I is still one I, separate from you and everything Other, I seem to need to believe.

But I is seethingly multiple. 
 
The world moves through I each second, and I responds in ways the busy conscious self often hardly notices. Self often rides rough-shod over these responses, signals, changes, and doing so can make I ill.

The illusion of an entirely separate self, fortress I, seems to this I to be fundamentally mistaken and potentially dangerous. I needs to belong, to relate, to feel part of all Other. That is the only way to be a true individual - not to believe I is one.

That realisation - living in that understanding - doesn't make I weak. It feels very free, sometimes scary, and sometimes difficult because of how we live and how we grew up (or not.)

So thanks ALK for further understandings of what I is, and is not.

Another prompt and revelation from the Eden Project, a place that feeds.

I and the rest of the world is the same stuff, although I is in a particular formation, a unique events sequence.  I is not what I needs to think I is most of the time, but "you must have to see clear sometimes." This I needs to meditate to find that clarity for a little while.

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