Background

In one of the many first of many firsts before, I wrote about the definition of “Who Am I?”, for me. It was a very vague one, depending on my current perspective. I defined myself to be an object with properties and functions, that has language, memory, body, etc… This is a good idea, but now I think it’s just a good attempt to explain myself. In this post, I want to explain the new idea of “self” that flashed through my head, while reading the book “The Laws Of Human Nature” by Robert Greene.

The author goes thorugh really amazing facts about human nature, and all with real life stories and examples. He first introduces a short story, to use as reference, and then provides an interpretation of in the context of the chapter. Yesterday, while reading, I got really intrigued by the idea of what makes a narcissist? Why are they, the way they are?

How To Know Self?

The author pointed out, that people who don’t know self, don’t have a self image, are highly probable to be a narcissist. A narcissist is like that mainly becuase he/she does not know about their self, they don’t have a self image portraying to themselves what they actually are.

So, to know self would be to create this self-image. It never came it my mind. I’m now not talking about the narcissist, let’s just focus on the word self-image. How did human come to know how they look? By looking at their image in a reflecting surface! That’s what we need to do! We must use our brain as a reflecting surface, imitating every behavior, ever impulse that we get in times we are not behaving normally. We must define a normal for ourselves, which we will use as a reference to identify all other possible states of our mind.

How Does This Work?

First, we must start by slowly distancing our thoughts with ourselves. How does this happen? With practice. You must slowly start noticing your thoughts when you are with someone, or alone. Examples of this would be low : “Now I’m feeling happy, when I’m with this person. Why?” or “I feel a desperate need to talk to someone when I’m alone. Why? How can I adapt to this instead?” or “I want to do this, but do I need to?”. Distancing basically means you add an intermediate step, between execution of thought, and the inception itself. That middle step is asking questions : “Why?”, “What?”, “How?”, “Where?”, etc…

Slowly you’ll have a database of your own behavior, and when you again have a question, you’ll have answers about your own self. You’ll have answers about your behavior. You already know some things about yourself, like how you look? What things you prefer eating over others? What type of person you want to be with? Your favorite color, place, animal, object, etc… These all things make up your “Self”.

Why Does This Work?

Think about it! How do you know your mom, dad, sisters, brothers, friends, foes, or anyone? Ask yourself this question:

• I give you a story about a person. I don’t tell you who this story is about. It contains an incident, that involves making a critical decision. I ask you about a certain person, say your friend, “Does the peson in story look like your friend?”.

What will your first action be? You don’t have an image to look for in the story. You clearly cannot identify the person by their face. You don’t have a name, again failed to identify from there. What else is there that makes up your perception about another person? Their behavior. The kinds of decisions they can make, the extent to which they can go to get what they want, etc… Your next step will probably be to use this information to answer the question.

The same thing we must do with ourselves. For example, many of us don’t know how far can we go in one single run, without stopping. How long can we hold our breath in water? Number of people we know? What can we do if we were in a situation like this? etc…

This whole process involves asking indefinitely many questions to yourself about yourself slowly.

Be like water, reflect your self image to yourself, and you’ll know how you look like in the mirror named “You”.

What Will It Look Like After Knowing Self?

I don’t know honestly. This is just a way I think if I’ll follow, will help me better understand me, and answering the question “Ko Aham?” to “So Aham!”. This was just an idea, and it’s in your free will to follow or abandon this idea, or to take parts of it, and leave the left.

I guess if I come to know myself, I’ll be like one of those Indian Sages, with ultimate wisdom, but do I really want or need to be that person? 😉

Keep learning 😄