Monday, January 14, 2008

Oneself...


The self has many senses,

and yet it is still considered oneself.

5 comments:

n2 said...

I like the play here on the word "self". I could very easily have capitalized "Self" and could also have distinguished "one self".

The thought here is that the senses blend, we call it an experience, and value it as such.

Ponder the possibility of this mystically scaling up. You being a sense organ upon which the universe reflects upon itself. Go with it!

n2 said...

Note to self...
It helps to turn commenting back on.

Paul said...

Yeah, otherwise it sort of diminishes the self's universe, lol.

You sound Thich Nhat Hahnish here. I'm that way my, uh, self...

To me the Buddhist doctrine of Anata or no self, if I understand it correctly, may go a little too far. Noting how the self is composed of many elements and is integral to the larger world and is a process that changes through time, they seem to say it's an illusion.

While that can be a helpful way to look at it sometimes, to me it seems not literally correct, since there's clearly continuity as well as discontinuity, unity as well as discreteness, in one's identity, even at a physiological level.

n2 said...

I have to admit to liking the openness of simple passages such as this. I find they leave just enough room to personalize them. Perhaps then the essence of the verse has shone through the haze of words.

Yes. Maya (Sanskrit), they say. I’m with you. It’s simply too real.

I like to view myself as an expression of Tao. The passage was my way of giving a nod to Anata (Pali), but subtly staying true to my, uh, self.

Vincent said...

Why not try and inventorize the components of the self? I am thinking of this more in a neuro-psychological than in a Buddhist sense, but it would be interesting to see how the two senses of "self" coincide. Because if you take the totality of Buddhist texts, you don't get just an instruction book on attaining enlightenment, as some think. You get a course on psychology too.

Antonio Damasio, neurologist specialising in the "neurophysiology of emotions" has written "The Feeling of What Happens" to explore what kinds of brain functioning are required to give us what he calls "core consciousness" and "extended consciousness". It would be interesting to map these on to what the Buddhist psychologists call "the self".