Anyone here interested in the nature of the self ?
July 24, 2011 at 1:21 pm
(This post was last modified: July 24, 2011 at 3:44 pm by Whateverist.)
I didn't find a forum for this so I assumed "off topic" was the way to go. The topic may be of interest to those like myself who are more interested in why anyone still embraces religion than they are in whether magic beings exist, etc.
When we're young there is tendency to believe that that which we decide to do/be is all there is to us. With time we usually bump up against some cold hard fact about ourselves which won't go along with our wishes. Here is an example of what I mean. I was young when the book "Open Marriage" came out and intellectually it made total sense to me. So when I got married that was the package we went with. It turned out not to be comfortable for me. I know, I was insecure yada yada yada. But I don't think that was all there was to it. For me, an open marriage wasn't and never will be a good fit. I remember being so surprised by this lack of coherence between what made sense to me intellectually and the actual experience.
Any particular example will probably be inadequate but if you engage in any kind of creative activity you might consider where inspiration comes from. This is pretty subjective but I suspect most of us who do so would not describe it as a rational activity. Yet there it is and sometimes it can be quite moving for reasons we have to discover, not as a result of any deliberate intent we had while creating it.
It has always seemed to me relevant to make a distinction between "talent" and the access we have to it. Now maybe that access is like yoga, a kind of discipline to be mastered. Certainly there is an aspect of that. But there is, I think, also a sense in which access can be given or denied at a deeper level of self, like writer's block. I think of this as the need to maintain coherence between ones conscious intentions and those motivations which act at a deeper, unconscious level.
Sometimes I think that, at its best, religious experience taps into the deeper self. How else do we explain rational, accomplished christians who admit that all church doctrine is fallible and accept science as our best understanding of the natural world. I've copied something below which I wrote on another post here to see if anyone else here has these questions.
"While I don't think a 'god' has anything to do with it, I know there are dimensions of human experience more profound than rationality. That too is unprovable, and I wouldn't try. I suspect that, while hardly necessary, religious thought can tap into an experience of the deeper self. There is a sense of otherness about this deeper self in that it is what it is independent of what your would have it be. Sometimes I think this dimension of experience is merely our animal knowing, the intelligence and intentionality that all mammals at least possess but which we become alienated to by our reliance on language. I don't know but I do know that life without coherence between my rational self and deeper self isn't enough. To the degree that the religiously inclined use religion to seek and accomplish such coherence, I can't find fault. When someone like Bill Moyers talks about god you can tell that for him it really is something mysterious, that he isn't starting with a lot of doctrinal presuppositions. I would really enjoy talking to that sort of theist."
When we're young there is tendency to believe that that which we decide to do/be is all there is to us. With time we usually bump up against some cold hard fact about ourselves which won't go along with our wishes. Here is an example of what I mean. I was young when the book "Open Marriage" came out and intellectually it made total sense to me. So when I got married that was the package we went with. It turned out not to be comfortable for me. I know, I was insecure yada yada yada. But I don't think that was all there was to it. For me, an open marriage wasn't and never will be a good fit. I remember being so surprised by this lack of coherence between what made sense to me intellectually and the actual experience.
Any particular example will probably be inadequate but if you engage in any kind of creative activity you might consider where inspiration comes from. This is pretty subjective but I suspect most of us who do so would not describe it as a rational activity. Yet there it is and sometimes it can be quite moving for reasons we have to discover, not as a result of any deliberate intent we had while creating it.
It has always seemed to me relevant to make a distinction between "talent" and the access we have to it. Now maybe that access is like yoga, a kind of discipline to be mastered. Certainly there is an aspect of that. But there is, I think, also a sense in which access can be given or denied at a deeper level of self, like writer's block. I think of this as the need to maintain coherence between ones conscious intentions and those motivations which act at a deeper, unconscious level.
Sometimes I think that, at its best, religious experience taps into the deeper self. How else do we explain rational, accomplished christians who admit that all church doctrine is fallible and accept science as our best understanding of the natural world. I've copied something below which I wrote on another post here to see if anyone else here has these questions.
"While I don't think a 'god' has anything to do with it, I know there are dimensions of human experience more profound than rationality. That too is unprovable, and I wouldn't try. I suspect that, while hardly necessary, religious thought can tap into an experience of the deeper self. There is a sense of otherness about this deeper self in that it is what it is independent of what your would have it be. Sometimes I think this dimension of experience is merely our animal knowing, the intelligence and intentionality that all mammals at least possess but which we become alienated to by our reliance on language. I don't know but I do know that life without coherence between my rational self and deeper self isn't enough. To the degree that the religiously inclined use religion to seek and accomplish such coherence, I can't find fault. When someone like Bill Moyers talks about god you can tell that for him it really is something mysterious, that he isn't starting with a lot of doctrinal presuppositions. I would really enjoy talking to that sort of theist."
