The Self? What Self? 2011

The amount of times I've started this piece of writing shows just how much I know about the self: absolutely nothing, and absolutely everything. This is the dilemma of being me. My brain has taken enough damage to constitute mental disability, I've pushed my mind to the very limits of its ability. I've tried to go everywhere I possibly could with it, explored the inner realms of consciousness, all in search of the self, my self, and whatever it all meant. I was looking for nothing in the midst of everything, trying to find one thing to constitute what is my self, yet what I found was that there was nothing that I could say was “my Self”, what I found were different things and many pieces that made up what I found to be “me”. I am bits of everything and everyone I encounter in my life.

Through these observations I've come to believe that there is no “Self”, like that we see in general psychology, but rather a transference of consciousness from one being to another, from one life to another, a transferring of energy, thoughts and traits. We pick them up from our parents and friends, from the people we meet and read about, we take in what we believe is beneficial and discard what we find is deteriorating. This is the constant change that happens every day we are alive to take in something new.

If we were given the chance to move and travel around, we would find that there is no self apart from the “one” that is the “person” you see in the mirror, this is all that constitutes the self, the internal world is one that changes with the surroundings, the body follows later, this is evolution, or adaption, whichever way you choose to look at it, it is what it is, change.

I choose not to believe in a “Self” anymore, I choose only believe in what I see and feel, and those two aspects of life change all the time, so essentially what I believe in is Change. Change is the only way I would have survived in this world, if I had to stay one person and one being my entire life I would have killed myself or been killed a long time ago. My life started interestingly, first of all I was not supposed to be born, I am the product of teenage naivety.

My mother fell pregnant with me at the age of 18, my biological father was already a father and could not handle another child, so he when I was born, he did not stick around, and although there is still some question as to who was at fault, I found that my mother told me a twisted version of the story, when I was 11, or younger, the year changes every time I ask. This was something I have come to see now as being way too young to understand what it meant at the time, and so as a child I took it all very personally, because that is what 11 year olds do. I blamed myself for my mother being the way she was, all her problems became mine. My thinking was that I must have been such a terrible person if my father abandoned me and my mother rejected me. Suicide, etc, followed soon.

This took me back and knocked me down, believing that I was like a fatal car accident, destroying everything involved. This is where it all began. Or maybe it began when I was dropped on my head as a baby. Or when I cracked my skull as a child. Maybe the time an older girl forced herself on me after I said “No get off”. It may have even been when I was seduced by my neighbours daughter at the age of 5, but it is most likely genetic though. Oh and it can't be drugs, haven't done that many despite popular opinion. The list goes on, just like everyone else's, but the point is that here I am now, with an understanding of these things and their affects. And so are you, with all your lessons and experiences behind you. This is our knowledge.

I am not angry at the world, or anyone else, but rather myself, for letting these things get to me and effect me as they did, but I have forgiven myself because it is part of the process. I am a complicated mess of contradictions and paradoxes for it. Perfectly screwed up in a truly messed up world. This is me, a mess of everything put together in one body, and courtesy of my exploration of life, I'm not even sure that my body is even here or just an illusion projected from an inner consciousness in an attempt to define its own existence.

Although honestly, I don't care, only because if I did, I would go insane, well more so. I cared once and look where it got me, into such a mess that I've had to design my entire life around the attempt to fix it. I've been to the other side of hell and kissed the floors of heaven, but still, I am here, not there, or anywhere else. Everyday I live in hell and fly to heaven, but I always come back, and even though my mind is a puddle of emotions, a whirlwind of thoughts and creations, chaos confined, this is my self, my true self. Once the veil had been dropped and the curtains lifted, I saw this IS the Self: Nothing and everything. No one and everyone. That which is, and that which is yet to be, or may have been already. Past, present, future, all combined into one operating system, the mind.

This life we live is an illusion being refined by commercials and celebrities, computer games and cyber-spaces. We have not lost the idea of the Self, we have only begun to uncover its true identity. But we must also be careful not to be lead a stray but our own false desires and programmed agendas. The news is lying, we are one species, living on one planet, that happens to be experiencing itself separately and indefinitely through the consciousness of all that lives on it.

It is only with the sight of the other in our mind that we can sustain our self, because even the person in the mirror is not you, it is only a reflection, it is what others see and what you believe they see, but at the same time it is none of that, because only you yourself can know what lies beneath that flesh.

One day we will hopefully all wake up and all we will see is Us, no you or me, only us, and that will be the day you know your Self. That day, there will only be harmony. No war. No peace. No time. No space. Just existing in the purest form, with no there and then, only here and now.

One day difference will create curiousity.

One day we will be free, because we will finally see ourselves for who we are:

The people from the other side of the mirror.