Saturday 19 November 2011

Being a Person.

I’ve talked a lot recently about this process I’ve been going through over the past year – trying to drop the role-play, trying to stop adapting myself to the aims and expectations of particular circumstances and then convincing myself that I am, in some way, being me. I believe it’s what most of us do most of the time.

I’ve found that two things happen when you let go of the roles and try to find out who you really are. First, you realise that you’re actually an entity of very little substance or consequence, and so you lose confidence in the prospect of anybody ever wanting to associate with you. That’s the difficult bit. Conversely, however, you also realise what a complex, multi-faceted being you are, and that leads to a process of determining which things really matter to you and why.

The two appear to be in conflict, mutually exclusive even. But maybe they’re not. Maybe it’s just a matter of understanding that the human animal actually amounts to very little more than his or her self-perceptions. Maybe this helps to explain the illusory nature of material existence, a phenomenon of which the Vedic sages often talk.

This isn’t a theory yet. It might become one.

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