Self

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Self is an illusive concept of human existence. It is essential to being human distinguishing one from another human and deals with a persona introspection of oneself in particular. It is our experiences with the Universe, it is about our emotional awareness, our thoughts at the moment, it is an accumulation of experiences and it is a perception of self as an individual person as an object of consciousness. It is a philosophy, a psychology, a religious belief, a culture with its socially driven cultural belief and so on. It is about our essential qualities that constitute a person as both essential to the group or trive while promoting a uniqueness to feed the ego with caution and moderation. It is our identity as a product of our experiences, learning, understanding and practices.

It is about social identity and acceptance therefore subject to change accordingly even when the change creates stresses of the mind and body. It is about ego as affected by external influences as they effect our personal pride created from our self.

Ego does not necessarily mean the mind since the ego is a lot about emotions and the monkey brain. The mind, as a simplistic model, is divided into three parts that we humans use, i.e., the logical Spock like brain where we handle common sense, etc., the emotionally driven pride filled testerone driven monkey like brain where we handle our emotionally driven crap and is the main stay of humans that leads to conflict and violence, etc., and finally our instinctual automatic lizard brain that nature uses to handle the more automatic aspects of the body such as breathing and blinking while assuming the role of survival models when our monkeys dive into its emotional driven crap or when nature attacks, etc. and the lizard has to bring up those actions necessary to survive like freezing or running or fighting, etc. Martial arts are about learning what our three minds do and training to be aware of those aspects of self so that we can at the very least try to rein the more dangerous aspects in for survival. Example: We become aware that our logical brains are too slow in survival mode, the monkey brain is an emotionally driven ignorant stupid don’t give a shit mind that often escalates us into grave bodily harm or death while the lizard is auto pilot so training and practice must be geared to bypass the logical brain, the monkey and pick the appropriate operant conditioned principle multiple response type model that will allow survival while remaining within the proverbial self-defense square. This is not truly about such responses because once aware of all that encompasses conflict and violence you should therefore have the logical mind through awareness trained to stop the process of conflict and violence for avoidance and so on. Only by studying our “Self” and its three minds can we become aware and recognize when they are leaving the train station so we may apply more control so that our “Self” does not succumb to the monkey, etc. and do bad things. 

Protecting the self is important for the self is that accumulation of both internal and external perceptions, distinctions and lessons that make us who we are as persons. It is exposure to such experiences that create a self that can be good, bad  or predatory with all these able to do good or to do bad, this is the self for each of us, that composition of all we encounter in life that makes us humans with the appropriate humility, etc., that speaks to good, etc. 

Remember that our encounter and exposure to any given moment in life, our race, our gender, our age at any moment, our professions, our politics, our religious belief system and our general socially driven belief systems, and countless identifying and defining characteristics and affiliations tend to drive our “Self” and effect what we see, hear, feel and perceive at any given moment with all that entails creates within us our, “Self.” Most humans never even realize, understand and are totally unaware of these ongoing processes and that is what our monkeys live for but once we become aware of our “Self” then we can understand the “Self of Others” and then create a mind-set and mind-state that takes into consideration all the ways we can avoid, deescalate and communicate to control conflict and violence. 

This is my initial foray into my “Self” and I try to train, practice and apply these in my martial discipline and life with a modicum of success and a lot of failures that teach me about how to be more successful. 

Philosophy will never truly define the self simply because like fingerprints the self is so unique and so different that defining it in one way is impossible for to define the self would require us to know, understand and appreciate every single human in existence at every moment throughout one’s life and that is impossible but to know that one must be aware of their “Self” and then work from there is a common principle of self and character and personality and so on. 

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