User:Paine Ellsworth/The Self

The Self may not be so easy to define. Individual sentient beings do not have an individual self. There is such a thing as a "self"; however, it is not the self who most people mean when they think of a self. An individual's self is nothing more than an illusion. The true Self is real, and we are all a part of that.

Just so the words don't get too awkward I will continue to refer to the two different kinds of self in the following manner: an individual's illusory self will be kept in lowercase, as in "self", and the true self will be in uppercase, as in "Self".

A star is born
Each of our selves is born along with each of us. The self is with us from the beginning. It is nurtured by us, by our parents and families, by our teachers, by all other selves with whom we come into contact. Most of you who read this will not believe it. Your self won't let you believe it. You will need evidence, hard evidence, to accept it. And the only one who can furnish that hard evidence is you... your Self. Remember, you do not have a self – your self is an illusion – you do however have a Self, which is not an illusion. The Self is eternal in time and space, in spacetime if you will. The Self has no beginning, no end, only a continuing existence, a continuum.

To Accept or to Believe
To accept a truth does not require belief, and to believe something does not require acceptance of truth. If I were to tell you I have a green card, you would either believe me or not believe me. If I were to show you my green card, then belief or disbelief no longer enters in; you would accept as truth that I have a green card. If I show you a purple car, then you are not required to believe it's purple, you simply accept as fact that it is purple.

On the other hand, if during a sermon you hear that "God is good", then you are presented with a choice to either believe or disbelieve. If you choose to believe, then you do so based on faith, not on evidence. In this case in order for you to believe, you are required to have faith not only that there is a big old guy in the sky, but also that he is not creepy, not evil, the creator is good and watches over us.

If God were to come to the sermon and speak with the crowd of believers, perform a miracle or two, slowly rise into the sky until he finally disappears, you would probably no longer need to believe or have faith, you would have seen it for yourself and would accept it as truth, right? What if you were hallucinating? How would you know that you weren't hallucinating? How would you go about convincing others who hadn't been there and who didn't see and hear the big old guy?

And if there is no hard evidence for a greater Self whom I can accept as truly alive, then which is better for me to believe in... myself? or my Self?

Mirror
Take a good look in the mirror – what do you see? Most people see the person that they would call "me" or "myself". In the first place what you see in the mirror is an "image". Your eyes sense whatever your brain tells them to sense based upon the electrical impulses they sent to it, and those impulses are based on the rays of light they receive from the surface of the mirror. And in the second place the image you see is your body, or a part of it, maybe your head and shoulders. And are you like most people? Do you identify that image with "yourself"? your self? Or do you see your self as more than just your body? To the point, what do you accept as truth about your self (evidence bearing), and what do you merely believe about your self (based on faith and faith alone)?

< * more to come * >


 * "To accept a truth does not require belief, and to believe something does not require acceptance of truth."

- P.I. Ellsworth

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