When you're trying to make yourself a better person, there are two yous involved (at least). There's the you you are, and then there's the you who wants to make you better and who does make you better. There's the you that gets worked on and the you that does the work, right? So which you is You?
I think the first you, that is, the you that gets worked on, isn't really you at all. It's what we've grown to think of as you (or me), it's what everyone says our you is but really, I think, it's just our personality, our ego. It's a conglomeration of traits and habits, virtues and vices, prejudices and pre-planned performances through which we interact with the world, but that's all it is. Our personality, our ego, our "self", can change, yet we remain the same. My habits have changed, my virtues and prejudices are different today than they were on the day we graduated highschool, but I am still me. I haven't changed at all, in some way. In some way I am exactly the same as I have always been, underneath all that exterior stuff. I am me, no matter what my personality or my ego "looks" like.
So what am I then? If I'm not the you-that-gets-worked-on, then I must be the you-that-works.
But what is this you? The first you was easy. We all know that you. It's the you that you and I know, the you that our employers and coworkers and friends know, the you that our families and loved ones know, but that you is no you at all. The real you lies underneath the surface one, the real you is the ideal that is constantly critiquing and working on and forming the surface you, the personality. The real you is insightful and wise, seeing the proper way in every situation. The surface you is blind and dumb, constantly stumbling over itself. This is why the real you is always working on surface you, ever trying to form it in its own image. The real you is conscience, the surface you is superstition.
The real you is the ideal you, the perfect you. The surface you is the imperfect reflection of the ideal you in the material world. The real you is a force, always pushing, the surface you is a substance, ever resistant. It is between this pushing and resisting that human lives are lived.
Our folly is that we cling to the imperfect reflection and ignore the ideal. We attach ourselves to and identify ourselves with the surface you, the personality, and thus deny the real you. When we do this, we lose our insight, and then we count our blindness a blessing and call it sight. In our ignorance, we mistake our ignorance for wisdom.
The court jester who plays at catching his shadow is surely comedic, but the poor fool who with real passion attempts to restrain his shadow is just as surely tragic. Still, all of us engage in such tragic foolishness. The surface you is ever changing and therefore unreal. Its being is contingent upon an infinity of variables and is therefore relative. The real you is unchanging and absolute, its being is contingent upon nothing. The surface you demands one thing today and another thing tomorrow, the real you demands only one thing, constantly: "be good" . The surface you is like clay that, without a sculptor to give it shape, has no form of its own. Our fault is that we forget the sculptor and think we are nothing but clay. The real you is not the clay, the real you is the sculptor, the real you is the you-that-works, the real you is God (no joke) and this is why it is written that God makes man in his own image.
And the Lord God said unto Israel, "You shall be Holy for I, your God, am Holy."
I think the first you, that is, the you that gets worked on, isn't really you at all. It's what we've grown to think of as you (or me), it's what everyone says our you is but really, I think, it's just our personality, our ego. It's a conglomeration of traits and habits, virtues and vices, prejudices and pre-planned performances through which we interact with the world, but that's all it is. Our personality, our ego, our "self", can change, yet we remain the same. My habits have changed, my virtues and prejudices are different today than they were on the day we graduated highschool, but I am still me. I haven't changed at all, in some way. In some way I am exactly the same as I have always been, underneath all that exterior stuff. I am me, no matter what my personality or my ego "looks" like.
So what am I then? If I'm not the you-that-gets-worked-on, then I must be the you-that-works.
But what is this you? The first you was easy. We all know that you. It's the you that you and I know, the you that our employers and coworkers and friends know, the you that our families and loved ones know, but that you is no you at all. The real you lies underneath the surface one, the real you is the ideal that is constantly critiquing and working on and forming the surface you, the personality. The real you is insightful and wise, seeing the proper way in every situation. The surface you is blind and dumb, constantly stumbling over itself. This is why the real you is always working on surface you, ever trying to form it in its own image. The real you is conscience, the surface you is superstition.
The real you is the ideal you, the perfect you. The surface you is the imperfect reflection of the ideal you in the material world. The real you is a force, always pushing, the surface you is a substance, ever resistant. It is between this pushing and resisting that human lives are lived.
Our folly is that we cling to the imperfect reflection and ignore the ideal. We attach ourselves to and identify ourselves with the surface you, the personality, and thus deny the real you. When we do this, we lose our insight, and then we count our blindness a blessing and call it sight. In our ignorance, we mistake our ignorance for wisdom.
The court jester who plays at catching his shadow is surely comedic, but the poor fool who with real passion attempts to restrain his shadow is just as surely tragic. Still, all of us engage in such tragic foolishness. The surface you is ever changing and therefore unreal. Its being is contingent upon an infinity of variables and is therefore relative. The real you is unchanging and absolute, its being is contingent upon nothing. The surface you demands one thing today and another thing tomorrow, the real you demands only one thing, constantly: "be good" . The surface you is like clay that, without a sculptor to give it shape, has no form of its own. Our fault is that we forget the sculptor and think we are nothing but clay. The real you is not the clay, the real you is the sculptor, the real you is the you-that-works, the real you is God (no joke) and this is why it is written that God makes man in his own image.
And the Lord God said unto Israel, "You shall be Holy for I, your God, am Holy."
posted by Diptherio at
8:32 AM
3 Comments:
This is good stuff, although I would think that the two yous exist all the time rather than only when one wants to be a better person, unless you were positing that we are always trying to be ideal. I will say that you employ an excellent rhetorical style (not in a pejorative sense). You are illustrative and are good to stay away from sounding heavy handed.
I do, however, have some questions about your thoughts.
1) How does the worker you (or the righteous you)obtain its senses. Does it rely on the worked on you to gather that information from the environment? Is the worker you born with these powers of judgement? (you did say that the worker you was God, so it would seem that supernatural forces might play in)
2) Does the worker you's conception of right/wrong change over time? I suppose that if the worker you was concieved with an infinate knowledge of possibilities and courses, the answer to this would be no, but if there is some growing that takes place, it would have to be yes.
3) How do you know of the worker you? Can it be felt or remembered? Are you conscious of it?
4) Is there more to the relation ship between the two yous than the the worker moulding the worked upon? What is it about the worked upon you that necessitates its existence? Does it protect the worker you?
I am very interested in hearing your thoughts elaborated upon.
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Ok, first off, thanks for your praise. It means a lot coming from you.
Rather than try to answer your questions point by point, I think I'll just try to explain myself better.
So, I've had this thought for awhile now. It goes something like this, "If you're trying to make yourself a better person, which you is you, the one thats wants to make you a better person or the one that gets made a better person?" It seemed to me (and still does) that just the fact that you can look at "yourself" and think things like, "I want to make myself better" is evidence of two distinct entities. Just look at the words "yourself" and "myself". The very words imply ownership; your self, my self. This self is mine, my self: myself. But if you own something, you cannot also be that thing. A seperation is necessary for the relationship of ownership (or any relationship, for that matter) to come into existance. My being is not something that I own, it is, rather, the thing that owns. My being is me, it is not my possession.
"The eye can see everything except itself." Therefore, if the eye can see it, it must not be the eye.
So there's me, that is, my being, and there's my self, my personality, my ego. I like ego the best, but I don't use it in Freud's sense. Rather, I use it more broadly as both a person's personality (i.e. their interactions with the outside world) and their attitudes (those interior thoughts, emotions, defense mechanisms, etc., that shape the personality, as well as one's thoughts about those thoughts, emotions, defense mechanisms, etc.). So the ego is our self. The thing that belongs to, but is distinct from, us.
These two "parts" of us, if we can call them that, are always existant. My being is the part of me that has been the same since the day my peephole opened; I like to call it my soul, or my atman. My ego has been around about as long as my soul, but the difference is my ego is constantly changing, morphing, and warping. Whereas my soul provides the continuity to my life, my ego has provided some of the most striking reversals and incongruities.
The ego is a necessary result, a symptom if you will, of living in a material world of physically and psycically discrete components. The ego results from having to interact with others, of having to leap out across the unbridgeable void the seperates one mind from another. So long as we live in this material world we must have an ego, there's no way around it. The soul, we know, is always here because it is the thing that lives in the material world.
So does the soul, the you-that-works, change over time? It doesn't. The soul is eternal and its command singular, "LOVE". As one becomes more attuned to the you-that-works (please, not worker-you, it sounds too much like a bee), the personality begins to change, in order to better accord itself with the soul. Why and how does this happen? It happens because you are your soul and your soul is love. Your soul is also aware of every nook and cranny of your ego and the ways in which those nooks and crannies conflict with its nature. As one becomes more aware of his or her true nature as soul, one becomes more aware of the conflicts between the ego and the soul. The soul says "love" but the ego says "greed". Because the ego is literally our way of living in the world one becomes aware of the coflicts of ego and soul as a feeling of hypocrisy.
But we're getting into a sticky area here, semantically speaking, because now we've gone and introduced a third you by the back door (or maybe by the bathroom window). I refer to it as "one" in the above sentence. This "one", I should explain, is nothing more than our conscious thought process (which, incedentally, makes it a part of the ego). Our thoughts, while mostly random and completely useless, occassionally hit upon true knowledge, by dint of which they can recognize the ego for what it is and learn to identify with the internal soul. The conscious thought process is part of the ego like the eye is part of the body. Just as the eye can look down and say, "oh yes, this is a body I am attached to," so too can the conscious thought process look around it and say, "oh yes, this is an ego I'm attached to." The conscious thought process is the main link between ego and soul, and it is through this channel, cheifly, that the you-that-works does its work.
Now, in the process of identification with the soul and molding of the ego to fit the contours of the soul, there will neccessarily be a process of approximation. The command is "LOVE", but our understanding of what that means may change over time. This is nothing more than our limited understanding trying continually to come to terms with an infinite reality, contorting itself to try to match ever more perfectly the outline of the true self. This does not imply a change in the soul, the atman, the you-that-works.
I think that more or less answers questions numbers 2 and 4. As for number 3, I would suggest a thought experiment. Ask yourself, "when I look at something, what is it that sees?" You see, of course, but what does that mean, you? We know the phsyiology of sight, how light is collected by the eye, projected on the retina, turned into nerve impulses and conveyed via the optic nerve to the optical cortex near the back of the brain. But then what? Who's watching the images in the optical cortex. We know the optical cortex isn't watching them, right? We are. But again, what does that mean, we?
Or if that doesn't do it for ya', consider that we know that our bodies change (every cell dies and is replaced every seven years), our opinions, thoughts, ideas, prejudices, etc. change, our relationships change, yet we know that we are the same, somehow, indescribably. So where can this sense of continuity come from? Surely not from any of the above named sources. Probably it's the same thing that's watching movies down at the Opti-Cortoplex.
(Kierkagaard took Descartes to task for his famous dictum, "cogito ergo sum," I think therefore I am. He pointed out that in moving from the first half of the sentence to the second half he had, in fact, moved not at all. Descartes starts out by saying "I think"; if I am there to think, then surely it must already be assumed that I am! Personally, I think a more cogent dictum than Descartes would be "Thought is, I am". Stating the obvious perhaps, but Descartes was looking for the thing that couldn't be doubted.)
Ok, now, first question last. The you-that-works obtains its senses from the body. Nothing "supernatural" about it. The you-that-works occupies the body the same way a driver occupies a car. Just as the driver enters the car and uses it to perform his purposes, a tool for his will, so too does the soul occupy the body, so that she might express her powers fully in the material world. The driver, though detached from the road, none the less recieves information about the road conditions, whether it is smooth or rutted, from the vibrations in the steering column or the clattering of the doors. The soul is the perciever, the unseen seer.
The being of the soul is Love, it does not make judgements. Love does not judge, it feels compassion for all beings. Judgement requires distance, but Love demands union.
Of course you may say, "but the soul judges the ego," but this is incorrect. It is the conscious thought process that judges the ego, i.e. the ego judges itself. The conscious thought process judges the ego because it becomes aware of soul and of the nature of soul, and sees how the ego is lacking and decides to fix it (or not). The you-that-works does its work simply by being what it is, pure Love and Compassion.
I know some of this probably contradicts the original post, but I don't mind, so you don't either.
Alright, I hope that clears things up (ha!).
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