So what is a self, anyway? My first instinct, when in doubt, is to apply to the dictionary and work from there. The American Heritage Dictionary says that self is 1. the total, essential or particular being of a person; individuality 2. the essential qualities distinguishing one person from another 3. one's consciousness of one's own being or idenity 4. one's own interests, welfare or advantage and 5. that which the immune system identifies as belonging to the body. I suppose this gives us a place to start.
Totality, I'm going to leave more or less alone, since I think that getting into totality gets us away from the rest of this definition. Totality and self is the point where self becomes more than individual. Where we touch the ground is where we become the world.
Essential, while a conflicted term, may get us farther. Philosophically speaking, essential is often connected to the idea of something basic, unchangeable, given. I don't believe that any part of the self is unchangeable, unchoosable. It's very difficult to choose becoming something we don't actually see around us, but if we see a mosaic done in reds and another in blues and a third in green and gold we can take parts from each without taking all of any. Many varied colors make for a more interesting picture, anyway. Once we've taken them, though, and placed them, do they become essential?
This is a strange thing to me. The picture we make can always change--is always changing. And yet, in each moment, the picture believes that it has always been this particular way. On some level, this is even true of me; and, intellectually, I know better. I even know better vicerally, when I stop and remember. While we can remember being a different picture, though, we have a great deal of difficulty remembering being different colors. What was it like when we didn't have Stone to hold the center and the borders? When there was still a one-way mirror between I and we? I suppose it makes sense that we don't remember much of that, because it hurts to do so. Things that hurt go in long-term storage, back by the Memory Box, and those colors fade from the picture. Some colors we have even washed out all the way, taken those mosaic chips and thrown them away. We have to keep throwing, of course, those chips were with us for a long time and try to come back.
So the picture itself isn't essential. Nor the colors. Is there such a thing as temporarily essential? While we use them, those chips are me. The picture, the pattern of the colors, is what distinguishes me from other people. And yet, if I have chosen my chips from other people, how distinct is the picture? Even my arrangement is modeled on the people I have known, though never completely on any one. Essentially speaking, it's action that distinguishes me; the mosaic has no meaning in stasis.
This, I think, is what gives rise to consciousness of identity. The actions that I take, to think, to move, to speak, are taken by someone who is not anyone else. It's like the boundary of one's skin. And if we are strongly aware of how heart differs from lungs differs from toes, our skin still contains them all. If Angel wants to take action that Stone doesn't understand and 13 disagrees with, if Long Term Planning won't tell anyone else what the plan is until it's accomplished, if Maitenance will observe and speak but not act otherwise, none are any less me than those that refuse names.
What, then, is the boundary?
Is it recognition? That we all recognize each of us as me? That makes a certain amount of sense; the worst problems seem to occur when we did recognize those who were not us. Integration also seems required, then. Integration of the more material and less material, acceptance that the physical definition must accord with the mental definition. Recognition must follow the boundary of the skin.
At one time I had an image for intimacy: two trees whose roots have grown together. Not too long ago I realized that this was wrong. Now the image is two trees whose roots grow around each other but not into each other. Follow the skin.
I wonder, you know, what will happen when we die. Because, while I don't precisely believe in reincarnation, I certainly do believe in the conservation of matter and energy. If the same things happen to the more material and less material, then the self will decompose. All parts of it. I wonder if time is a factor for the less material the way it is for the more material. If the less material is recycled quickly (can it be?) do bits of it stay in the same configuration? One of my roomates and I worked out a theory about past-life-memories once. We called it the Unified Leggo Theory of Reincarnation. Just as, when you build something out of Leggos, some of the pieces won't come apart when you break it up and you throw them back in the box still stuck togather and use them as a unit the next time you build something, perhaps parts of souls stick togather and get thrown back in the Cosmic Leggo Bin that way and incorporated into the next soul as a unit. And that's when you get memories lingering. Will our named elements show more propensity to stick together than the unnamed ones?
Curious that, while more elements seem willing to forego names, there doesn't seem to be a loss of complexity. The distance between chips of color has become less. Some chips are picking up the colors of others, especially of Stone. But I find it very difficult to believe that we will ever not be chips; this is the way we put ourself togather, it's part of the ability to choose. We choose chips, we don't just absorb dabs of color to be swirled into the blob. Even if the chips all touch each other, which we can see coming, we will still be chips.
Memory, though, that's an interesting question. Perhaps that is what's truly essential--what one remembers in any given moment. This suggests that the essential is constantly changing, but that does not, in truth, surprise me.
Change is choice. Change is life.
Last modified: 08/23/08
First Posted: 4/14/2001
© 1998-2009 Emily Ravenwood