• for: emptiness, shunyata, non-existence of self, no-self, illusory self, deconstructing self
• comment
  • this short description of the reasoning behind deconstructing the self is quite fresh and insightful, especially relating it to cognition.

• for: constructing selves, constructing self, reconstructing self
• comment
  • this is a fascinating insight that gives us deeper nuance on what it means to construct our selves in every moment
  • we obviously know we don't have access to our past and only have access to engrams of the past , so it isn't wrong to say that we are constantly reconstructing ourselves like a Planaria worm does to regenerate its body, all the time.
  • engrams are abstract traces of the past
  • this goes to the heart of constructing the self, in the Buddhist sense, as a kind of illusion
  • Levin says he is somewhere in the middle between the two poles of illusion and solidity of self, the self is a pragmatic useful metaphor, like everything else we construct

• for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

• paraphrase

  • sense of self is a construct
  • a psychological and social construct
  • it's not something that infants are born with
    • it's actually something that develops as we grow up
  • our caregivers look into our eyes
    • give us a name that we learned to identify with and
    • also basically we learn to see ourselves as they see us
      • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
    • we learned to use language in certain ways
      • mine
      • you
      • yours
      • his
      • hers and so forth
    • that's all very essential to it
  • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
  • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
    • thinking
    • feeling
    • acting
    • reacting
    • remembering
    • planning and
    • tending
  • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
  • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
• I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
  • because the sense of self is a construct
    • because it doesn't refer it
    • doesn't depend on it
    • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity

• this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

  • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
  • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable

• comment

• question
  • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
    • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
    • reference
      • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
        • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?

Good explanation of what self-consciousness attempts to do:

Self-consciousness is not something obviously "self-existing" it is a fiction, - it is ungrounded because it is - a mental construct.

Rather than being selfsufficient, - consciousness is like the surface of the sea: dependent on unknown depths ("conditions," as the Buddha called them) that it cannot grasp - because it is a manifestation of them.

The problem arises because this conditioned, and therefore unstable, consciousness wants to - ground itself, to make itself real.

But to real-ize itself is to objectify itself - meaning to grasp itself, since an object is that-which-is-grasped.

The ego-self is this continuing attempt to objectify oneself by grasping oneself, something we can no more do than a hand can grasp itself.

//* Loy is stating... - Those engaging compulsively in money, fame, power, materialism - are actually deeply repressing - the fact that the ego-self, and therefore self-consciousness is a construction - To continually reify the ego-self, we engage in these activities - and of course, this is fueling the polycrisis we now find ourselves in

// SELF CONSCIOUSNESS IS A MENTAL CONSTRUCTION