Concept Of Yourself

Transcript

Welcome, beautiful thinkers!

Let’s talk about the concept of yourself.

Many times the past still affects us.

We carry around these things that happen to us, these experiences may have happened many, many years ago, and they still enter our minds. plaguing us.

We relive these experiences, seeing them over and over, perhaps cringing to ourselves, wondering why it had to be like that.

And beyond that, we also identify with these things.

Well, at once we probably resist identifying with them, we don’t want to truly believe that those things are us.

And at the same time, we know that they must be us because we had that experience.

And of course, that cognitive dissonance can cause us a lot of suffering.

What we really are is something a little more enigmatic, a little more difficult to grasp, pin down, we can’t actually grab a piece of paper that has our identity on it and pin it to the wall.

It’s not that simple.

We don’t know exactly what we are even having access to all of our experiences.

Presumably you are the person who knows you the best, at least the earthly person, that even in that case, you can’t necessarily say exactly what you are.

There’s no one paragraph, that you can write down to say clearly, yes, this is me, this is the essence of me.

In Carl Rogers “On Becoming A Person”, he talks about this idea, as I mentioned many times, he says there’s a key point in therapy, where somebody starts to realize “I’m not just the concept I have of myself.”

So, somebody has a concept of themselves and they know how to handle alcohol or something like that.

But they have a concept of themselves, that they still that 15 year old, was embarrassed in high school.

They bring those things with them.

But slowly, it starts to dawn on them that something is going on in the present, something wonderful and mysterious within each one of this, this puzzling nebula circling, circling around the Sun, circling around the galaxy.

A wondrous experiment in experience, a question, a puzzle of being that is inside each one of us.

And it’s not so simple to answer.

And if we ever obtained an answer to this question, we’ll probably have to change it very quickly.

And that’s what Rogers comes to that conclusion.

He says that each of us is an ongoing process.

We are experiencing things, learning, gaining knowledge, processing past experiences and moving into the future, in a way that astounds even us.

In a sense we’re passengers on this journey of life being carried by our bodies, these fine vessels, exploring the world and wondering how the things we see, suffering and enjoying them.

We don’t know exactly what we are.

And if you have an idea of what you are, it is likely that it’s not entirely accurate, that there is more to the story, that there is more to you than your concept of self.