Do you know who you "truly" are?

I have the same question, What is human nature? Nature is to protect and extend and all behaviors are associated with that. Our purpose is exposed in our most valuable commodities. We are created and are willing to create the good.

Well so much for integrated personas then. How about no shadow acting out but things about yourself that you do not see or refuse to look at. I am going to have to learn a whole new system to have a place to putshadow actors. From the perspective of the oneness you say you recognize there is no such hierarchy. There is however basis for diversity and it suggests that there are forms that are so different as to not recognize one another. A jellyfish cannot see a dog. There are mental constructs with parameters so different as to be absolutely abhorrent of each other. They do not meet in time. They are constructed on a basis of absorption or refection and proportional polarity. For example fear flees at the sight of love and in love no fear can be found. These two enraptured states cannot occupy the same space at the same time. What you call integrated self is memory but the essentially competing interests emerge regardless and having and being are the same in real time.
The reason for internal conflict is not the idea of integrated self nor are the competition between good and evil a stable concept of reality. We are taught through the enculturating process to compartmentalize states of being and so we build barriers to the perception of one thing or another. We don't allow certain behaviors in certain situations and we do allow certain behaviors in others so we find people putting on faces and if those people so compartmentalized should loose one or more of those masks of identity then they experience an identity crises. Loosing a long standing job or experiencing a divorce are examples of fundamentally upsetting events caused by this effect. Competing interest is built into our convoluted cultural paradigms and it has certainly co-opted our access to the food chain. Essential interest is what we inherit and it is at that level that you find essential self.

You have not because you ask not. You have what you have applied yourself to and if you find it insufficient it is because you hadn't known essentially what you wanted. There is nothing shadowy about this, it is simply not examined from the perspective that you already know who you are or have an essential clue about what you want. My results in life at one point convinced me that everything and I mean everything I had learned was suspicious by it's virtue in respect to true. Unconscious and subconscious are mysterious terms which mythologize a quite plain and conscious experience. Everything you see arises in conception and the world behaves exactly as you orchestrate and the essential fear in life is that this is actually true or the fear of your own power.

 

Off hand, I'd say the question is on a par with "Do you know if reality is really real?" It's intuitively obvious that the question is unanswerable, and then the follow-up question is surely "How do you really know you really know?" Some may find the game entertaining, but I wouldn't take it too seriously, lest one end up in a straitjacket and padded cell. Unless of course, you've already been contacted by Morpheus. What is your location?

 

When someone asks you this question, tell them that when they figure out who they are, they'll know who you are. Then say: until then, don't trouble me with your silly questions.

 

Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

 

I'm an airplane.

 

Wow! I remember saying the exact same thing. Not to promote Buddhism here (I'm not Buddhist), but after hearing me say it, someone once asked me to contemplate a certain zen koan. It was a short one. It was:

A girl asked a zen master what the most valuable thing in the world was. The master replied: the head of a dead cat.

EDIT: To be precise, he said: The head of a male dead cat . . . and all white, too.

 

Well I know I'm not Jesus Christ.

You don't think I'm Jesus Christ, do ya? hahaha

Well yes, volunteer_tommy, I do know who I am. But that shouldn't offend anybody that I say it, and it shouldn't offend anybody that it's true. Eh, maybe "offend" isn't the right word. But there's something about saying that I know who I am that seems to bother people, or offend their senses, for some reason.

 

Ha ha, thats Zen for you! Those guys are such jokers. :smilielol5:
I blame it on all that Saki.

 

thedope:

A refreshing beginning! Pisses are free! May you never forget to take one! Your being your body will remind you.


Which reminds me of a koan I found lying by the wayside:


A porcupine, having lost its way in the forest had come across a temple where a young monk happened to notice it. Not being in the company of his fellows, nor being of a kindly nature, he fell upon it with his stick. When he finally got up, the creature had grown, and asked him for directions to the nearest public restroom.

 

Thanks for waking me up. The master was wrong. The head of a live, talking porcupine obviously trumps the head of a dead cat when it comes to value.

 

Lately I've been thinking it's not about finding who you are, it's about accepting who you are, which is subject to change with time

You say you are afraid of who you "truly" are. then truly change

 

A long time ago I watched a program that had a guy named John Bradshaw on it. He pulled some guy from the audience and asked him who he was. First the guy gave his name. Bradshaw said, "No, I didn't ask you what your name is; I asked you who you are." So the guy tells him where he lives, how old he is, how long he's been married, and how many kids he has. Bradshaw says, "I didn't ask you about those things. I'm asking you who you are." By now the guy was looking panicked, searching his mind for something that would satisfy this relentless son of a bitch that went by the name of John Bradshaw. But just before the guy's answers were sure to degrade into descriptions of such things as penis length and the color and consistency of his stools, John let him off the hook and sent him back to his seat a deflated and defeated . . . who.

For a while afterwards, I tried to come up with an answer to the question:
"Who are you?" I came up with: "Yes I am."

But if I were to one day be confronted by John Bradshaw himself asking me who I am, I would give him an uppercut to the jaw, or maybe a stiff left jab to the face (depending on how my day was going, of course), and then stand over him and ask him if that gives him any clue as to who I am. Or maybe I'd just tell him I'm his worst nightmare . . . without even the hint of a smile. If he's seen the Rambo movies, I'll bet that'd shut him up.

Otherwise, I would have to say that who I am is up to you--in your mind anyway--but that I'm not bound by that.

 

Who is Rambo?

 

Sylvester Stalone played a guy named Rambo, a disillusioned viet nam war vet who was trained in killing anyone, anywhere, any time, for any reason that made sense to him.

 

The first one truly is a great film.

 

Rambo is a killer. Did he kill evil bad guys or evil good guys?

Do you know who you truly are? lol

 

storch:

How I feel about it. I tried to appease the bradshaws at one time by lyingly replying that I was more than my body, but rambocizing them with such stool samples had no effect.

I guess they'll have to consider us a kind of living uppercut until such time they can bear that we're our particulars.

 

ginalee:

All went south when he was accosted on a bridge by a wannabe troll. No 'moral' compass for his bearings from that point. Survival fits us for its limits. :-D

If you're hatefully awake in eternity, you should ask her why she swallowed you whole!

 

I suffered from depression. I didn't care so much about who or what I was. The big question was WHY I was. If you sat me in a room with someone, I could have them wondering about the legitimacy of existence. Everything lives and then dies . . . unpleasantly for the most part. Some would tell me that that's just the circle of life--a beautiful thing. I would laugh and say, "You mean the circle of death." I stopped watching nature programs because I saw a mother monkey with her baby in her arm; her other arm had been bitten off as she was getting a drink of water from the river where the crocodiles live. Nice job, God. Is this your first attempt at creation, or what?

I felt that as soon as you start living, you start dying, and that as such, life was really just death in a clever disguise, and that the living process is really the dying process. I couldn't accept reality the way it appeared to be. It was an ordeal that had no point to it. Looking back, I can see that I wasn't suffering from loneliness; it was more like onliness. Am I the only one who sees this shit for what it is? An exercise in dealing with time? I started drinking because there was no reason to not.