I believe I said something startling in my previous blog. One could have still missed it. Not because you aren't agile. But possibly because I could have stated it in a clumsy manner.
Let me redo it again for you and take off from that single point. "I am basically a thinking spirit and I could equally say 'I am not this', just as I continue to harp 'I am this and that'.
If you remember, I concluded by saying it isn't wrong to believe 'I am this body and this mind' but it's simply a beginning of the evolutionery stage.
Just a simple argument is sufficient to prove that my presumption of self is either wrong or imperfect. My body as we know is a mingling of the cells of my parents and it continues to depend even now on lots of physical sources such as food, water and air existing outside this body. Hence how could I ever say 'I starts from this body alone'? My brain which is not sufficiently developed to see the links of physical realities has made a great blunder by asserting "I am this body".
True that I have no nerve connections with my parental bodies or the sources of daily sustenance. I need to make an intelligent connection beyond the nerve tie-up to understand that they too are part of me.
Once you acknowledge that some error has creeped in somewhere, you can easily train your mind to reach a holistic outlook. I really don't want to go into all the arguments to prove that our basic assumption is imperfect. Simple intelligence is sufficient to list almost 5 dozen reasons on a single day to establish what I have stated above. And yet our mind continues to harp certain pre-recorded messages down the age. New interpretations for self were given almost two millenium earlier. Yet we couldn't bring ourselves to digest them.
Hence the real difficulty is not so much of arguments or holistic statements. It's the art of training our mind to gain a holistic picture. I would therefore spend time in articulating the technique of reshaping our mind.
It must have taken millions of years for insects and animals even to gain the sense of self, as it exists now. In other words to gain the consciousness of self, based on a mind-body intimate linkage, the evolution took a long-winding path. Insects and birds have instincts but the sense of self slowly began to shape up in mammals, more so among the intelligent categories such as dogs, elephants and monkeys.
True that in human beings it has thickened to a level beyond initial impressions. Their self-consciousness gained a stage worthy of its name. Now to take us to the next stage, its nothing but the existing self that would serve as the real starting point.
Continue to observe closely how the sense of self develops in a body-mind inter-linkage and through the social education starting with the family. Capture in your mind thoroughly how as a baby, you began to open an unending account of memories, in which the sense of self started to reinforce in countless bombardments and your own assessment of what you are steadily grew along with the events of your life, year after year.
Well, you will never have this closest intimacy with any other reality in life. But mind you, your brain has sufficient capacity to take your entire individuality as a single unit and to begin to apply the same technique with all other units as well.
The one precious thing you have gained through evolution is your self-consciousness. Through every single thought that flashes your mind, you somehow become alive to yourself. You may either draw something from the wealth of your own memory or through an immediate inter-action with the outside world. Whatever may be the thought that arises in your magical screen, you have that inexplicable hot link to it; you and you alone can access it; you are born with it; you come alive through it; you further recognize you are alive through each of your thoughts.
But then you have extended your sense of self to something beyond your own consciousness. In fact at the primordial level, your consciousness began to assert that the body was your self. Now you have piled up a lot of things into that identity of self: the past events in your life, your own self-image of who you are, your social staus, family link, profession etc. Over and above this huge definition, you somehow become alive to yourself through every flash of your mind, countless though it may be.
Just take alone the crisp of all this. It's basically the capacity to think of something as yourself. A mystical feeling no doubt. But just recognize this capacity of your mind and the clarity it has already gained through evolution. You are now a thinking spirit - highly developed through countless stages of evolution. And nothing can stop you now to think of anything as your self.
You really have the capacity of thinking something as the self - a quality unthinkable for most other lower beings.
Starting from here the ability to think of any other reality in front of me as my own self is a possibility no one can dispute with. In fact, there are definite laws and guidelines to begin to think of other things outside your body as your own self. It's not easy as the nerve connections are getting lesser and lesser. But the very acknowledgement of limitations is a fresh start for your mind and it can definitely handle the complexity outside of itself.
My own mind has generated the laws governing the extension of self to the limitless world beyond and I will be articulating them as clearly as mathematical formulae in my forthcoming pages. Best wishes till then.
Lovingly,
E.Raja
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