Self Image

Now we have a fair idea of what we are, the complexities involved with in us and with in the universe. All along we wanted to change every thing or every happening in this tiny earth with in the vast cosmos by ourselves or by some body else. We still can change that with the understanding of whole complexities of this cosmos and the complexities of ourselves. But we need to change a bit with in ourselves to make us capable of changing the happening in earth. Self analysis is for the purpose of understanding what we need to change with in ourselves.

If we are required to write down about whom we are, depend on our descriptive nature, we may write about ourselves any thing from three sentences to 30 sentences. No ordinary person can write more than 30 sentence about him/her self. If one can do that, he/she must be a story writer.

This is the time to start self analysis. If you are willing to do, prepare an analysis report of yourself as far as possible and make it as a record. If you are willing to change yourself and see this record after few months, you will surprise about your image you will be having about you at that time. Yes, what we have just written down is our image about ourselves, which we have with in us. What is this image? How this image has been formed within us and got into our mind? Do we need this image or do we change this image? If we get all these questions, we are again in the right track.

I would like to ascertain one thing here. Any body who reads this page is definitely an intelligent person. You must have been gone thru certain formal education which ever field it may be. The education must have been made you as an intellectual being. By intellect, what I mean is you have become a logical person. What ever you think you try to attach some logic to that. But the irony is whenever we are not able to attach any logic to something which we come across, instead of asking questions and finding a solution, we just go into our belief system and start BELIEVING those things. We never try to understand the logic behind what we believe or, at least gaining intellectual knowledge about our belief. Yes, belief is a wonderful thing to have, if we believe every thing and trust every thing what ever come across to us, beyond any question or doubt. But having an intellectual mind we are not able to have that sort of belief also. Hence if we analyze some thing using our logical mind and when it goes beyond our capability with respect to logic, we just escape the logical route by taking a belief route. This is mere escapism. We are lazy to analyze further and find the answer. It is because of our laziness we divert ourselves to the belief route just for those concepts which we can’t understand but somehow we need them for a mere psychological satisfaction or for psychological process of covering up things which we are unable to understand. We never reach any where by this escape route and psychological covering-up process. The best thing we can do on such situation is go as far as possible with in the logical mind and stop were we are not able to proceed any further, and keep it for a later time. In this way at least we have kept a possibility open. By escaping thru the belief route for certain things (only), we are sealing possibility of knowledge. Being with an intellectual mind, knowledge gives more freedom to us rather than the belief.

That is the reason I said, we are in the right track if we get some question about us, as we started the self analysis. So in the first stage of self analysis, we actually analyzing our image about ourselves rather than actually analyzing ourselves. There is a vast difference between analyzing our image about ourselves and actually analyzing ourselves. We may discuss about this at later stage. Now let us start with what we consider as ourselves – The image about ourselves.

Okay, now the list is ready. We have already written down what we consider as ourselves. The list may contain description of our physical nature, interests, attitude, and what we consider as positive and negative description of ours. Now let us go back and look at how we arrived at the conclusion about ourselves.

Let us take the physical description of ourselves. Naturally we have described our body here. We would have written as tall/short, long/round/oval face, long/short hair and so on. But what we describe about our physical aspect is just a comparison of what is there around us. Yes that is the only way we can describe our physical aspect. Here we will write the same thing even if we have written it a year ago or a year later as long as we are in the same society. This is reasonably straight forward. Now let us move to the description of our interests. Here the interests we have noted about ourselves is just what we though about our interest at that moment and at best, this is the interests we have on a few days span of time from the moment we have noted them. If we would have written about our interests a few weeks ago or shall write few weeks later, that would have been a different set of interests, depend on our exposure to new experiences in life. Same is the case with the description of attitude or any other aspects. The point here is that except about our physical nature, every thing else is entirely the projection of our mind. It is basically the projection of our mind at the time of observing those aspects. To express it in a subtle way, the description we give about ourselves is the observation of the projection of our mind at the moment and it is not the observation of ourselves. (It may be a bit hard to understand the difference between the projection of our mind and ourselves. It may be cleared after some more discussion). The projection of our mind could have been in any other direction, if we would have observed it in another moment. There are limitless numbers of possibilities about how we would have described ourselves based on the time in which we are describing ourselves. The point here is that the entire description of us we have observed is based on our reactive thoughts, which can change at every single moment of life. So what we think about us is not a fixed thing. It changes every moment during our life, except about our body. Even about the body, though we do not perceive, the reality is that it is changing every moment. Every cell in our body is dying and regenerating itself, which is happening at every moment of our life at certain part of our body. Some where I heard that each cells in our body dies and replaced by a new cell once in every 2.5 years. On the other hand, we are virtually having a new body once in every 2.5 years. Hence the fact is that what we describe about ourselves changes during every moment of life. We are not the same entity at this moment compared to what we were in the previous moment or what we will be in the next moment, as per our description about us.

I would like to remind you- please do not bring in the philosophical or religious concepts which describe about us at this moment. It is deceptive in nature and seals the possibility of self analysis. Let us be open about ourselves. Let us not deceive some thing and seal the option of knowing about ourselves. Same is the case when you are reading this blog. Please stay away from any urge of deception – towards or against the content, which will take away the possibility of self knowledge. Just try to relate the contents to your experience or try to experience it. If unable to relate it to your experience or not able to experience it, just stop there in that direction and move on to another direction. That will be far, far better than deceived by some idea.