What if this thing we call “SELF”...

6/27/2014

What if this thing we call “SELF” is actually a narrative construction/creation that we shape as we move through life, including the path already travelled and the path ahead?

What if our experience of “SELF” is an on-going improvisation that situates our body and consciousness in the world, relates to others, acts and reacts in a constant dance of static and dynamic perceptions.

What if “SELF” has no tangible (physical or psychological) reality apart from what we create/construct by narrating it as we live it and then remember it?

What if what we label “SELF” is our on-going awareness of our being/doing/thinking/feeling…, continually migrating through time… unfolding, becoming perceptible, acquiring dimension, form and color… something we experience and can talk about and describe, which then disappears into memory as a seemingly solid and immutable point of reference: the “truth” about who we “are,” what we think, what we can and cannot do, should and or have to do, what we have done, should have done, shouldn’t have done, etc., etc. …

What if we construct the present, past and future to fit with what we “know” and expect?

What if we elaborate stories to describe our “SELF,” and then elaborate our “SELF” to fit our stories?

What if it only feels solid? What if we can restructure… adapt our story to create a narrative we like better?

What if “SELF” is our personal story of existence as we have narrated it?

What story do you want to write?

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This was musings (part 1) on re-reading J. Bruner: “The narrative construction of self” (Chapter 1 in “The handbook of narrative and psychotherapy, Part I: The ‘narrative turn’: Why stories matter in psychotherapy.” Lynne E. Angus and John McLeod. Sage Publications, 2004)

(Labeled “part 1” just in case I want to more musings later as I continue to read the chapter. I don’t know yet if I will or won’t as that part of my story hasn’t happened yet and I choose not to predict.)

2 Comments

Maria Hoffman

6/29/2014 03:52:04 am

What if reality is only a reflection of our imagination. What if self is not within us but a force or energy that drives our body and mind from outside.

What if that force just moves to another place at some point and self moves away to another stage and the body disconnects, just an energy unplug? (dies?)

Where was self before we were born and where does it go when we die?

What if we construct our future with what we've learned by repletion since we were born? You are born, grow, age and die?

How would a person's reality be if grown isolated without outside world reference? What kind of reality would he/she construct?

Just questions that come to my mind by reading your reflections... Same questions with different words or frame of reference.

At the end is this reality real? or we build the reality with what we learn? what is self? is it body, mind or spirit?

Kate

6/29/2014 10:27:20 pm

IMAGINATION.

TO IMAGE.

TO IMAGINE.

To form a mental image of.

Literally, everyone whose mind/brain is alive can image or imagine… can create images of things both internal and external. In common usage, we use the words “imagination” and “imaginary” to designate something “creative,” invented, or existing only in the ‘mind’s eye’ of one person. Like “creativity,” “imagination” usually contains a connotation of talent or artistry and so imply that certain people have “more” of it than others.

In fact, everyone is creative and imaginative. We are constantly in the process of creating images. Awareness in the world is a constant process of imaging/imagining/imagination at work. In that sense, reality is indeed a reflection of our imagination… it is that which we image out of our perceptions and intuitions. Imagination is the creation of both what we experience as “real” (i.e., having an existence independent of our perception and will… two or more people can agree on its color, shape, size…) and “unreal” (i.e., that without characteristics that two or more people can appreciate and agree upon… that which another person may experience and/or describe differently). When we say something is ‘real,’ we attribute to it independent existence or being outside our mind..
In short, our imagination constitutes/creates our internal and external worlds.

So now on to part two of my thoughts after reading the chapter….
Bruner suggests (and I quite like the idea) that “narrative” is the process of tying experience together, that self-making is both an outside-in and an inside-out process. ‘Self’ is constructed in function of the culture we are raised in (including our education in all senses, formal and informal), which sets up templates according to which we define and establish our “self” (by conforming and/or resisting). In this sense, there is always something of the “other” in an individual self. There is a constant balancing of autonomy and commitment: a sense of free will … the possibility of choice, balanced with belonging to a group (family, religion or other belief system, friends…).

Self-creation is dialectic and dynamic, always open to re-making to the extent that the evolving self is coherent with one’s on-going narrative of who this character is in space and time, what one has experienced and is experiencing, learned and is learning, what one believes and believed, what one desires and desired, etc. (I am sure there are more sources) set within a certain place and time.
Where the self comes from… where it was before we were born and where it goes when we die are indeed interesting (different?) questions. As is the question of “soul” and how it relates to “self” … is it self itself? What we call the spiritual? Is it another thing altogether? The energy that fuels self-building?

Kate

What if this thing we call “SELF”...

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