Is who you are unchangeable? Are you the same person you have been all of your life? Surely you have looked through old love letters and journal entries and realized you do not believe the same things or think in the same way that you used to. If all of that changes, what are you? Is there any aspect of your existence that you can pin down and identify? And I wonder if, when you do, this feels like a completely adequate description of yourself.
I think an important question that everyone in our society must have at one point asked themselves is "how is one able to feel free in an existence so heavily structured/scheduled?" I think this freedom depends on what you identify with. If you are a "positive thinker" you get by through optimism and hope for the future, and that is your freedom. If you use anger to bully your way through the day than anger grants you the freedom to get what you want. If you identify a lot with the system you are in, and you are very comfortable being a cog-in-the-wheel, than you get by through your pride in what you do. If you are a religious or spiritual person, you function through your powerful belief in a system of worship or thought.
Yet back to my original question, is who you are unchangeable? Certainly to function in society, it seems like one has to hold themselves in a pretty decisive way. If your a positive thinker, you cannot alter your thinking without suffering. If you are a bully, then you fairly desperately rely on your aggression to be able to function. It seems like in order to function in our structured society, we trap ourselves psychologically in a specific way. We are no longer allowed to change.
There is another way to function in society without holding oneself in a rigid psychological state. It is extremely difficult, because it requires admitting to yourself in every moment that you do not know who you are. You constantly question your own beliefs, your own analysis. You do not condense around any aspect of yourself, but rather witness your own experience of life as it happens. While you still have a "map of the universe" via beliefs, you do not identify solely with those beliefs anymore. You are able to live outside of the realm of beliefs and human logic. You no longer manipulate what you do and what you think. This is called "living in the present moment."
I think an important question that everyone in our society must have at one point asked themselves is "how is one able to feel free in an existence so heavily structured/scheduled?" I think this freedom depends on what you identify with. If you are a "positive thinker" you get by through optimism and hope for the future, and that is your freedom. If you use anger to bully your way through the day than anger grants you the freedom to get what you want. If you identify a lot with the system you are in, and you are very comfortable being a cog-in-the-wheel, than you get by through your pride in what you do. If you are a religious or spiritual person, you function through your powerful belief in a system of worship or thought.
Yet back to my original question, is who you are unchangeable? Certainly to function in society, it seems like one has to hold themselves in a pretty decisive way. If your a positive thinker, you cannot alter your thinking without suffering. If you are a bully, then you fairly desperately rely on your aggression to be able to function. It seems like in order to function in our structured society, we trap ourselves psychologically in a specific way. We are no longer allowed to change.
There is another way to function in society without holding oneself in a rigid psychological state. It is extremely difficult, because it requires admitting to yourself in every moment that you do not know who you are. You constantly question your own beliefs, your own analysis. You do not condense around any aspect of yourself, but rather witness your own experience of life as it happens. While you still have a "map of the universe" via beliefs, you do not identify solely with those beliefs anymore. You are able to live outside of the realm of beliefs and human logic. You no longer manipulate what you do and what you think. This is called "living in the present moment."
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