ANNOTATION:
SELF KNOWLEDGE

"SELF" means "ME". The Individual who is BORN? or DIE? or LIVING? What we see as an Individual is the Physical Body only. The SELF is the SPIRIT OR THE SPIRITUAL FORCE which takes the shape of a body when born. The FORCE which keeps us alive. The SPIRIT which leaves the physical body when we die. From where does it come? Why doe it takes shape of a physical body at the time of birth? Where does it go at the time of death? All these is given in the UPANISHADS and can be revealed to a seeker if seek honestly. Search begins with:"WHO AM I?"

my diary

TRUTH REVEALDPHILOSOPHY OF UPANISHAD

Author: Francisco Colon (TAINAZTNLOVE[ at ]CS.COM)
Date: Jul 20, 2000

REPLY: Our Body

You are right when you say we have a spirit! In the same token we got a soul. The spirit comes from the Creator, is the breath of life we each recieve. But the soul is what sets us appart from animals. We have reason, thats an attribute of the soul.The soul is also given by the Creator. When we die the spirit goes back to Him who gave it and the soul to either a total and eternal separtion of Him or to a good peacefull place.

Author: David Hamm (babylon42[ at ]yahoo.com)
Date: Sep 11, 2000

REPLY: Excellent examples!

I think you two have clearly shown us two perfect examples of ideas surviving through spreading through conciousness.

UPANISHAD is actively spreading his messages, that are still probably in their infancy of contagion. TAINAZTNLOVE is reaffirming the now-familiar-to-everyone-in-the-world 'Creator-idea.' At least we are spared from being subjected to exactly which one.

babylon42

Author: David Hamm (babylon42[ at ]yahoo.com)
Date: Sep 11, 2000

REPLY: Excellent examples!

I think you two have clearly shown us two perfect examples of ideas surviving through spreading through conciousness.

babylon42

Author: Tobias Mueller-Kortkamp (nylen[ at ]gmx.de)
Date: Sep 20, 2000

REPLY: No creator of self

Author: Tobias Mueller-Kortkamp (nylen[ at ]gmx.de)
Date: Sep 20, 2000

REPLY: No creator of self

I was born, right, but I had no self (or I would remember).
My self developed by interaction with my environment. The self is written into the flesh and has developed over the years.
My self is differnt from my self a year before. 
So where is your creator? And what did he created at all?
Which a baby after birth unquestionably (for me) possess is consciosnes, the second of Poppers three Worlds. But that is just it. And maybe a baby is aware of pain. But it is definitly not aware of itself. Not until interaction with environment (Parents, Food, whatsoever)progressed to a certain point.

Author: Paulo Pinheiro (pjspinheiro[ at ]hptmail.com)
Date: Oct 28, 2000

REPLY: My self and other's selfs...

The "creation" of the self is due to: Godel's theorem (see Hofstadter GEB), and Natural Selection. There are no other creators for the self (read BOTH Damasio's books, "Descartes's Error" and "The felling of what happens. By the way, try to read "The selfish gene, by R. Dawkins). In fact, at first look, Godel's theorem seems to indicate that the self can not be self-created. And that is right! The self is a creation of Natural Selection on a being that is a SOCIAL being. What I mean is this: if you are to create a model, representation, what so ever, of the world as acurate as possible, you have to represent the OTHERS beings that interact with you. You need this to make predictions of others behavior, but the behavior of the others is influenced by what they know of YOU. So, as the understanding you have of others becomes deeper, inevitably you will apreend a little about your self! That is how a representation of you becomes incorporated in your nervous sistem, more exactly, in that part of the brain wich represents the outer world (and this solves the paradox of how you came to have an image of yourself in the representation of the outer world).

Since there are more representations of the self on your body, all that it takes is some kind of neural selection to link these representations and create self-knowledge.

So, others and their deeds are Popper's "third world". The "second world" is (I think) your biological self. The "first world" are the genes.

P.S. I know this is speculative, but I don't care. I came to the conclusion that there is no distinct line bettwen science and metaphisic. This means that there are to risks: putting the barrier to low (and you'll jump from metaphisics to misticims without noticing it, and I believe that's the trouble with Popper's science's philosophy), and to high (that's what Dawkins does, in an attemp to avoid mistics).

P.S.2 I'm Portuguese, so it may well be that you will find errors in my writing. For that I apologize).

Author: ANDREW NOBLE (andrewnoble@dingoblue.net.au)
Date: Dec 24, 2000

REPLY: No mind.

Don't search for the source for it is nowhere to be found.
www.godbusters.com
And a little poem.The clouds

The clouds emerge from the Mountain of Chung and then return to the Mountain of Chung. I would like to ask the dweller in this mountain, "Where are the clouds now?" Clouds emerge from No mind, and then return to No mind. No mind is nowhere to be found. We need not seek the home of No mind. 
- Wang An-shih (1068-1076

Author: Jerry F
Date: Mar 12, 2002

REPLY: Free will

Hmmm... You’re over thinking this. You need to decide weather you believe in free will. Free will = God Predestine = No God It's as simple as that. I, personally believe in free will. Now, the where/how/who God is has me stumped. As humans we have this annoying habit of dividing things up into "little chunks" We divide the universe into Galaxies, Galaxies into Solar systems, Solar systems into planets/stars, Planets into continents, Continents into countries, countries into states, states into county’s, county’s into cites, cites into suburbs, suburbs into streets, streets into houses, houses into rooms, rooms into tables/chairs/etc..., tables/chares/etc... into chemical compounds, Compounds into atoms, atoms into neutrons/protons/electrons, neutrons/protons/electrons into quarks... They are even trying to devoid quarks up! The reality of it all is that the Universe IS a whole. We are part of that whole. When you refer to the universe, you are referring to your self. To say that we are a product or a result of the universe is wrong because we ARE the universe. When you think... the universe thinks. All people are the universe trying to understand the universe. It's like our brain looking at our feet and saying "that doesn't think" "it is not self aware" The feet are part of you and you are self aware. We are part of the Universe, the Universe is self aware. All things exist because we are aware of them. For example.. a planet is a planet because we decided to call it that and because we decided to differentiate it from other parts of the whole. Without the mind, none of this would exist. What happened before there was thought? Before there was life? In order to discuss it you need to THINK about the evidence we have. Then you get into the "Big bang" bla bla bla... The point is that what happened before us did not happen until you THINK about it. It would be impossible for there to BE anything before thought because thought invented the IDEA of everything. Thought invented EXISTANCE...

Author: David P
Date: Jul 24, 2002

REPLY: Free Will

Where do you get your ideas from Jerry ? 
"Free Will = God and Predestine = No God" ?
Come on. It's customary to support ones assertions with some form of argument or evidence.
So you see no difference between yourself and the rest of the universe ? When you think, the Universe thinks ? You ARE the sun, and all the planets? 
Rather I ask - which planet are you from ? 
At least, if you and I are really the same thing, then it's nice to be able to disagree with onesself, because I don't find any merit in your position.
Take your mystical mumbo-jumbo and come back when you have a reasoned argument supported by some evidence.

Author: Yahya Abdal-Aziz (YahyaAA1@hotmail.com)
Date: May 27, 2003

REPLY: The birth of the MeMe: Self

Paulo,

The source of the notion of self is society.  Ask David Ogg.  Writing in "Europe of the Ancien Regime" (Collins Fontana 1965) he says, "the individual had not been detached from his milieu, he was not yet considered a personality, distinctive and unique."  Before society gave us the necessity - or the space - for individual decision-making, we needed to distinguish ourselves only to the limited extent of the facts of our unique situations.  The more each of us had to think for himself or herself, the more strongly we individuated ourselves and became aware of our uniqueness.

Ogg puts the coming of the concepts of "individuality" an "personality" at the end of the Ancien Regime, arising from the greater abstractness of thought ushered in by the Enlightenment, and its full flowering he holds to be post-revolutionary and post-romantic, while Kenneth Clark, I believe, put it earlier, at end of feudalism, with the emergence of entrepeneurial classes such as the bourgeoisie.

I don't think it really matters when it happened.  What matters is that it was not always thus.  Many preliterate societies studied during the last century have not agonised over "why am I here?" "what must I do?" "how shall I be saved?"  Rather, they have accepted the wisdom of their elders.

Whether their lives have been the richer or the poorer, who can say?  For every Gautama Buddha attaining enlightenment under the Bo Tree, there is a Woody Allen suffering the torments of eternal self-doubt.  And, historically, for the two of them, there have been hundreds of the blithely unaware.  I suspect that, perhaps, ignorance IS bliss ...

Self is a social construct.  It is a meme, if you will.  It's certainly contagious enough that I need to involve myself in particular disciplines, such as meditation, in order to divert myself from too great a self-consciousness.