I tell myself that I’m ‘intelligent,’ but then I do something stupid. I tell myself that I’m ‘hopeless,’ and then something nice happens. I tell myself I’m ‘kind,’ and then I’m kind of a dick in a different situation. I tell myself I’m ‘ok,’ and then I have a mental breakdown. I tell myself I’m ‘crazy,’ and then I’m literally chilling 15 minutes later.
I think the thing is that the self is deceptive, and self-deceptive. The way the self operates is via emotional ‘levers,’ so one day we’ll be completely believing that everything sucks, and the next day chortling about ourselves. There’s no consistency at all to it, but it’s functional because it gets the job done of procreating and surviving.
On top of that, if you give the ‘self’ full rein, it believes that it will never die and that it is an all-powerful deity merely dreaming about the world.
It’s sort of like if not only were we a leaf-mimicking butterfly, but also believed that we were a leaf.
That seems to just be the nature of creatures that operate on a hedonic tonal scale. Conditions are dynamic, so affective responses will be dynamic.
You and the rest of the animal kingdom will oscillate back and forth on that hedonic scale in response to fluctuating stimuli – which for some cerebrally enhanced animals include vivid thoughts and simulated scenarios – to varying degrees as that is what you are designed to do.
You will feel one way or the other, some place on the scale, in response to your continual evaluations and re-evaluations of yourself and your environment. I reckon even the persistent need to evaluate and re-evaluate is derived from a primal vigilance operation, scanning constantly for either safety or danger.
Maybe there is deception at some level there, maybe not. We wouldn’t be the only life forms engaged in that sort of behavior. Certainly not something to be ashamed about.
The reason this seems like some contradiction is only because of the fallacies which are involved in this line of reasoning.
Firstly there is the very common fallacy which has it that things which are natural are intrinsically right, true, correct etc The second one which is linked is the belief in the ‘fall from grace’ which holds that humanity has somehow set itself apart from the natural (true) order of things and anything we do now is in some way fake/artificial (wrong).
Any division of natural/not natural is obviously arbitrary - an aeroplane is no less natural than a tree.
We only refer to these words for ease of communication, they do not refer to any actual boundaries. Richard makes this even clearer by always using the specific term of ‘blind nature’ which again is not some genuinely existing force but rather the way that life has developed on this planet.
So keeping the above in mind it becomes less and less contradictory to allow that something which arose evolutionarily can indeed be an illusion (not genuine). Then if we switch the word natural for the universe it becomes even clearer - as in we do exist in a universe where a sense of self has developed in creatures thus giving the impression that a self genuinely exists inside of these creatures when in fact it does not - it is not genuine.
And the social identity which is comprised of beliefs is no more of a fake than the deeper self which consists of the instinctual passions.
I prefer not to blame myself for that instinctual “hyper focus.” I put it on blind nature. The survival instincts manifest that “small picture” which @Kub933 is suggesting is an illusion, and he may well be right.
Nature has a documented track record of manifesting illusions and deceptions, evidently.
‘I’ am the expression of blind nature. There isn’t a separation. Blame myself? Not blame myself? Who cares, it’s still me that’s creating the separation.
As @geoffrey writes, the gap as caused by me, and not ‘me’ that I can put in quotes and hold over there, but me that’s experiencing this right now. Me. me. I. myself.
I’m doing this suffering to myself and I’m the only one that can end myself.
This is also where ‘I’ am ‘humanity’ and ‘humanity’ is ‘me.’ ‘I’ am blind nature.
I tend to (broadly) agree with that. Though I have reservations about the idea that illusions cannot be genuine. Something to explore another day, in its own topic perhaps.
