A Lack of Faith in the Self

Honestly and Truth aren’t always intellectual pursuits. Most of the time, they’re a feeling. As though it confirms and at the same time gels fragments of memories or thoughts into a single coherent idea. Evidence of their truth has been dripped to you all life long yet specifics are impossible to vocalize.

Such is my belief that negative emotions are more honest emotions. If all people have various selves, which they interchange rapidly as the need or desire arises, then anger and its ilk are the ones closer to the “true” self. Because an angry outburst doesn’t represent a quick fabrication of lies, but the release of feelings long stewing. Because happiness is a response to stimuli. So is anger. But happiness feels like an involuntary reaction. Like laughing. But then, have you ever shown the funniest comedian’s best work to a friend that doesn’t laugh?  Laughing isn’t a voluntary response! It is something that happens to you. Or so I thought. Anger is a thought process that arrives at an unbalanced equation. Fairness is not being represented! Yet I trust it more because it feels as though I am thinking. Nefarious. On the nature of and what constitutes thought, I turn to feelings as the sole judge.

Another thing I firmly believe is that whenever anyone makes a general claim about how the populations psyche works, they are invariably talking about themselves. It’s another trick that emotion plays upon the mind.

Adversity doesn’t reveal character but creates a situation in which only an honest self can live. It can feel as though layers were being peeled back. Too long living in comfort builds a maze of other and alternate selves while the core isn’t needed so is lost. It’s a laziness I can’t explain. The very best and most capable self is the first jettisoned. The ease with which fantasies are slipped into is inversely proportional to the difficulty in maintaining a thinking mind. Yet who is the one managing these multitudes? Is there a core more core than the thought-to-be core? Honestly another tool on another layer to deal with difficulty? I immensely distrust anyone who has the least confidence in who they are. Anyone who can describe themselves with authority. I think they’ve taken the candy shell for the sum total. Fooled by some malicious or lazy self that wishes to be.

A discussion of selves and the mind is filled with statements balanced with “and”s and “or”s. A trick of language (and by extension culture), or a fair representation of the brutal dichotomy? The Good and Bad self. Thinking verses Feeling. Yet I keep coming back to the question: who has taken the step back to analyze both?

The Truth is a reduction of all superfluous material into a single core observation. How can I send a corrupted (superfluous) self to investigate it? And why are all metaphysical activities only understood by this animal brain’s need for physical metaphor (the truth is at the center), from which metaphysics is supposed to be… above, beyond?