The baby is totally connected to the body. It has no dilemmas with identity and is living the pure human experience. It is identifying with its’ true self by deriving its’ identity through the body. One cannot experience God through the mind. The baby’s smile is indicative of its experience in the human body where it is happy to be. In time, the baby begins to have different experiences because of exterior stimuli. This will create a different experience or identity called the false self which comes about because fo the reflective process and it is through this process that we suffer and feel pain, thus slowly losing touch with our initial process of joy. In this way we set off on a complex journey with a different path of identity.
The False Self is an imaginary self which we create as a by-product of the reflective process. This creates a world of its own, full of emotions and mental activity which gives us a false identity of who we really are. We then carry this false identity throughout our life, thinking and believing it is whom we really are. We then start with the internal dialogue which causes us to suffer because we are never satisfied and at peace because there is this sense of lack and the more we shift into this persona, the more lost we become because the mind continues to create situations where we then get lost because we cannot find ourselves and become slaves to internal dialogue.
We relate to the world and people through this internal dialogue – hurt, hopeless, extremely good etc. Therefore, we filter reality through the internal dialogue using the skills and mechanisms we have experienced in our life. People have difficulty relating because they create a world of their own i.e. I know who I am because of my problems.
We get to a point in our life where we have to take a decision. We might experience a deep crisis of identity which might require us to take a decision. This illusion of false self cannot feed us any more and we come up against a wall. This is the most fruitful moment because crisis will give us the opportunity to decide the path we wish to follow. It will show that the previous path we followed did not give us life. This will then initiate a process within us which will want to transform the way we live. Difficult experiences in our life like shock, degressions, end of a relationship, loss of a job etc will freeze our mind and internal dialogue. Our mind can no longer cope with these experiences of life and shuts down, thus giving us the opportunity to go back to the pure experience of the baby. The true self of human experience makes a comeback bringing us intense and short periods of joy, reflecting the connectedness with my being. Like the phoenix , new life comes out of the ashes. We then start to move again into a dynamic of human experience.
Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life. (Thomas Merton)
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