I am full of myself today.
That's the thing. I have been reading three texts concurrently. The New Scientist, on 'Self' ( 'Where is it, if it's there at all?' ) Fr Richard Rohr on 'The Search for Our True Self' ('It's there, you just have know where to look for it') and, for light relief, 'The Tablet' on the Poping Drama now being played out at the Vatican. ('Who..?' No, it's no good, the machinations of Papal politics defy summation.)
(Pause for a swig of tea, which, because that paragraph took so long to construct, has now gone cold.)
I am thinking hard about myself and what that means. I was asked to leave the philosophy class when at college, so I must apologise for my ignorance about a subject that's been chewed over for millennia, on occasions with pebbles in the mouth, so I believe, but I shall plough on as if ignorance is bliss.
The NS report begins:
'As you wake up each morning, hazy and disoriented, you gradually become aware of the rustling of the sheets, sense their texture and squint at the light. One aspect of your self has reassembled: the first-person observer of reality, inhabiting a human body.
As wakefulness grows, so does your sense of having a past, a personality and motivations. Your self is complete, as both witness of the world and bearer of your consciousness and identity. You.
This intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience. But it is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel. Some thinkers even go as far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self. '
Due to the fortuitous consequence of being ejected from the philosophy class, I am not burdened with being a 'thinker' , so I cannot claim, ' that there is no such thing as the self.'
I have a heavy cold that has settled on my chest and has reduced me to a fractious and demanding individual not fit for company. 'This is it!' I unthink to my self, 'If I am NOT, then who the hell has this bloody cold?
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