Post #2057836

I have a number of answers to give you and will write more as I have time, but a start with some of the shorter ones. “The map is not the terrain” is a very important concept in general but especially so wrt the self. Your idea of your self is such a map, and as such is necessarily flawed and incomplete. A person is very complex, probably to complex to fully understand even if you had access to it. But you don’t fully have access to it, even about your self. The complexities going into why you like a thing, why you react a certain way, sometimes why you do a thing, are not all inspectable to you. We have am enormous bias in modern culture to think of everything in terms of the conscious mind. This is usually incorrect. Most often we do things unconsciously and rationalize why we did it afterwards. Now these rationalizations may often be correct, and trivial. But the reality is that they are not observations about the workings of our mind but after the fact theories. In many non trivial cases they can be quite incorrect. (I can give examples, but this is getting long winded already.) Sometimes, with phenomena we have limited ability to know, it is helpful to let go, accept that they are what they are, and just see what they do without getting too committed to expectations. Like with the weather.