What does the self want?

Kinfonet Discussion
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What does the self want?

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The self is asking this question, and the self will answer it.

Assuming this is true, all you have to do is ask: What do I want?

Pleasure, joy, safety, comfort, pain, sorrow, fear, challenge, good, bad, tall, short, fat, skinny, meaning, nonsense.

The self wants whatever it wants whenever it wants it. It wants reality to obey it.

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Alternately, the self’s primary drive/want/desire may be its own survival. This may entail the survival of the ‘host’ organism’s body. But the self doesn’t stop there, it posits its own continued survival after the death of the body: reincarnation, afterlife, eternal being.

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I am surprised that we say we want pain, sorrow and the bad.

Another way of describing the self, that includes all the qualities mentioned is to say that we are pain, sorrow, insecurity and the bad - which is simultaneously the movement towards joy, safety, pleasure, comfort and the good.

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Do selves possess a host organism’s body? Krishnamurti’s Multiple Personalities (DID) - Kinfonet Discussion - Kinfonet / Forum

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I think humans want what they want when they want it, and there are times they want darkness, sorrow, suffering, melancholy. We want the full spectrum. Though not equally, we generally prefer pleasure to pain.

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The notion we are ‘possessed’ by a self or by multiple selfs resonates. The question arises for me: Who or what is the entity that is possessed? The physical body? The body-mind? The pure core-of-the-onion self (assuming this exists)?

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So the self is the brain’s mechanical reaction to awareness as determined by desire and fear?

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Sounds about right to me. Awareness awares X. The self-brain, on constant stakeout, grabs and has its way with the awared X, projects its conditioned thought onto it, judges and assigns value to it (good, bad, neutral), assesses its potential risk/reward.

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That seems like a good way of putting it.

We know how reflexively we react constantly, and we may be mindful enough to moderate our reactions before communicating them, but how aware are we of undercurrent of thought from which our reactions emerge?

We can draw the conclusion that we cannot be aware of the movement of unconscious thought, or be open to the possibility that we have chosen to be unaware of it. It may be that we are too identified with thought to be aware of what it is doing at the deepest level because it would be too appalling, too disconcerting to face.

This is why it seems to me that the brain cannot awaken to its misuse of thought until it’s ready to face what it’s doing with the need to understand why.

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This may be. Rings true for me. OCD is a study in not facing what’s really going on.

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We think-talk about the self as a real, semiautonomous entity with agency: It does things, wants what it wants, is a trickster, hijacks perception. Is there truth in this?

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The truth is that as long as rick can’t turn off The rickScott Show (the streaming contents of the rickbrain’s consciousness), the self may as well be an entity with agency because there’s no way of knowing otherwise without silence and emptiness, i.e., the end of The rickScott Show.

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Turning off the rickScott Show is the rickScott Show.

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I am the I show streaming continuously because I believe what I can’t stop believing.

I is a believer because I is not beyond belief. I exist within the confines of the believable. I and Belief are one and the same. I, Belief, is the dimension where truth is what is believed and falsehood is what is not believed. Doubt is the midpoint between these polar opposites, and is the means by which a belief is accepted or rejected.

It sounds too stupid to be true, but if it isn’t true, how do I account for the fact that I seem to exist as more than just the movement of thought, how ever inane or brilliant it may be?

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