What's this 'me' thing ? (choice, Adam and Eve, verse, philosophy)

[stephenw]

Yesterday I posted that I thought that there is no distinction between "no choice made" and "thinking I made a choice" - I think I choose. But I don't.
In response Willamena asked why I eliminate the distinction between "no choice" and the appearance, but am unwilling to eliminate the distinction between "choice" and the appearance.
What a great question.
A penny dropped straight away that the reason I was unwilling to eliminate it was because I was protecting a concept of me that I have constructed.
That was the easy bit, where this line of thought goes next I'm not sure. It's kept me occupied all night thinking about it.
I've been reading about Piaget recently and was thinking of how he saw the basic building blocks and processes of development as universal but how he saw development itself as the child's own construction. It seems to me that this is equally true of adults and it certainly applies to my unfolding concept of self.
I was then thinking about Piagets concept of 'centring' - how infants sense themselves to be the centre and the moving force of their world, and how he concluded that infants lack a concept of object permanence. Maybe infants are right. Maybe they understand what we don't and lose sight of this as they grow into adults.
This in turn took me back to Pelagius and how from his perspective to look into the face of a newborn is to look into the image of God, it makes sense to me in the terms outlined above.
Can it be that the selves we construct are mere vehicles for survival. The truth is what small babies know, and access to this truth is made evermore difficult because of the increasingly defended nature of the construct we refer to as 'me' ?
My head is spinning from this so I'd really appreciate some input.

[Willamena]

Originally Posted by stephenw

A penny dropped straight away that the reason I was unwilling to eliminate it was because I was protecting a concept of me that I have constructed.
That was the easy bit, where this line of thought goes next I'm not sure. It's kept me occupied all night thinking about it.

I think this line of thought may go to the land of "Unity".

Originally Posted by stephenw

Maybe infants are right. Maybe they understand what we don't and lose sight of this as they grow into adults.

The Buddha said something about "being as the child..."

Originally Posted by stephenw

Can it be that the selves we construct are mere vehicles for survival. The truth is what small babies know, and access to this truth is made evermore difficult because of the increasingly defended nature of the construct we refer to as 'me' ?
My head is spinning from this so I'd really appreciate some input.

Some might call "I" a linguistic convenience, to accommodate the sense of "centeredness." What is a "word". It's sound and syllable, but it's also what the word means --from our first word to our demise, they express the relationship between "I" and the world around it. Every word is the expression of an observer (or the Every-Observer, if you will). "Hungry," "cold," "near," "up", "mother," "gravitational constant of the universe" ...all our words express a relationship of consciousness, or conscious being, to "things".

"How do you know?" asks the epistemologist.

[mball1297]

Originally Posted by stephenw

Yesterday I posted that I thought that there is no distinction between "no choice made" and "thinking I made a choice" - I think I choose. But I don't.
In response Willamena asked why I eliminate the distinction between "no choice" and the appearance, but am unwilling to eliminate the distinction between "choice" and the appearance.
What a great question.
A penny dropped straight away that the reason I was unwilling to eliminate it was because I was protecting a concept of me that I have constructed.
That was the easy bit, where this line of thought goes next I'm not sure. It's kept me occupied all night thinking about it.
I've been reading about Piaget recently and was thinking of how he saw the basic building blocks and processes of development as universal but how he saw development itself as the child's own construction. It seems to me that this is equally true of adults and it certainly applies to my unfolding concept of self.
I was then thinking about Piagets concept of 'centring' - how infants sense themselves to be the centre and the moving force of their world, and how he concluded that infants lack a concept of object permanence. Maybe infants are right. Maybe they understand what we don't and lose sight of this as they grow into adults.
This in turn took me back to Pelagius and how from his perspective to look into the face of a newborn is to look into the image of God, it makes sense to me in the terms outlined above.
Can it be that the selves we construct are mere vehicles for survival. The truth is what small babies know, and access to this truth is made evermore difficult because of the increasingly defended nature of the construct we refer to as 'me' ?
My head is spinning from this so I'd really appreciate some input.

Wow. Well, my comments might be outdated as I saw Willamena posting before I came in, but...

I think kids do have it right. Even if you believe in the story of Adam and Eve, this is true. Adam and Eve fell because they gained knowledge. This knowledge took away their innocence. So it would seem to follow that knowledge and innocence cannot co-exist.

On the other hand, I don't know how we'd get through life without constructing a "me", and the surroundings for the "me". It's kind of like how we can talk about philosophy all we want on here, and how "nothing exists", and such, but then we still have to live our lives, which means mostly disregarding those thoughts.

And remember, some people's "me"s are more important to them than others' "me"s are to those others.

I caould say a lot more, but I'm sure we'll be discussing it for a while, and I look forward to it.