I am interested in a range of things, but most importantly, I am interested in the question of 'Being' i.e. why we are who we think or believe we are and who are we? These are questions that have regularly baffled and intrigued me ever since I was a child growing up and having occasional insights into the person behind the outward facing me, the body-mask staring back at me in the mirror.
The honest truth is I have never seen myself but only a reflection in the mirror and from others, hence how accurate are those reflections of me? Do people see and interpret what I show them of myself or do they really know the person behind the mask? Is it garbage out to the world and garbage back from the world?
I've come to realise that of course, I can't ever see myself in person, what I ever get to see as a living being is a reflection of what I look like - from a mirror and from others. Perhaps only when we die do we get to step outside that body-mask to see what we really looked like in in distorted form. But by then, it would be too late, as the real (hidden) you finally gets to see the body-mask posed dead in rigor mortis - in end form.
Those insights of me behind the mask, were very brief indeed, as I would catch myself having them in fleeting moments. Those very brief moments, lasting seconds rather than minutes, were astonishing moments, which I then reflected on. During those brief moments, It was as if the mask had fallen to reveal the real person behind the 'ME' parading itself to the world.
The real person behind the mask, the actual self, who in a material sense is a 'nobody' or to put it harshly a non-entity of sorts. In those fleeting moments, I questioned my rational for 'being' and I questioned who the real me was, the person behind the mask or the mask itself. The being doing the thinking, the engine running the sleek personality machine that parades itself to the outer world. Is that the real me?
The real person behind the mask, the actual self, who in a material sense is a 'nobody' or to put it harshly a non-entity of sorts. In those fleeting moments, I questioned my rational for 'being' and I questioned who the real me was, the person behind the mask or the mask itself. The being doing the thinking, the engine running the sleek personality machine that parades itself to the outer world. Is that the real me?
I always felt that the person or engine behind the mask was the real me, the indisputable me but because, in a sense - what I could observe in a mirror was my physical self, embodying all the traits that the mask had come to identify with and absorb wholeheartedly over the years of its existence - my little mind and my grown mind would undoubtedly always end up accepting and identifying with the Masked Persona.
As I now know, the 'outward personality' or the 'Mask' represents the bundle of characteristics that I have been conditioned to accept about myself from birth till present. Those characteristics, starting with my name, are formed and reinforced over the years by conditioning from my parents, siblings, teachers, education, religion, history, peers, friends, partners, co-workers, neighbours, community, media, society, nation, ethnicity, race, and the world at large. That sum total or bundle of characteristics often referred to as the 'ego' by philosophers and psychoanalysts alike, forms the basis of my presentation and reaction to the world around me.
As I now know, the 'outward personality' or the 'Mask' represents the bundle of characteristics that I have been conditioned to accept about myself from birth till present. Those characteristics, starting with my name, are formed and reinforced over the years by conditioning from my parents, siblings, teachers, education, religion, history, peers, friends, partners, co-workers, neighbours, community, media, society, nation, ethnicity, race, and the world at large. That sum total or bundle of characteristics often referred to as the 'ego' by philosophers and psychoanalysts alike, forms the basis of my presentation and reaction to the world around me.
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