That’s actually a very complex question, so I hope you don’t mind a slightly complex answer- I’ll try to keep it clear!
There are things that I do that I disapprove of, that I find annoying. I am lacking in some skills- my perception is fallible, my judgement often even more so. I have habits that I don’t like, and I sometimes behave in ways that I find difficult to justify or explain, even to myself.
But I try my absolute best (or really hard, at least) to draw a clear distinction between my “self” and my “skills”. I make a conscious effort to avoid defining “myself”. If I do something badly, if I hurt people, if I make mistakes- it’s upsetting, but I don’t allow myself to get pissed off with “myself”. I try to learn from the mistakes, and move on.
The closest thing that I’ve come to getting pissed off with “myself” is when I find it hard NOT to get pissed off- with myself or anyone else. Let’s say something spoils my plans- like if I have conflicting schedules, or something isn’t going well- say my band is screwing up on stage, or I’m having a bad workout. I then tend to get cranky and irritable, which worsens my performance/judgement/actions, and then I get annoyed with myself for being cranky and irritable. It’s a silly, irrational loop that cannot be solved by directly applying my already-agitated mind onto it. I’m trying to acknowledge the loop there, to not be too hard on myself, to accept that it’s okay to be cranky and irritable, and I think I will soon make progress on this.
So… no, there is nothing about “myself” that pisses me off. I’m making it a personal commitment not to do “pissed off” any more. The most I’ll go is mild annoyance/irritation/discomfort. The awesome side effect is that this carries over into my interaction with other people- I’ve become a lot more tolerant of people in general, and this enriches my relationships with everybody and my experience of life.
It seems long and complicated but it’s really a very simple idea- we are too complex and complicated to be defined, so we cannot get pissed off with “ourselves”- if we make mistakes, we make amends, and all is good- and the same applies to other equally complicated and complex human beings.
Ask me a question at formspring.me/visaisahero! (Or in the comments, if you like)
Hey Visa,
haha, currently in army camp right now, typing this because I am surfing the web and sleeping and having nothing to do. Which is great.
Dude, you’re close to something here, when you say that you try to separate ‘yourself from your skills’ , or that you try ‘not to define yourself’
but this is not because you are too complex and complicated to be defined, but it’s because ‘you” does not exist. self does not exist.
it’s a subtle distinction, i think, but it’s an important one, because I think i’m seeing what you’re trying to do – you’re trying to overcome negative emotional feedback loops from the self, but what you’re doing seems to me to be nothing more than endeavoring to stay ahead of the feedback loop by slapping another label on the self. I have tried it, it works, but it’s not a permanent solution, just a bandaid. and all bandaids come off eventually.
check it out for yourself, that it’s not that your self is more complex or complicated – the complex and complicated processes are real (emotions, thought loops, behavior patterns), but the self is not
the self is not.
self is imposed artificially on those ‘complex and complicated’ thing-a-ma-jingles. self is a lie, and any thoughts and emotions that are related to it is false.
it just does not exist in real life
cheers, get back to me
There is no you, in real life. Check it out. Look.
I agree with you! I subscribe to the idea of unconditional self-acceptance over conditional self-esteem; I just don’t quite know just how to express the solution of negative feedback loops- it mostly just involves letting it fade away on its own
Oh wait I just figured out what you’re getting at- that the idea of a personal identity is a redundant and counter-productive assumption altogether, right? I agree, actually- I just didn’t express that in answering a formspring question because I didn’t want to come across as a tad extreme
You got it, man.
Personal identity is a completely arbitrary construct. We have experiences, thoughts (about the experiences, or about fairy sandcastles), feelings about these experiences, feelings about these thoughts…but that’s it. No self. Any notion of ‘self’ is imposed *afterward*.
You might know this already, but it goes a bit further (or should I say, more extreme) than that.
When we say ‘There is no you’, we mean this quite literally, in that there is only life, and no one living it – or, put another way, that you are not experiencing life through a ‘self’, but there is only the ‘experience of life’, in all its forms: sensation, thoughts, emotion; the whole package.
All thoughts about the self are merely that: thoughts of the self. They refer to nothing real.
Have you (un)seen the no-you yet? Haha, can you do me a favor and wax lyrical about it?
Oh yeah, by the way, where are you serving your NS at the moment?
cheers
I’ll do a post on this next!
I’m at Hendon Camp- I was a storeman, now I’m attached to the signals store, waiting to go for my signal ops course at Stagmont. I haven’t done my BMT yet, so I don’t know what’s up, but I’m just making the most of my free time. =
Pingback: summary of entire blog, part 2 | visakan veerasamy.