what is your true self?

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What is your true self or personality? Awhen you're alone? or when your around other people? or both?

also... if your alone, and try to impress yourself.. are you really impressing yourself, or is that genuine?

write back if im not makin perfect sense, thanks

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Your making perfect sense zeroh. Great question. I would think you were youself when you were alone. everybody tries to impress people to one degree or another.

Maybe I'll have more to say on this later.

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You are not your private self, and by the same token you are not your social self, nor your online self, nor your drunken self, etc, etc.

You are the combination of yourself in all situations. That is you. You can't separate part of yourself out and say "that's not really me." Of course it's you, that's just how you act in a different situation.

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Thats interesting. I had a boyfriend who became like whoever he was with. If he was with me hed be like me, and if he was with one of his friends hed be like one of them.
In the end i just came to the conclusion he was shallow and didnt have much substance to him.

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what people usually mean when they say "be yourself" is that you should be "the same" or respond to in the same manner to every similar situation, or in other words the world should not affect you. That is quite obviously impossible simply because we are a PRODUCT of this world as much as we create it, and hence we are NEVER ourselves in the above definition.

To me being your True-Self is simply unconditional acceptance of yourself, no matter what you do or say. That is as close as you can be to your "true-self".

IamWell

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IamWell wrote:

what people usually mean when they say "be yourself" is that you should be "the same" or respond to in the same manner to every similar situation, or in other words the world should not affect you.

I highly doubt that this is what the majority of people mean when they say "be yourself." In fact, this would be doing the exact opposite of what most people probably mean.

When people say this, they mean do not try to force yourself to behave in a way that is not natural to you. Attempting to force yourself to not change the way you act based on your surroundings is silly.

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I am almost always "myself". I have the mentality that if you don't like me out of the gate, I don't really want to know you anyway. I might tone my real self down in certain situations to be polite or accomodating but rarely am I fake.

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hmm, how about one step deeper and ask: what is your pure, unaltered substance? like, who would you be without an imprint of school, parents, friends, society..... all of that? what is one's essence, and, is there such a thing at all?

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But, Dagmaraka, your experiences are what make you what you are. Take away your experiences, and you are a fetus, nearly identical to every other human fetus.

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You are the rational being that arises in this Universe, and as such is a part of the Universe. You are not your actions but are the subject of the actions. Similarly, you are not your characteristic but are the person possessing the certain characteristics. That's sort of how I look at it.

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But, Dagmaraka, your experiences are what make you what you are. Take away your experiences, and you are a fetus, nearly identical to every other human fetus.

Take away your experiences, and you are left with the precondition of time, space, and reason. My mind is not merely an empty slate. If it is empty, when I experience two separate objects, I will not be able to distinguish between the two. Nor can I, when looking at a ball kicked toward the air, be able to conceive cause and effect. If I merely have my senses, and nothing else, then I would be like a camera with the added features of taste, smell, touch, and hearing.

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i asked that exact question in a topic before..

If you take one person, and erase there mind and what they know, and make them start over in my spot in life... will they be exactly like me? or since they have different chromosomes, will they make different choices and be a completly different person? (nature or nurture)

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Ray wrote:

Take away your experiences, and you are left with the precondition of time, space, and reason. My mind is not merely an empty slate. If it is empty, when I experience two separate objects, I will not be able to distinguish between the two. Nor can I, when looking at a ball kicked toward the air, be able to conceive cause and effect. If I merely have my senses, and nothing else, then I would be like a camera with the added features of taste, smell, touch, and hearing.

Our minds are certainly not empty at birth. For one thing, our mind is already pre-programmed to be able to interpret sensory input to a limited extent. For instance, a newborn already has enough neural circuitry to recognize recognize it's mother's face and distinguish between other faces. As the baby grows, the higher order neurons continue to develop into more advanced perceptual units. There is also the ability to do computations...such as prediction of an object at a timestep into the future given it's present velocity.

I was not saying that the brain is empty at birth, rather, that it is devoid of personality...and personality is largely (although not entirely) what differentiates us from othe people.

I speculate that the following analogy is more or less how the development of a personality works out:

Imagine a piece of photoreceptive paper, this is our brain. The experiences which we encounter in life are reflections of light that strike the paper and leave imprints, creating a personality. There is a filter that all the light first passes through, this filter starts out as being defined by the genetic makeup...but the filter is continuously being altered by the light that passes through it.

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I agree with bella. I am mostly myself, but am more myself around people more similar to me. Anyone who doesnt like my real self is generlaly someone i dont like anyway.

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Quote:

Our minds are certainly not empty at birth. For one thing, our mind is already pre-programmed to be able to interpret sensory input to a limited extent. For instance, a newborn already has enough neural circuitry to recognize recognize it's mother's face and distinguish between other faces. As the baby grows, the higher order neurons continue to develop into more advanced perceptual units. There is also the ability to do computations...such as prediction of an object at a timestep into the future given it's present velocity.

I was not saying that the brain is empty at birth, rather, that it is devoid of personality...and personality is largely (although not entirely) what differentiates us from othe people.

I speculate that the following analogy is more or less how the development of a personality works out:

Imagine a piece of photoreceptive paper, this is our brain. The experiences which we encounter in life are reflections of light that strike the paper and leave imprints, creating a personality. There is a filter that all the light first passes through, this filter starts out as being defined by the genetic makeup...but the filter is continuously being altered by the light that passes through it.

I agree then. However, I do think that personality is not what largely differentiate us from other people. It is our position in space and time that largely differentiate people from each other. Smile

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what is your true self?

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