What if you are an egocentric that wishes to change the nature of his centre?
coberst wrote:
It appears that the key question of an egocentric is "How can I get what I want and avoid having to change in any fundamental way?"
I think that is close...perhaps "How can I get what I want and avoid having to change in any way that I perceive to be negative"
People are always willing to want to change in ways that they see as positive, just ask the diet & beauty industries, plastic sturgeons.
Instinct, drives, unconscious motivations, etc. are inevitable; they are the forces of life itself. But it is also the case that we must manage them, perhaps sublimate them in the interest of survival. Without the illusion of ego and the constructed identities (roles, statuses) made possible by the sense of responsible self and other, society would have been impossible, and, given our physiological weakness so would our species' survival. Reason is homo sapien's principle survival tool, yet it has very little spiritual value, as far as I can see.
Spiritual realization is not something we "figure out" (deductively or inductively); it's something we realize with our entire body and we do so by means of an essentially non-rational intiutive process.
Eorl wrote:coberst wrote:
It appears that the key question of an egocentric is "How can I get what I want and avoid having to change in any fundamental way?"
I think that is close...perhaps "How can I get what I want and avoid having to change in any way that I perceive to be negative"
People are always willing to want to change in ways that they see as positive, just ask the diet & beauty industries, plastic sturgeons.
I think that the egocentric would consider anything s/he wanted was ipso facto positive.
JLN wrote:Instinct, drives, unconscious motivations, etc. are inevitable; they are the forces of life itself. But it is also the case that we must manage them
What is the I that manages, if it is not what is managed?
Or is this just one of those grammatical restraints you sometimes lament?
A very provocative question, Cyracuz. We know that the suppression and sublimation of drives occurs, but that that is not proof of the concrete existence of a self that suppresses/sublimates. It just happens. And, as you suggest, our efforts to describe that process necessarily includes the grammatical subject-predicate structure of an ego-agent who causes supression/sublimation.
Maybe the ego is something that "just happens", as you put it.
It seems to me that the only thing about self that has concrete existence is "heat".
To clarify, the self is like a flame, and the only property it has is that it happens. All the rest are just logs on the fire.
I think this is a good analogy, because a flame cannot exist without something to burn...
