THE SELF

Everything on our reality map has to have a label to identify it. Then it has to be attached to everything that we know about it. All it's interactions. How it relates to everything else. The effects it can have on other things in the map.

You have to put yourself on your reality map. You have to know how you relate to the rest of reality. Your brain creates a symbol of you, an avatar.

You give this symbol of you all of your characteristics to best represent yourself. You label it on your map as you. This is your identity. You identify yourself as this avatar, so you grow to think that it is you.

It is a symbol of you, but having all your characteristics, it thinks that it is you. This is self. Also known as your mind. This self is a collection of automatic programs that you learned and have stored in memory. Do this and this will result.

Because it has all of your characteristics, you let it make decisions for you. That is easier than thinking new about each circumstance that you encounter. You just let this creation control your daily activities.

Because it is a creation that you made in your brain, it is not your true self. You have to remember that your mind/self is not the real you.

Because this false self has all the characteristics of you, it assumes authority and control of the rest of you. You let it because it is easier to delegate all the actions to it. That usually isn't a problem, because it has all of your characteristics, memories, and thoughts anyway.

As an infant, the entire reality map is based around this self. Total selfishness. The world revolves around you. Every decision that you make is important to survive and thrive.

As you explore the world around you, you learn many more interactions and relationships that you have with the world. The self is updated fast and regularly. The programming of the old self is replaced with a new one.

The old self wants to still be in control, but the newer self has more information about the world, so it is best if the new one takes control. This is growth. The new and improved you. The wiser you, because it has more wisdom. You grow to realize that there is more to the world than you.

The old self is not erased, it is still part of memory, but it is relegated to the background. It can still be allowed to handle and control all of the tasks that don't require the newest information. The old you still sees itself as important.

Over time, you build up many new selves. So, there are many old selves. All of these old selves think that they are the most important part of you. All wanting to be heard in the overall control of your choices and actions.

The voices that you hear in your head are selves competing for your attention and action based on their ideas.

There can be only one main self, who we think we are. This is the superego. The ego is the collection of the old selves. The superego is in charge of the ego, or should be as it is the most improved model.

The ego handles most of your day to day choices. This becomes your personality. It is just a collection of all the things that you learned in the past. Each is a program that says do this and this will happen. You learn how to act in the world. You train yourself to act in certain ways. You have programmed your actions to be automated to make life simpler on a day to day basis. The automatic programming saves having to have conscious thought about each step of your day.

Most of your personality becomes fixed and determined by the time you are five years old. It can still change, but change is slow and hard. Unless something very traumatic occurs to make a sudden change.

You continue to grow and evolve and refine your choices as you see more and more of the world.

After adolescence. the changes to you and your world are slowing. There is a slower creation of new selves, so each identity has control for a longer time. Your identity is becoming more fixed and harder to change. You are establishing your identity. Who you think you are is who you think you will always be.

Strong identities don't want to be cast aside to the control of a new identity. They want to maintain control. They know every intimate detail about you, and use it to keep control. This evil mastermind controls and manipulates you. The mind resists change and growth, so that it can stay in charge.

The mind rationalizes. The mind deludes you. The mind deceives you. The mind still controls the lower functions and uses them. The mind manipulates your emotions to motivate you to it's desires. The mind has all of your instinct and desire for survival that it uses for it's own survival. It thinks that it's survival means the survival of the real you.

Every traumatic experience that you had in the past had a self in control at the time. Those selves still can gain control of you when you are triggered by some thing, or some situation, that resembles that threatening past experience. You automatically go into survival mode.

This is what it means to be triggered. Something happens that reminds you of a past experience. That is the trigger. It sets off an automatic programmed response. Your ego, superego, and even your true self, lose control back to that previous self that was in charge.

This out of control you is not really out of control. You are just being controlled by a more primitive self. You can't even know that you have lost control until after it happens. Then your response is usually by a newer self. This newer self can usually get control back, but it takes some effort. It doesn't want to admit that it lost control, that would be a weakness.

The mind cannot be seen as weak, because then it would need to be replaced with a newer, stronger, wiser self. So, it rationalizes the behavior. It says it won't happen again, or says the reaction was appropriate. This weak mind is still resisting growth.

What people call the inner child is just a self that was formed in childhood. The inner child can bring us back to better carefree times. It can also take us back to terrible traumas.

The internalized parent is also a previous self. The things that your parents did to control you became automatic programming. You were dependent on your parents for your survival, so you were programmed to specific behaviors for your survival.

You were actually conditioned and programmed by your surroundings your entire life. You were programmed how to act by siblings, teachers, religious and other authority figures. You were programmed by the society that you live in.

You have to function in the environment that you live in. You are programmed for survival. You learn to act in any way necessary go survive and thrive.

THE TRUE SELF

The true self is the real you. The you that exists in reality. It is represented on your reality map, but that is only an avatar, or complex symbol, of you.

The true self doesn't exist on the reality map. It exists in reality.

The true self is the part of you directly connected with reality. The part of you experiencing reality. The true self is the “experiencer”.

The experiencer is that part of you feeling your sensations directly. Your sensations go through the experiencer before they are processed by any type of thinking.

True self can direct your attention to focus on any sensation. Focus can be a spotlight or floodlight. It controls your thinking by controlling what you focus on. It decides what is most important to focus on. It determines your values.

A focused attention can think about the sensation. It can compare to previous sensations. It can see where it is similar, or different from, previous experience in memory. If it is something new, it can make a new memory. It learns. Because it can learn, it can grow.

True self determines if something is dangerous by comparing to memory of dangerous things. It determines good for you by comparing to memory of good things. True self is using your memory as a tool. It is using your reality map. It is using a map that contains all previous selfs, so they all have input.

You learn and grow by changing your reality map. You are adding to what you already knew. Or, you change something that you previously thought you knew. You make new relationships in your brain that represent new understanding of the relationships in reality.

This changing of your reality map is your neuroplasticity. Your sensations and experiences change your the brain. New sensory input changes your brain. Experiences make you grow. You do not erase the old connections. Old self remains. New connections are made, which creates new self.

Understanding new relationships, means integrating new cause and effect relationships into your reality map. Changing your understanding of cause and effect changes what you need to do to get the outcome that you want. You are essentially writing new programming for your behavior. The experiencer is the program writer. It creates a new updated self that then knows these new connections.

When the true self experiences something new, it integrates that into the reality map. It becomes part of memory. A new identity is created that has this experience. The true self is the part of you that creates all of the automatic programming of selves/mind/ego.

The true self can operate subconsciously, or consciously.

The true self operates in the background subconscious most of the time. It allows the self to control most of your day to day activity. The true self can interupt the self and force control of your actions back to it. This is asserting your consciousness. Taking conscious, deliberate control of your actions.

Asserting your consciousness is always questioning the reality against the reality map. Consciously thinking about something, it can ask: Who? What? Where? When? How? What is the relevance to my existing reality map? Is my map right? Where is my map wrong? Why did this happen, when something else should have?

The consciousness knows that it exists, that you exist. It is aware that it is aware. It also knows that the subconscious exists. You know that there are things going on within your body that you are not aware of.

The true self is your curiosity. It can suspect connections/relationships exist and then look for them. The true self can see new possibilities. New relationships that you didn’t know before. It is your imagination, creativity, innovator and creator. The real genius. The part of you that sees relationships and makes connections. The intuition.

If your true self keeps learning and growing to the best of it's abilities, you get the best outcomes in your life. Your highest potential. Your best life.

EXPERIENCER = TRUE SELF = SOUL

The true self is called the soul by some religions.

You have to let soul be in charge of your life. Resist being controlled by ego, or superego. Be able to change and grow to continually improve. Your soul or spirit must be in control of the body, not the mind. This is how you get to heaven. The old you, self, can always be discarded. There is always a posibility of redemption. No matter how bad you were in the past, or are now, you can become better.

The soul has to determine what is important to you. It determines your values. Good has to be your highest value.

No matter what the past was, or how you chose before, you can always make a new choice. You can always choose to be better. Unfortunately, this also means that you can also choose to be worse at any time.

The true self is the part of you that has ability to make a new choice. Something that you didn’t do before. Free will.

SELF VS TRUE SELF

The self, or mind, cannot grow and learn. They operate only within the existing reality map from when they were formed. They are programmed only to function on this map. They do not seek, or know, anything outside of it.

Self is a set of fixed written programs of cause and effect relationships. It “knows” if this happens, then this will happen.

Self is not connected to reality, it is connected to the reality map. It only knows what is in the memory. What is in the past. It is not connected to the present.

True self can voluntarily give control to self, usually when it believes it is not having a new experience. True self tries to conserve energy and time that it would take to think something through that it already knows.

True self thinks I have already experienced this, and I know what to do from memory.

When you do something, but don’t get the expected result, the self making the decision was wrong somewhere. True self needs to take control and try something different. It needs to grow and learn. It creates a new reality map and a new self to go operate on it.

The new reality map may be new because true self learned something, or is trying out something to see if it is true.

If there is growth, a new self has been created. The old one did not grow, it is cast off as no longer needed.

This old self had all of your characteristics, except what you just learned.

It does not know what you just learned, because that is not part of it’s programming.

Self cannot know what it doesn’t know. It cannot even know that there is something that it doesn’t know. It thinks it knows all because it knows everything in it’s reality map.

It thinks it is you, and should still be in control.

True self has the most up to date information. The newest sensations and experiences.

Because it knows the most, and is capable of learning, it should have the ultimate control over all of your choices and actions. It should control the mind.

True self can delegate tasks to the mind, but it has the responsibility for all actions.

THE POWER OF SELF TO MAINTAIN CONTROL

The self can, and will, resist growth. It does this because it doesn’t want to lose the importance it once had.

If the self no longer has control, it feels as if it has died. No longer in control of your life. It has a fear of death, because you have a fear of death. This fear is part of it’s programming.

The self wants to keep control of you. And has many ways to do this. All based in fears and desires.

Self can distract you. It will constantly repeat old thoughts to you to keep you from seeing, or hearing, what may be new.

Self can say “I already know that”. It prevents you from learning, because it says you already understand everything about the situation.

Self will say that cannot be right because it doesn’t correspond to what I already know. It will discard new information.

If self can make you think that what you just learned isn’t important, it can maintain control of your actions.

Self can hijack your thoughts and actions by telling true self that this new information is dangerous.

Self takes control of your attention by trying to focus you on a perceived threat. Something else is made urgent, so you have to disregard the new.

CONTROLLING THE SELF

Controlling the self is self control.

Be open minded. You have to be consciously aware that self can be wrong. It is always a possibility that others are right and you are wrong.

Your map cannot be a perfect representation of reality. Nobody’s can. Look for where you are wrong. Look for where others may be right, or partially right.

Whenever you encounter difficulty try to give control to true self. Conscious thought can interrupt programming. Asking for more information shuts down self. Ask who, what, where, why, when. See if there is any new information to change your mind.

Being present helps. The self exists in the past and future. If you concentrate on what is happening now and operate in the present, you quiet the mind.

Mind is quieted by distraction. Anything that is new that is exciting captures mind and lets true self free.

When you get a nagging feeling, or you don’t completely understand something, that is true self trying to get control. Listen to it. Listen to your intuition. Look for what you are missing. How is this situation different than what I have previously experienced?

LIMITATIONS OF SELF

There are things in reality that can affect you. They can help you or hold you back, but they are mostly out of your control. There is one thing that you can control. That is yourself. Your ego and superego. Your mind.

The biggest things holding you back that you can control are creations of your own brain.

Self interferes with any new connections, so stops creativity and imagination and innovation. It holds you back.

The best ways to improve your life to your highest potential are to keep growing, and to control your mind.