SELF: ME, MYSELF & I = FLORENCE DURRANT (HERSELF).

It is easy to understand the meaning of words, we are taught these words by our parents and family from childhood, we learn more from our peers and friends from adolescent and we have dictionaries to check meanings of those odd words we come across and don’t understand. As I am trying to understand human nature, and having previously argued that PRIDE is a mentality that is embedded in human mind, I will attempt to understand SELF as a mentality that is embedded in human mind. The human mind is like a chaotic endless junction of words and definitions and I have chosen the following three definitions of SELF in an attempt to rearrange this chaos.

1. The total, essential, or particular being of a person; the individual
2. The essential qualities distinguishing one person from another; individuality:
3. The distinct individuality or identity of a person or thing.

Before I look into this SELF who is ME, MYSELF and I, I will attempt to understand what I mean by mentality, the mentality where this SELF is embedded, and these are some of the definitions of mentality:

1. Brain: mental ability
2. A mindset; a way of thinking
3. Characteristic mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations.

This SELF therefore seems to incorporate distinguishable characteristics namely, those essential qualities that distinguish one person from another and I believe that the purpose of these characteristics is to identify one person against the other; to set apart a person as an individual. These characteristics seem to be interpreted in the person’s brain because that is where thought is understood to take place. The problem is, no where does it say whether these characteristics are innate or learned. So this SELF who is me was told by her mother from a young age that she was special and at 50 she still believes that she is special. However, it does not mean that this mindset that regards the SELF who is me as special is the same mindset that interprets what the SELF who is ME uses when regarding other people’s characteristics; because if it was the same, the SELF who is me would regard the SELF in others as equally special. My best friend for example is special to me, but that idiot across the road who told lies about me is a Mr Dickhead whose arse I want to kick to pulp. But how would this mindset interpret my friend who is special to me today if tomorrow she turned against me and told lies about me; or how would this mindset that loathes and despises Mr Dickhead for telling lies about me make of Mr Dickhead should he turn out to be a Good Samaritan in the future?
Just to add, these two people are real, my special friend who has never told a lie about me and is always there for me, and Mr Dickhead who is always sticking his thick dickhead in other people’s business.

I love my special friend because she has been there for me in good and bad times, and I assume here that she also loves me and regards me as special. However, something is bound to happen to my mentality once she tells lies about me; something is bound to change in me when I realize that I am not special to her. Most likely the love I had for her will be replaced by something else; something like what I regard as a range of emotions is bound to take place, i.e. anger, sadness, a feeling of betrayal or even hate. The SELF who is ME automatically distances herself from the SELF who is my friend. On the other hand, I believe that the SELF who is my friend will also experience a certain degree of emotions once I distance myself from her as it means I have stopped loving her. She stops being special to me. This chain of events has triggered another mindset which I have called emotions and this definition of emotion fits well with my argument, because this mentality is now translated to a feeling rather than a thought.

Emotion: A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling:

Something has happened here that has changed between the SELF who is me and the SELF who is my friend. But it is not because my friend told lies about me, but it is me finding out that my friend told lies about me which resulted in a trigger somewhere in my mindset which translated into a feeling and this feeling translated into emotions. It is these emotions in me that changed the relationship between the SELF who is me and the SELF who is my friend. One can go through many emotions at such times but I believe that LOVE AND HATE are two major emotions that give birth to all emotions just as PRIDE is regarded as the sin from which all other sins arise. I believe therefore that before I find out about that my special friend has lied about me; it was LOVE that made me see her as a special friend, we were bonded together by love. The emotions triggered by the lies then turn that love into hate, hence anger, feeling of betrayal etc are born from hate and it is HATE that disconnects the SELF who is me from the SELF who is my friend.

Where is this mentality and where are the emotions? Let us say that the mentality is in our brain because that is where thought takes place. In the case of my friend, I will confront her and tell her that ‘I feel hurt by her actions.’ This feeling is not in my brain because the brain does not feel. However, somewhere in my body there is an emotional pain which I cannot describe. I know how it feels like because I feel it every time someone hurts or betrays me. If this pain is not in my brain, then which part of me or who in me is feeling the pain? It is the thought in my brain after all that triggered this chain of events. Let us say that my friend who has triggered this emotion that has made something in me turn from loving her to hating her, owns up to having told a lie about me; gives me a humanly acceptable rationale for telling lies about me and begs for forgiveness. I forgive her straight way and love her just as I did before. Thus I believe the moral judgment some where in me set in motion another emotion because my friend chose to do the right thing by making amends. This does not mean that the lies she told about me are erased from my memory; but her actions are bound to compel me to see the goodness in her where her lies had made me see the badness in her. As a friend with whom I have wonderful memories of our history together, her remorse is bound to automatically cure the emotional pain in me and turn the hate I felt towards her that was triggered by this pain back to love. This means therefore that if our mentality is inactivated, there is still something in us that makes decisions on our behalf without the action of the brain, except that in this case the chain of events starts off in the mentality. The pain is cured, the emotions of anger towards my friend stop, I stop hating her and I love her again.
Just for clarity, I don’t believe that anger on its own is a bad emotion because when someone is betrayed a range of emotions are triggered, i.e. anger, sadness, pain etc and in my friend’s case the anger in me was triggered by my friend’s betrayal. Hence I believe in Malcolm X’s quote is right when he says:

"Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change"

This is anger used positively, but there is the negative anger; i.e. if I continue being angry after my friend’s apology, because that is no longer anger, but extreme anger driven by hate.

However, how would someone react given exactly the same scenario? Here I will leave each person reading this essay to think of their own individual answers.
But if SELF pertains to ‘the total, essential, or particular being of a person; the individual’, i.e. the whole of a person, how come there is such confusion in our mentality? Let us say I tell a lie about Mr Dickhead, who is a well known liar himself. Dickhead finds out that I have told a lie about him; I apologize to this Dickhead and give the humanly rationale reason for my lie and explain that it is the first that I have told a lie in my whole life. Instead of accepting my apology, what if Dickhead, who is driven by hate, hence he lies all the time, gets so angry with me that he smashes my car in revenge. Given this scenario, how is it that I forgave my friend despite the fact that her lie made me angry and yet Dickhead who lies all the time could not forgive me? Is it this individuality therefore that is explained as in SELF? In my case however, I see the SELF as ME, MYSELF and I, i.e. three different parts conflated into one whole? This is the complexity of the SELF as I understand myself:

Personally, I interpret the SELF who is ME, MYSELF and I as the MIND, BODY and SOUL. In my mind I love my friend who stuck with me through the good and bad times, just as I love every other person. However, I believe this love for my friend goes deeper than the love in my brain, because should my friend betray me, my same mind will cut off the love that I had for her, and yet should she apologize my love for her is restored. I cannot say the same of other Joblogs. I believe that when my friend asks for forgiveness, the morale part of me that is concerned with the judgment of the goodness or badness in a person brings to my mind the goodness of my friend as I have known her before she lied about me. But that moral part of me is not in my mind, because if my mind cut of the love for my friend and replaced it with hate purely because of the emotional pain, and then suddenly changed again and replaced that hate with love for the same person, what is it in me that made me change my mind? I suspect that is where we get sayings like, ‘Please show the goodness of your heart’ and by heart here I believe it is the SOUL rather than the physical heart whose job is to supply our bodies with blood. On the other hand, the mind is a chaotic junction of thoughts and hence not capable of showing any goodness of anything. I believe therefore that the reason why the love for my friend is different from the love I have for Joblogs is that I reflect myself on my friend, hence when she is good to me, she is special like me and is part of me. So, when she betrays me, she betrays that part of me that loves her, the part that I see in her that makes her special to me and I believe that part of me (us) that reflects itself in us is our SOUL. Unlike the body and the mind that are ever changing, the soul never changes. I regard the SOUL as the child in us that never grows, hence by asking for forgiveness, she exposes the vulnerability of her child like personality, her vulnerable soul, and this soul is a child which makes my soul which is also a child behave just as children do; forgive and love each other.

In my earlier essay on Seven Deadly Sins, I pointed out that the reason why I am attempting to understand human beings is not because I am a philosopher or Mother Theresa, but because I have been at the receiving end of what I can only regard as the cruelty and evilness of other human beings, mostly to do with people telling lies about me. But the difference between these people who told lies about me and my special friend is that, although their behaviour made me angry, I never felt any hatred towards them. So, whether they apologize or not, it will not make any difference to my emotions, more so now that I have been vindicated having exposed them as liars; I am no longer angry with them. The reason why I could not hate them is because I could not reflect myself in them as I do in the case of my friend. Like me, they have the body and the mind, but they don’t have this child, or this ‘I’ that I see in my friend. Unlike the body and the mind, this ‘I’ is never changing. It is like a child that never grows. That is why some people find it easy to apologize, because when you reflect yourself in another person, hurting that person is equal to hurting yourself.

I end with this quote:

"If you hate a person, you hate something in her/him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us" [Hermann Hesse Demian]