Kindle Notes & Highlights
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February 1 - February 20, 2022
To say, for example, that people merely have different moods at different times misses our main thrust: the selves that compose us are actual, real, independent, and innately valuable parts of who we are.
Healthy, normal*1 people have—and may be aware that they have—more than one self or personality. Different selves are truly different—when a particular self is up front and in control, fundamental qualities and attributes of a person can change by a little . . . or a lot. Ultimately, it is easy to see beyond the Single Self Assumption and have your life work better.
We want to be clear, however, that we are not big fans of terms that soft-pedal or negate the main concepts being presented here. Your selves are not merely moods, urges, or whims, and to integrate a self against its will is not a benign act. The bottom line is that a single, consistent, unitary self is almost never the way things are. We do not experience ourselves or other people in this single-minded way, nor do other people experience us that way either.
different selves have the ability to bring to the fore different qualities, characteristics, and talents. This applies to a wide range of inner emotional and mental experiences, to external real-world abilities and capacities, and in some cases even to physiological differences (like changes in eyeglass prescriptions and blood pressure).
Each of your selves, whether or not you ever name them or identify any of them with precision, is a very real being, entity, or self-state, an autonomous complex (as Jung called it) that has its own agenda, its own needs, and its own ways of working with your other selves and other people (and their selves). It is not just that you have different moods, aspects, or feelings; it is that there really are different alive autonomous parts of you—different selves, different personalities, different parts.
As St. Paul famously puts it in Romans 7:15–19, “I do not understand what I do. . . For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate, I do For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”35
The simplest (and we believe correct) explanation is that the part of us that put the thing down is not the part that then has to look for it.
Mental health is being in the right mind at the right time.
“In any given interaction, we can never be sure of the part that we are actually playing—all we can do is show up and be fully who we are, in the given interaction, in the given moment.”
being in the right mind at the right time will not solve insoluble problems, create magic solutions when there are no good alternatives, or replace necessary hard work and effort.
For more life energy and effectiveness generally, make sure that the part of you that is good at and wants to be doing something is currently present and in charge. If it is not, find a way to consciously call upon or shift into that part of you, or simply do something else until the right part can and does show up.
Meditation, of course, may inherently bring more energy and recharge people on its own merits, but it may also give our selves the opportunity to recalibrate and do whatever is necessary to get the right part(s) of who we are on deck and fully engaged in whatever is coming next.
Physical objects can remind us of and revitalize skills and selves with which we have otherwise lost touch.5
Much of what we call mental illness looks like (or can be described in terms of) having the wrong self in control at the wrong time; that is, being in the wrong mind at the wrong time and then doing the wrong thing.
Ultimately, then, the goal of much of psychotherapy might be reconceived of as teaching people how to shift into the right mind and away from dysfunctional self-states (rather than striving toward the unrealistic goal of being a single, unified, consistent self).
If all you can manage is to remember that whenever someone is bothering, irritating, or annoying you that that is only one of their selves, then you will be way ahead of the game.
it is much better to work at keeping the wrong self off center stage than it is to try to get it to not do what it always does or wants to do.
Not only is constructive self-talk good for us in a variety of ways, but it also seems that people who use the term I in self-talk meant to boost confidence or give a competitive advantage do not do as well as people who refer to themselves in the second or third person!
I am not sure that the number of different selves is in itself all that pathological; I hope not. Eight strikes me personally as a reasonably small and easily manageable number. It is the simultaneity of their appearance that is the real problem, and I should think psychiatry would do better by simply persuading them to queue up and wait their turn, as happens in the normal rest of us.
Sheldon: So you’re proposing that the self is an illusion, and that we actually have multiple centers of consciousness that are communicating with one another? Penny: In laymen’s terms, yeah. Sheldon: Huh. Interesting. So you don’t believe there’s a Cartesian self that underlies the flux of experience? Penny: Maybe in my twenties, not anymore.
“The Guest House,” translated by Coleman Barks,66 suggesting each self should be treated honorably: This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes As an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!
In ancient Greece there was an understanding that one was required to worship all the gods and goddesses. You might have your favorites, but none of the remaining deities could be ignored. The God or Goddess whom you ignored become the one who turned against you and destroyed you. . . . So it is with consciousness work. The energy pattern that we disown turns against us.
St. Augustine (354–430 CE) asserted that “if there are as many contrary natures in man as there are conflicting wills, there would not only have to be two natures but many more.”
Elizabeth O’Connor, author of Our Many Selves: A Handbook for Self-Discovery, says that she eventually came to the realization that the entire New Testament could be conceived of in terms of leading us to working with our selves:
Often translated as soul, ego, or self, the Sufis identify seven levels of Nafs: the tyrannical self, the regretful self, the inspired self, the serene self, the pleased self, the self pleasing to God, and the pure self.
The sole God, the ruling ego of the universe, is a mirroring or projection of the dissociated executive-self of the Western psyche.”
In ancient times Plato viewed it as a man (rationality), a lion (courage and spirit), and a many-headed monster (passions and appetites). Another of his famous metaphors likened it to a charioteer seeking to guide two powerful horses, the one spirited and noble, the other base and ignoble.39
Prince used the term personality to refer to the sum total of our minds, and he proposed that people have many organized dispositions that compose the whole personality. Prince called these organized dispositions selves, secondary units, characters, phases, and variants. . . . These different selves appear when there are changes in fatigue, illness, intoxication, mood, and situation. They can change from morning to evening, in adversity versus prosperity, happiness versus sorrow, sickness versus health, and in our different social relationships.29
James summarized his first lecture with the statement that ‘the mind seems to embrace a confederation of psychic entities.’”
‘Theory is good; but it doesn’t prevent things from existing.’”
Assagioli suggested that a therapist could ask a client, “Have you noticed that you behave differently in your office, at home, in social interplay, in solitude, at church, or as a member of a political party?” Assagioli proposed that each of us has different selves, based on the relationship we have with other people, surroundings, groups, etc.; that is, roles. We should not identify with any one of these selves. The goal is to become aware of the subpersonalities and immerse ourselves in each role, so that we can play consciously these various roles.
Games People Play by Eric Berne. That book made a vast reading public aware of three psychological realities each person carries in him . . . the Parent, the Child, and the Adult. . . . This is a profound observation of psychological realities translated into terms easily grasped by lay readers, so that they are able to use them to observe these states in themselves and to note when the shift is made from one to the other.
Buddha himself, in answer to the question of whether a self exists or not, never put forward a definite position so as not to cause new concepts to arise that would be irrelevant and obstructive for spiritual practice. Thus the teaching of no self is to be understood more as a fruitful pedagogical device than as a philosophical doctrine. Nevertheless in the course of the development of the Buddhist system of thought, this came more and more to be an unequivocal denial of the existence of a self.
Instead of there being a single, consistent Cartesian self that monitors the world and makes decisions, we live in a kind of nineties-era Liberia of the mind, populated by warring independent armies implanted by evolution, representing themselves as a unified nation but unable to reconcile their differences, and, as one after another wins a brief battle for the capital, providing only the temporary illusion of control and decision. By accepting that the fixed self is an illusion imprinted by experience and reinforced by appetite, meditation parachutes in a kind of peacekeeping mission that, if
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“The Multiple Self: Exploring between and beyond Modernity and Postmodernity”—provides
the scientific notion that consciousness is an epiphenomenon generated from the physical body and its components—then
as Thomas Schelling stated, “the human being is not best modeled as a speculative individual but as several alternates according to the contemporary body chemistry.”
Selves are self-states, and self-states are recurring patterns of mindbody chemistry, energy, perception, and behavior in a human being.
under the regulation of viruslike elements, the paternally inherited and maternally inherited copies of some genes compete for domination in the offspring, on whom they have opposite physical and behavioral effects.
Some philosophers and thinkers have directly stated that cells and organs are alive and conscious.
For William James, co-founder of the philosophical school of Pragmatism, the test of truth is to first suppose an idea or belief to be true and then ask if that truth makes your life better.
ask yourself: “‘What would the strongest, bravest, most loving part of my personality do now?’ And then do it. Do it with all your heart. And do it now.”
Generally, a person is unaware of a part’s blending, and whether the person is feeling anger, sadness, joy or some other emotion, the blending is so seamless the person owns the experience entirely. She would say, for example, “I am angry,” without any sense that the anger originated with a blended subpersonality.
When it comes to any major or even minor decision, we have such a raging tangle of inner conflicts of feeling and intention that it’s a wonder any decisions ever get made! Indeed, usually a decision is made only because one or another of these inner voices happens to take over at a key moment and blurt out its own message, while other aspects of the personality are shoved under.
Why would you, indeed, how could you, if there was only a single you, do things that were counter-intentional and against your best interests? Once again, the simplest answer is that there is not just a single you.
We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the definition of I.
Yes, we are captain of our own ships. And the way I see it, these are pirate ships. Each of our crews are made up of the many subpersonalities living with us. And the crew is planning mutiny.
The ideal calls for a vinculum or meta-self team captain who inspires colorful idiosyncratic initiative by team members capable of playing together.
Sometimes there does seem to be a Higher Self or the equivalent in someone’s selves repertoire, but even when such selves come with remarkable abilities or levels of awareness, they are far from infallible or omnipotent.
The more you learn about the brain’s architecture, the more you recognize that what happens in your head is more like an orchestra than a soloist, with dozens of players contributing to the overall mix. You can hear the symphony as a unified wash of sound, but you can also distinguish the trombones from the timpani, the violins from the cellos.
