What do you rely upon to get you out of a mess ? To infuse calm and peace in you in times of tribulations ? Better still, what is the base impulse you have, your goto thing, if faced with any problems/questions about anything ?
These are very fundamental questions we have to answer for ourselves. Because no one else will. Others can react to how you are behaving. And that behavior, while in many ways, could be a good description of who or what you are, as people embody their truth more deeply than the way they think it out, it is always not enough.
So yes, your behavior is a truer representation of who you are, than your thoughts. People modify their behaviours to fit in, and be a part of a group. No one likes to be an outcast. We repress our truer instincts and impulses and modify actions under a variety of conditions.
Hence, just observing a person is not enough to know his base impulses. In a repressed person, the metaphorical wall, so to say, that you would come to, would be the place where you will know that they are not acting true to their true self, but not any further. Yes, you can get their “masks” off, so to speak, under the influence of different kind of psychotropic and psychedelic substances, that still wont be a conclusive proof as what you might find there could be any of the numerous other masks, triggered by a specific substance/place/location etc.
This analysis may lead us down a totally different road of questionings, similar to the paradox of The Ship of Theseus.
The paradox talks about the essence of a personality and an individual self, and if our actions define our psychological space and if we become who we pretend to be, and slowly our motivations and impulses and instincts change fundamentally. So much so that we might not be the same person as who we were before.
Then the question is, Do any additions or subtractions from our personality changes us completely into new people ?
But I think those questions, though important, misses one simple point. Almost all of our personalities are masks which we wear. If a stage actor, who played a role of one character for small period of time, during the starting days of his career, but then becomes part of a big theatre production company where he was typecasted in a role of another character, for next 10-15 years of his life, its very obvious that the first character he was, you would find very less of its imprint in whatever he became later. But that is fundamentally, a problem of memory and complexity. And similar, to some extent is the corundum of real life identities.
On the other hand, some would argue that behaving in newer ways do change us, even our brain structures, for that matter. New neural pathways are created and strengthened as we adopt new habits and ways of being. Yes, they do, but isn’t there a possibility of reverting to a previous stage of being even when those new pathways get created ?
I remember listening to Sam Harris, on one of his podcasts, talk about his experience under hypnotism, when he was made to sign on a paper like his 12 year old self woul’ve done. Think about it, this has happened with us too. Under some peculiar sensory impulse, a smell, a taste or a sight, takes us back to feel like we used to do at a previous point in our lives and its as if in those moments, all of our context changes. For those short moments, you forget all of the realities of your current life and are transported back to a life you might no longer even have. This would prove to us that those earlier brain circuits, though inactive, are not wiped off as we adapt to newer ones.
And hence if we consider our selves as a mishmash of “Brain circuits” which are created and switched to as we move from one stage of life to another, what I am interested to talk about here, is the common thread that binds all of those circuits. There might be no direct relation between them in terms of their physical existence i.e there might not be a physical link between them, but there could be a qualitative similarity. Some people might argue against such a concept because that would entail accepting an essence to every individual, but I think there is that connecting link that exist. And here I would like to switch to my subjective experience.
For me, what I realized was, this qualitative feature is, my reliance of my own rationality and reason. My firm belief that by sheer intelligence and powers of logic and inference, I can, eventually, solve all my problems. I cannot be scared of things I completely understand. Anything I am having issues with ? Try to learn more about it and understand it to its tiniest details. This obsessive focus on details and explanations to wiggle my way out of difficulties is my essence, my core belief so to say. I primarily believe in the prominence of reason over everything else. And that’s what I realized. My first instinct is always to try to read up and understand more of the thing in front of me.
Now some may say, and even I might agree to, that these fundamental feature of my cognition, so to speak, comes in me because of my formative years, my genes, my upbringing. The whole dynamics of Nature vs Nurture. And that could be, and even is true to most extent. But the point here is not, again, the focus on the question of why, what, how, when etc ? Or maybe it is, but not about the thing at hand, but in its relation to its surrounding. So for example, though the question, “Why do a certain kind of quality exist in my cognition ?” is a valid enough questions with probably totally satisfying and accurate answers, those answers are unimportant. Meanwhile, on the other hand, the question, “Why the quality of my cognition is directed in the direction it currently is and whether that is making my life, and life of those around me any better ?” is a much more important and valid question, the answer to which might be confusing and messy, as it would require us to direct our effort in understanding and defining scales of bad, good and better in the outside world. But I think it is still worth our time.
The Existential Routine 