Suppose that you are living in May 1997 and the Pentium II computer had just hit the market. The lure of a modern computer with most capacity, functionality and even more importantly speed made you to come to market and get one of those computers. You were also one those lucky and rare people who had access to commercialized internet (Internet was commercialized in 1995). You would appreciate Windows 95’s friendly interface operating system (You had still to wait one year more to get Windows 98) and of course Yahoo Search Engine (Yahoo become public in Jan 1994). What would be your feelings? You might be overwhelmed by the amount of the information available and connectivity across globe in a small machine available 24 hours at comfort of your room. The freedom, ease of access and most importantly the amount of information would make you think that you are living at the peak of human history. Suppose at the height of this excitement, a Philosopher intruder had interrupted and had asked you, “Who are you?”…Knowing that this question has been repeated by all generations since the birth of Humankind, most probably, you would try to give a very intelligent answer, “I am human history”….”Can you elaborate, how?” The Philosopher would inquire because “living history” seldom exists…..Just inspired by your computer and internet, the immediate answer that might come to your mind, “How we know about human history?” you might ask the Philosopher, “Through books, people, Buildings, cultures and ruins” the Philosopher might reply…”Do you mean human history is all in this stuffs?”….”Yeah, it is what we call human history”….”Well then I am human history because I have all this with me and right here in my computer”……
I would not disagree much with this line of reasoning as you and your computer had not access to Google Books, Google maps, You Tube, Amazon and all sort of these internet based archives (Google become public 2004, Amazon 2004, You Tube 2005) at that time…so Of Course, you still didn’t belong to this part of human history….but I would rather tell you “I accept that you are human history but still, Who are you?”….
The reason that this answer is not satisfying because it is what everybody can rightfully claim. Well, this claim was always there and we can find Spiritualists, Philosophers and in our time Physicists (David Bohm for example) who were preaching the oneness of self and in answer for “Who am I?” were saying that we all are different expressions of same reality…. Well, there is no doubt in oneness of both origin and content in everything yet, what we call different expressions of this oneness is showing that there is something besides of oneness, and that is the core cause of difficulty in answering, “Who am I?”
Well, you may say, what if I pose the same question to you, what would be your answer? That is the point that I wanted to bring you in previous introductory thought processes. My answer is, “Like all those Philosophers, Spiritualists and some Physicists who say that we are one in origin and content but different forms of expressions, similarly as an individual, it seems that I am one in the origin but the content of “self”, itself is not really one, so it is why generalizations does not fit. We see Philosophers are helpless in generalizations about it so they can’t do anything except just changing the places of words, one group say, “Self precedes Existence” and another group make “HISTORY” just by changing the places of words and make it, “Existence precedes Self” and when modern Philosophers do not find any way to make any more changes so they try to be really innovative and add an adjective to “Self” to make it “Bodily-Self”… How am I sure of different “self”?.... Well, just put a glance at works of Psychologists, they make a lot of generalizations and try to find a common Psyche so it help them in their practices but it never become like other Sciences, coherent because there are not a single self that one could formulate laws and principles… Let me make it even more simplified by another explanation, if we had a common psyche or “self” in more Philosophical and Spiritual sense that we would had coherent world views though in different versions and that is what we do not have…………..
No comments:
Post a Comment