The Illusion of Individuality

Anti-individuality is the idea that we are all just products of our environment. Experiments in the field ask the subject to think of a twin-Earth. The differences between the twin, and our original earth, are minute. But if water on the twin earth is still h2O, will our outlook change if it is now called "XYZ"?
Does our environment dictate our self-perception?

I would say even animals are individuals, have some things they like, places they like to sleep, or bark in a specific way.

I would say illusion of the self is not real, it's imposible for bilions of people on this earth to be controled in someway. If in someway let's say god has us all on a string, I would imagine how hard is to be a few billion people at the same time, each with some idividuality, ticks, behaviors and so on. Expiriance of the self is very unique in my perspective, I now notice that we are in fact individuals on our own, deciding what we do.
If there is control of the masses it's done with influence of what we now call sociaty, indoctrination.
Just what is control, it's influence of everyday things we see and touch, without influence of the masses we would be more natural, the self is really becoming more and more "art"-ificial in an "art"-istic way without noticing it. From hardware to software until we all become in some way robotic, far away from the self that feels and is alive. So in a way the self is in danger from asimilation, commun people have no creativity, communism is a very dangeros idea for the self. The very people that run the world are to blame for this.

Originally posted by xiphias

Originally posted by InertiaZero
What do you define as "the heart"? Is the heart a set of principals?

Would you say that maybe the only facet of personality most people experience is the ego?

Do you think there is more to yourself, more to discover...than your ego?

"The heart," as far as I'm concerned, is that part of your psyche that you've always been aware of, mainly in childhood. It's something you were possibly born with, and something that never changes. Not necessarily a set of principals (I think principals are formed in early adulthood), but rather the part of you that has always been receptive to certain aspects of your world/environment.

One might say the "heart" is actually the "inner child."

I think the primary facet of personality is experienced in the relationships between people; meaning the interactions between people on a social level. But the primary facet of "the heart" is experienced emotionally; through inspiration and creativity (eg, arts and sciences). On a social level, an individual is either driven by their ego, or by their heart; possibly by both. But the two are inherently separate. Some individuals completely ignore their ego, or completely ignore their heart.

There's more to a person than most would think. I consider the ego to be a sort of veil on your true self; as they say: beauty is only skin deep. Underneath the veil are treasures worth more than all of the material wealth in the world. Dramatic, but definitely true (just ask anybody who has taken meditation seriously).

edit on 5-12-2010 by xiphias because: (no reason given)

Do you think the heart holds the reigns of creativity, solely?

I think it may be a combination of both your ego, and youre heart. Some people create simply because they enjoy it. Some use their creativity for vain purposes. Some may be somewhere in the middle?

Do you think the heart is who you are when there are no other influences...when you are alone? The ego being a social butterfly, always adapting and changing?

Originally posted by DrunkYogi
If there is a universal mind then our thought's are not personal either, they belong to everyone. We are pure consciousness, all one and the same.

That is just new age doctrine, that in someway we are one big bulb.
If you think of the universe it serves as a unique element for everything, or else everything would be the same shape. If you for example take a grain of sand from a beach you will notice if you zoom in with the microscope that none of them are the same. Who would deisign trilions of sand grains to be the same or diverse.
It's not only life but nature, objects. It's diversity, in some way god does throw the dice. Who would stay to shape every grain of sand on this face of this earth. Just like a beach we humans are diverse and no one knows the secret of how things shape on their own and why they do, you are one grain of sand standing up and asking this question out of an infinite, other grain of sands will agree or will not with you all in different opinions of course, explaining it different. It may be very different in your view, maybe you state that all grains of sand eventualy return to the big sea ?

I don't think "individuality" exists. I have some traits, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual that set me apart from my family, or my friends, or my co-workers, etc. I am not the only one though.

For instance, I too find a powerful message in the Buddhist life-style (I don't consider it a philosophy, or a religion); does that make me an individual? Hardly. You, OP, like Buddhism too. So while it separates me from my dad, or my best friend, or my boss, it forms an interconnectedness with you.

By the same vein I have a personal religion, very, very small organization, mostly local. To the untrained eye it would seem I am an individual, practicing a very individualistic religion; I don't though. I have a very interpersonal religion. I am connected to the one who taught me, and to the one I have taught.

The same goes for non-philosophical things. I create music, but I do it with a band. So no matter how much "individuality" I put into the work I do, I am just a cog in a machine, the machine being made up of all of the members of the whole who put together the art we sell to the world. A conglomeration, not individuality.

But...

I am still an individual. For example, these words are mine. They haven't been pre-written by someone else. No one else has thought them out before I have conceived of their syntax.

This room that I sit in, it is decorated in completely non-individualistic paraphernalia: Tibetan prayer flags, occult altar, tapestry paintings of Chinese dragons, illegal nun-chucks, commonplace band posters, wooden DVD case, CD tower, my bed, movie posters I've acquired, etc.

As well as some stuff that not everyone else has: the Kitana that was made for me, the wand that a close-friend carved for me, the walking cane I had made for me while on a cruise, the sculpture of skeletal and muscular anatomy that was made for me, autographed books, movies, and posters that I had signed, etc.

But the organization is all mine: My bed in the dresser alcove, altar along the north wall instead of east, placement and organization of the prayer-flags, the arrangement of my religious iconography, etc. All of that is mine, individually placed, individually chosen; individuality. No one else has it like I do, where I do, and for the reasons that I do.

So what does it come down to? Personality is individuality. Beyond the personal level though, we lose our individuality by becoming one with our family, our town, our church group, our school, the local team, our employer, our state, our nation, our continent, and eventually the world and Universal Mind. I believe we attempt to retain a shred of personal individuality for the sake of our sanity, but beyond that we are more than willing to become "one among the fence" for the sake of day-to-day living.



My understanding of Buddhist philosophy breaks down like this: we are all individuals, but that individuality is a pre-cursor to the doctrine of reincarnation. If we chose to hold onto our discriminating minds, our personal identity—the ego—then we will be reborn again, and again, and again. The Buddha did not teach individuality, He taught sublimation into the eternal way of things. This eventually requires a letting-go: of self, of your biological connections, of views and beliefs, or emotions and thoughts, of everything. If a Buddhist is to reach sublimation he/she must be prepared to let-go of individuality in order to achiever connectedness with that-which-is-beyond.

Which is perfectly cool with myself. I'm not ready for that yet, but maybe one day I would like to be and will then try to be.

That's my two cents on the topic.

~ Scribe

Yours is one of the best replies so far, in my opinion.

I like the duality of your view. We are separate, but we are all the same.
Details separate us, but larger efforts unite us?

reply to post by InertiaZero


Thank you, it was refreshing to see a thought-provoking post on ATS, so I had to jump aboard for the discussion. And yes, it is the details which constitute individuality, but the larger effort, or the purpose, which unites us all together. Universal Mind made from Individual Preference.

~ Scribe

Originally posted by InertiaZero
Do you think the heart holds the reigns of creativity, solely?

I think it may be a combination of both your ego, and youre heart. Some people create simply because they enjoy it. Some use their creativity for vain purposes. Some may be somewhere in the middle?

Do you think the heart is who you are when there are no other influences...when you are alone? The ego being a social butterfly, always adapting and changing?

The heart doesn't necessarily hold the reigns of creativity exclusively. If you consider the ego to be the product of your relationships (either interpersonal, or environmental), then it's obvious the ego is also influenced by the heart of other individuals. So perhaps the ego has it's own "heart" which is actually the heart of the environment (friends, enemies, family, fans, teachers/books, heroes, etc.) and the times (and how an individual experiences or subject themself to these).

So yes, it probably is a combination of both. Consider that the heart may be how you approach your "self" from the inside facing out, and the ego may be how you approach your "self" from the outside facing in. Or maybe it's the other way around.

The heart could be "you" in it's purest form; meaning without any other influences. The concept of an adapting/changing ego is interesting. The "ego" could be a sort of "adapter" (even mechanical in nature, in a figurative way) between yourself and the world. It's interesting to consider the concept of "alter egos" when thinking of such things.

You might even say the heart is the navigator for the ego; and the ego is a sort of story which writes itself during the voyage. Or maybe the ego is the narrator, and the heart is the story.

We are individualised portions of the Whole.. Source/God.. call it what you will. And it is because we are Awareness that we are the some of the means the Universe has to come to know itself and its capabilities.

The experience of being an Individual is simply what we chose to have here. And that is great, especially over the next thousand years as humanity truly wakes up from its Dream of Life and participates knowingly in the Whole.

reply to post by pepsi78

If you for example take a grain of sand from a beach you will notice if you zoom in with the microscope that none of them are the same. Who would deisign trilions of sand grains to be the same or diverse.

If you keep on zooming you will come to the place where we are all one. All thing's are the same, expressed in a different way at the material level. I think this is where we are supposed to be made in the image of god....i.e Consciousness.

It may be very different in your view, maybe you state that all grains of sand eventualy return to the big sea ?

Yes i agree with this. Spirit (consciousness) to material and then back to spirit. If you take the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden then i think it could be taken as a descent from consciousness(spirit) into the material. Where we were once PURE consciousness but decided (for some unknown reason!) to experience the material world (eating the fruit of knowledge of the material... i.e. Fallen from grace) thereby being caught in the law of cause and effect. Now we are in this cycle we are finding it extremely difficult to escape, it seems all that we have to do is remember our divine nature or wake up, become enlightened

# Enlightenment (spiritual), a final blessed state free from ignorance, desire and suffering

and we will become free!
Most people live in a state of ignorance and are unaware of their divine nature. There are certain people in this world that do not want us to become aware of this nature and are in current times doing all in their power to stop us from becoming aware. This is where the conspiracy of the NWO could enter the picture. David Icke may have some bizarre views but when he say's we are being held back in our spiritual evolution he is right on the money. I believe a mass awakening is speeding towards us when the realization of who we are will dawn. I suspect this is why there is a conserted effort to enslave us more and take our rights away. To try to hold us down when the time comes.

We, the first, are all together one body, the church, we fit together in a subtle way. We need eachother and love eachother. We stay alive that way. One word, one love.. We fit together. Evildoers suck. Greets

I would say that individuality is the essence of consciousness. You would have no concept of sight if you could not differentiate between light and dark or lack of light (Imagine your only visual experience was a single shade of grey completely filling your visual field. Would you even think you had such a thing as sight? Would we even have invented a word for it?). You would have no concept of color if your eyes could not differentiate between different frequencies of light. No concept of sound if you could not differentiate between frequencies of physical vibration. Etc.

I think this is sufficient to show that we ain't "all one". From the time of the Big Bang, the universe has been getting more and more differentiated, more and more individual. And yet we are all part of and not separate from the universe we observe. We are made up of all the same substances and at the microscopic level even boundaries like the boundary between our bodies and the air around us are somewhat blurred.

Hard to say. The sort of question that probably will never get a cut-and-dry answer to us living mortals. After all, we don't have big forum discussions on what color a clear sky is at noontime. But we talk about this stuff all the time, and philosophers have been discussing this stuff from the time of the ancient Greeks and earlier. Just goes to show that these are sticky questions.

reply to post by NewlyAwakened


Exactly...these are things you cant help but wonder.

The ideas stick with you....

Originally posted by InertiaZero
reply to post by birhan

 

Great Question!!!

I think our brain may know more about us.

For a few minutes I'll put some of my braincells to work on the above. The brain is a tool, it isn't some entity waiting to become self aware and overtake you, condemning you to experience life helpless in an uncontrollable body, having to spend your days watching your body wear your clothes, do your job, live with your spouse who never finds out it isn't you, talks about everyday things as though they were cleverly programmed by the other brains... j/k but again the brain is just a tool, part of a larger system of tools (the senses).

Originally posted by InertiaZero
What makes up an individual?

Individual is something that cannot be divided. The very word 'individual' conveys this idea.

Individual is one who is whole. This means that when one's character is not affected by external factors, but is driven solely by oneself. The personality of an individual have no fissures. This means that an individual is not affected by external motives caused by environment, culture and trends. Individual takes no impressions from those, but he/she is one that is very content with his character.

I tried to express the idea of individuality in this thread.

Not many people are individuals, they are more like persons (persona means mask). Individual stays same whenever conditions may change. He/she is always the same. It is a fact that many people behave differently in different situation. We take roles when we are with our friends, another roles when we are with our colleques, other role in home etc.

Individual has only one role, and that is oneself. Individual.

-v

Originally posted by Dragonfly79

Originally posted by InertiaZero
reply to post by birhan

 

Great Question!!!

I think our brain may know more about us.

For a few minutes I'll put some of my braincells to work on the above. The brain is a tool, it isn't some entity waiting to become self aware and overtake you, condemning you to experience life helpless in an uncontrollable body, having to spend your days watching your body wear your clothes, do your job, live with your spouse who never finds out it isn't you, talks about everyday things as though they were cleverly programmed by the other brains... j/k but again the brain is just a tool, part of a larger system of tools (the senses).

It's the center of our systems.
Can you recall every single second of your life? Probably not.
Is it possible that just because we cant remember it, doesnt mean it's not up there somewhere.

Your subconscious does all kinds of stuff for you. It does it without you being able to access the how, all you see is the end result.

So could there be stuff about yourself that you dont know, or you are not aware of? certainly

Originally posted by v01i0

Originally posted by InertiaZero
What makes up an individual?

Individual is something that cannot be divided. The very word 'individual' conveys this idea.

Individual is one who is whole. This means that when one's character is not affected by external factors, but is driven solely by oneself. The personality of an individual have no fissures. This means that an individual is not affected by external motives caused by environment, culture and trends. Individual takes no impressions from those, but he/she is one that is very content with his character.

I tried to express the idea of individuality in this thread.

Not many people are individuals, they are more like persons (persona means mask). Individual stays same whenever conditions may change. He/she is always the same. It is a fact that many people behave differently in different situation. We take roles when we are with our friends, another roles when we are with our colleques, other role in home etc.

Individual has only one role, and that is oneself. Individual.

-v

Great breakdown.