On nature of self

Giving that speech was an interesting experience. I have always hated public speaking, but now it is more I enjoy it but I have no idea what is going to happen because the last time I public spoke was about 5 years ago so it’s a complete gamble.

Now this creates an interesting experience. We don’t have the security of a model of our own behaviour. Maybe I will stand up and freeze, maybe become tongue tied, maybe go over the top with excitement … who knows. Thankfully we have public speaking genes in the family… my father was an excellent orator. I felt, when I stood up, this coming out but it was outside my “comfortable” self. To begin with I was watching my own speaking just to see what was going to happen. Of course this over loads the brain because we also need to pay attention to what we have got to say, and we also need to pay attention to the audience. All sorts of feed-backs begin up and it become a processing nightmare.

The information overload caused a whiteout in my consciousness. I remember one person here-hereing to my mention of ethical awareness and raised to look at them but nothing appeared to say and continued the speech. This was the moment I guess I had full attention of the audience. I was programmed to make eye contact but in reality the cost of misreading the script was too great so I was forced to read large sections of it. The best I could do was hold it far away from me and up so that at least I was in a posture that was addressing the audience. Fact was with a brain overload it is hard enough to read let alone accurately remember what is coming next.

I remember looking over to the groom to check this were ok and he was laughing a lot. Good. I remember the rising of laughter in particular places also and in ever case in contradiction to what I expected. The “just bad at walking” worked extremely well while other bits were not as successful as expected. I will liaise with my sister again and examine exactly what was funny and why – worth knowing. I know comedians work their material with reference to audience response so it is evidently hard to predict.

But now the point of this blog entry. Who was giving the speech?

My usual secure consciousness was shattered. Vast amounts of the “performance” were entirely subconscious and I have no idea at all how it went – only feedback from other people. The groom said “side splittingly funny” I have only his word for that, I really have no idea within my own brain.

It all reminds me of a Zen story once told. Usual format of an inquisitive monk insistent to his master that he wants to know his true self. The master eventually sends him away from the monastery. As he walks away the master calls him by name and the monk instinctively turns around. The master says to him “that is your true self”.

The point I’m seeing more clearly now after the speech is that we hold SO strongly onto an “image” of our self. This then creates the concept of a “comfort zone” where that image is secure.

Something like that speech which is extraordinary in my normal world and which more importantly has a very high level of “objectivity” to it – there were 70 witnesses – forces one to abandon the hold on that secure image. It simply cannot apply to such a rare occasion. We find our self “flying by the seat of our pants”, making it up as we go along – i don’t mean we make the speech up as we go along that is all extremely well prepared even down to expressions and timing, i mean our “performance” in that single event and moment has to be made up as we go along. This is true all the time, but it never shatters the consciousness normally because we are really holding onto an image of our self and not experiencing our “true self”.

“My Muse” was interesting because with her I had objectivity and so awareness of the moment in a way that I had lost after she was gone.

I was rethinking Heideggar’s position last night. The Light of Being shines upon itself to illuminate the beings of the world and in so doing it hides the Being that is the source of all. His separation of Being and beings is key – the ontological and the ontic. The world can take any variety of shapes and forms. Saturday was a wedding, today I am sitting on a train. Things have changed. What hasn’t changed however is that there is a world, or there are phenomena and experiences. Some call this being Alive – but sadly being alive has been hijacked by biologists to refer to biological processes. Biological processes ignore the ontological aspect of being Alive – being Alive becomes a mechanism and from SRH, mechanisms can’t explain the idea of Mechanism so we divorce ourselves from any relationship with True Reality (in the sense of it being a Whole Undivided Thing rather than just disconnected events).

Speaking to that crowd marginalised the notion I have of “myself” – “I” became an ontic creation of something else which carried the day mysteriously and without showing or knowing itself. For all my talking in this blog this was the closest experience and evidence I have had for a long time of what I am trying to talk about.