Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Essence is fluttering
https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-be-yoursel...m-zhuangzi

As Zhuangzi saw, there is no immutably true self. Instead, our identity is as dynamic and alive as a butterfly in flight...

---

A prominent Buddhist scholar’s quest to unify East and West (book review)
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-seeke...he-sought/

EXCERPT: Batchelor focuses primarily on two masters of awakening: Gotama and Socrates. As chance would have it, they were contemporaries, even if they lived worlds apart. For all the cultural differences between fifth-century BCE India and Greece, however, Batchelor identifies a series of compelling parallels, from the merely anecdotical to the more substantive, which makes his book the delight of any comparatist of cultures. His narrative shuttles nimbly between the two figures, between East and West, the Indian world and the Greek one, in a compulsively readable way. Batchelor is not only a seasoned practitioner of Buddhism, and a great scholar of it, but a gifted storyteller to boot. (MORE - details)

Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times by Stephen Batchelor; Yale University Press, 352 pp., $28

I have always suspected a sort of trap behind the cliche admonitions to just "be yourself" made by famous authors and poets. It has never been easy in my own experience to be a self, whether it was the one I was raised to be or the one that opposes that and is somehow innate to me. While being a self undoubtedly serves a useful purpose in life, allowing us to adapt to and function in social situations, "selving" in itself always seemed something I was merely performing. A provisional role I was playing for a particular purpose and situation.

But even the supposedly TRUE self I was, doing what I really want and not guiding my actions by others' perceptions of me, just seemed another level of the same game. BE this kind of person that you just innately are, and everything will work out. But it never did. The best moments of my life in fact were when I was not identifying as any self at all, not even the subversive non-conformist that I love so much, but just BEING what is happening to me. A fluid and mercurial state that morphs and flows like experience itself. This is in fact my concept of Being, as the ever appearing/disappearing of whatever arises in our immediate experience. It is the difference between identity and simply being. It turns out that being nothing at all, for all the uncertainty and angst it may inflict upon us, is closer to Being itself than being something in particular. As Sartre puts it: "Man is free because he is not himself but presence to himself."