Self-Image Function

I’ve been travelling here and there, going to various places in the city of Sydney, loaded up with a general-purpose shoulder-bag, an iPhone, an Eee; and my backpack with clothes and sundries. It’s been days since I’ve been home, in the mountains west of here. All the morning, I’ve been taking care of my ‘presence,’ and in particular I’ve been practicing tracking how the self-image works, at Jack’s suggestion. During the process I’ve been asking a question that is not unfamiliar to me: “Does the self-image have some healthy use?” It hasn’t been hard to see the self-representations which are associated with ‘fixations,’ but I haven’t signed off on investigations into a positive function.

Then, I finish my business here and, at last, I get on a country train bound for my home, a few hours away. As I seat myself, I suddenly realise that I don’t have my backpack. I quickly jump off the train. So, now I’ve disembarked and I’m on the platform, and I notice some sorrow, a little panic, some grief, and a little self-criticism. I think of one or two personal things in the backpack that I would prefer not to lose.

However, I notice my mind’s condition, and I note the operation of my self-image in my reactivity. I soften my belly, come to my breath, and immediately a luminous presence arises in me. Very cooling. My whole organism settles. And this space (apart from giving me much more choice as to my next move) showed me something about the functioning of self-image in me.

It went like this: I took my memory back to places I had been in the last hour. Some of those memories revealed a bodily-felt memory of ‘physical lightness.’ That is, with the visual memories came a bodily-felt memory of: entering a certain shop; of going down a flight of stairs; of crossing the rainy, city street; of interacting with the bank teller; of sitting for a few minutes on a connecting suburban train. In each case, my body here and now, told me that I was unburdened ‘back there then’.

This wasn’t a self-image – but it gave me the basis for a self-image that I could then logically use (aided by visual memory) to imagine my movements in the last hour, and to track where the ‘burden’ of the backpack was last experienced, and where the last visual memory of the pack was imprinted, and where the bodily feel  of putting it down was last experienced.

Using the ‘self-image’ I had the logical place where it was probably last with me. I quickly caught another suburban train back there, and sure enough, I was able to reclaim it from the cafe where I had left it.

Voila! – I had, in this, an instance that answered my earlier TSK question. In this process I used ‘self-image,’ rather vice-versa. Rather than being at its beck and call (which is the case when it is narcissistically organised), I was able to problem-solve using the self-image. This leads me to think that self-image is a product and tool of logical thinking, one that has become out of control and elaborated unnecessarily, under the influence of identification.