Jack’s notes for this week included a very paradoxical claim: “the self itself is a story told by the self.”\u00c2\u00a0 My own self protests: surely everything has a cause outside of itself.”\u00c2\u00a0 And the example given, a few sentences later, in Jack’s notes–of a character in a novel–doesn’t resolve this issue.\u00c2\u00a0 Even in a first person narrative (where the “I” character tells the entire story of the novel), there is still an author outside the world of the novel who is composing it all.\u00c2\u00a0 So the idea of a self telling its own story, of being its own story, begs for another entity outside of the story that is being composed.\u00c2\u00a0 Who or what could that be?\u00c2\u00a0 If the self were really its own creation, who could communicate with it,\u00c2\u00a0 possibly “liberate” it (as in “The Four Noble Truths”, where the fact that suffering has a “cause” is held to be crucial to the possibility of liberation from that suffering)?\u00c2\u00a0 Doesn’t the self also need a cause, if there is to be any hope of transforming it?\u00c2\u00a0 –Michael<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jack’s notes for this week included a very paradoxical claim: “the self itself is a story told by the self.”\u00c2\u00a0 My own self protests: surely everything has a cause outside of itself.”\u00c2\u00a0 And the example given, a few sentences later, … Continue reading