A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it's not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that's very intriguing.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.
What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.
Self-consciousness is really a form of egotism.
Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.
Having a self, even a simple self, allows you to look into the world and put a mark over what is more important and less important. It's a way of classifying the world in terms of your own needs.
I think there are certain ways that people are always themselves, but I do think people change.
I've always been fascinated with knowing the self. This fascination led me to submerge myself in art, study neuroscience, and later to become a psychotherapist.
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
No opposing quotes found.