Love the Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching! One of humankind's masterpieces.
Is it even possible to get to know your true self?
I suppose you could say that you get to know yourself more and more each day.
And what you find is the person you thought you knew yesterday has actually changed a bit more. If you ever knew yourself fully one day, and next day it was still the same person, and the next day too, and the next year ... what then?
Another way to see it is that only when we are breathing our last breath will we have been all that we were in that life and be able to say, "now I am fully me. Bye". Once the fruit is ripe, it starts decomposing.
The true self is like the idea that there's a "purpose for my life I have to discover". On one level, it's a sincere impetus to better oneself, but there's a self-trickery that goes on when we think that there is someone, a me that's already there, pre-existing, in the past - that we will discover some time in the hopefully not too distant future. But what was then is not now.
If it is a blue print of me I want to know - well, yes, it's like living in a building but wanting to see the architectural plans that gave rise to it. Helpful in some ways but in the end, it's what "is" that matters, what was "actualised" according to quality of materials, tradesmen, budget at the time, climate etc etc more than what was "proposed" .
(Leaving aside the distraction of Karma) - My "abstract" blueprint might be my DNA and cultural environment etc, my potential talent, my parenting, my neighbourhood, education, and other factors will all affect how my "blueprint" potentials turn out. A woman with an inquiring mind born into a riverside jungle village in 11th century Congo will become a different person to the woman of inquiring mind born in 21st century New York.
Our crowded, urban societies demand both larger and smaller loyalties and so we've a malleable and complex sense of who we are (maybe why the question arises more), more so than an indigenous tribesman who is part of a small remote clan that barely survives, living as a unit tuning into the land and the climate and animal behaviour.
Sure, there is a constant that I can call "myself" - it's a thread that runs through all my changes, a consciousness that allows me to function and survive and prosper. Is my true "self" what I was when i was young and innocent, before the aggregation of experiences? Or, is my true self found after I've aged and been changed by experiences, am I now "Self Plus"?
Getting a bit more scientific and philosophical, if someone has Alzheimer's, so has practically no memory of their past or of their relations, they still
are what they
are, in that state, they've become different to what they
were. They feel their feelings, desires and emotions in that moment but, without memory, cannot "compare" them with what they previously felt or desired etc. They may become completely uninhibited or really intolerant of things that never bothered them, opposite to how they once were.
What I am
capable of in any circumstance is part of to what/who I am, it affects it.
If I lose an arm, I might say "I am still me" but I am different to some extent, depending on how the arm influenced me. If I am right handed and lose my right arm, it will affect me differently to my loss of my left arm.
If I was a cello player, losing either arm is going to make me live a different life to what i would have otherwise, so I will become a different person.We cannot say it has no effect on who we are.
A tiny woman who is kind, meek, mild and would not hurt a fly is capable of extreme violence if her infant is seriously threatened - this not based on anything she "knows" about herself. When her "rising to the occasion" happens, is that called her lower self or her higher self? The terms are interchangeable. Doing what's necessary seems "superior" to me.
Who/what I am
not will essentially determine who/what I am - and what I think I am.
If I can no longer conceive of others, like we find in extreme autism, or feel no empathy, like extreme sociopaths, then who "I am" has changed. So much of it is based on what I can "know" and see defined by certain values.
(It's the same old riddle, only starts from the middle)
If we take the idea that "I" extend as far as the point of contact of my senses - if I
am the taster, but I am
not what is tasted, nor am I the [act of] tasting, these are distinct. What is written is different to the act of writing, is different to the writer. Or as per the old riddle -"can an eye see itself", similarly, can the known be the knower? Hence Carl Jung's infatuation with the Undiscovered Self and the perpetual act of individuation (becoming oneself - a never ending task).
Do I "improve" with age and become a better person, more "myself" over time - or do I get stuck, and become a stereotype of who I was, inflexible, a caricature?
Again the trap is thinking things like Self and Purpose are somehow fixed and constant, just there out of sight and out of reach, some grand master plan that was 'flashed" but we've somehow blinked and missed ...
There is no grand master task, purpose or self to be realised. Like breathing, eating, brushing teeth, there's just a lot of little ones to be done, taken pride in for a short time then let go of. No living on past glories. We just do them again, each in their own way, each on their own day, and each time I am different and I become different.