Research on self, truth, being, and perception 

Self-Inquiry

There is a Zulu phrase, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which means ‘A person is a person through other persons.’

“The self is a problem that thought cannot resolve.”  — Krishnamurti

What happened to her? Nothing and everything. It hits her once in a while. Michael Apted, 1994

If we are constantly performing the self to the ubiquitous and persistent audiences that social media platforms provide, then interiority is no longer central to selfhood and no longer assumed in the same way. Instead, our performances establish ourselves for others, and how those performances are received conveys a sense of selfhood back to us.

I think to get to the point where I can understand that I've changed, I have to dissociate from any past version of myself first — Jonny Sun

“Sometimes your belief system is really your fears attached to rules.” ― Shannon L. Alder

James Fenton captures some of them in his poem “The Ideal”:  A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respect What he has been.  This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal. This is hard.

Each assemblage of details is like a fingerprint. Some of us have had the same prints throughout our lives; others have had a few sets.

Taiye Selasi: Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm a local | TED

"I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then."

Finding yourself is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering of who you were before the world got its hands on you.” Emily McDowell

🤷‍♀️ — Are.na

“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”  source: Barry H. Gillespie

Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend. Bakhtin believed that it was only through an encounter with another person that you could come to appreciate your own unique perspective and see yourself as a whole entity. By ‘looking through the screen of the other’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘I vivify my exterior.’ Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished – it is an open book.

Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.