If you think of yourself as being only one person, you are missing the entire broader perspective on how your life is.
How Most People Think Of Themselves
If you ask a regular person how many people they think they, they are likely to tell you they are one person.
At the face of it, it seems as though that is the only answer possible.
Each one of us is the singular 'I' and that's it.
This cannot be further from the truth.
It may even be one of the biggest causes of suffering in the world at the moment.
People's misunderstanding of their own nature.
To be precise, their misunderstanding the nature of their own mental being and state.
The Architecture Of Human Mind
First of all let's make some distinctions before we delve deeper into the core of this subject.
We can talk about the mind in two senses.
The Soul Self
Mind with the capital M, which is the soul.
Mind with the capital M is pure, truthful, honest, clean and real.
This is your true self.
The never ending, omnipotent love.
God, in essence.
This is the first and true kind of Mind we have.
This is what most people strive towards being able to Be at all times.
It is the individuated self.
One that does not need to pretend to be anything else.
No masks, no story as such, no need to defend oneself, no need for anything for that matter.
The Conscious Self
This is the place which majority of people think within.
Whatever they are aware of, they believe is all there is to life.
They start thinking that 'they are what they think'.
In fact, Descartes said 'I think, therefore I am', which cannot be further from greater truth.
But most people think this way in day to day life.
Our conscious self is subject to our level of awareness.
If we are at a low level of awareness, our conscious self will be very small and incapable of achieving much in life.
The conscious mind in most people 'resides' at a very low level.
This is how the notion of ego arises.
We feel a compulsion to defend what we know, as we don't want to be wrong.
The mind wants to defend itself and be right all the time.
At the same time it gets often confused by misalignment with the subconscious mind.
And the incongruence with the soul self.
The Subconscious Self
This self is there all the time and working all the time without us being aware of it.
It is full of shadows, trauma and gets driven by emotions, which arise based on circumstances.
Most of the capitalist system grows from selling products targeted at our subconscious selves.
Majority of our actions originate in our subconscious mind.
The rational mind then post-rationalises decisions which the subconscious made on our behalf.
We could say at this point that the truth here is 'I don't think, there I am'.
The reason why wise people work on raising their levels of awareness is to turn the subconscious into conscious.
This is the true nature of raising one's awareness and become awake.
The Avatar Self
Here's where things get more complicated and even harder to digest.
The modern world of social media has given us another dimension of existence.
Digital dimension.
We exist in virtual reality increasingly more than anywhere else.
Displacement of our being is in full swing.
We are 'porting' ourselves to the digital realm at a very fast pace.
A pace which is increasing.
We are in a state of constant attachment to our avatar self now.
It's not quite the ego, not quite the soul, not quite the subconscious.
The avatar can be something yet very different.
It's our 'fantasy self' in a sense.
A pick and mix of things that are real, imaginary, traumas, memories, ego trips and pure fantasy.
This avatar self is the thing that is confusing the world at large the most.
As humans, we are almost completely unaware to what extent we are doing the right or wrong thing with our avatars.
We cannot project the long term impact of what we are putting out there.
It's been a discussion in social media realm since it all kicked off over a decade ago now.
But nowadays it is more important than ever before.
Why?
Because other people find it hard to 'work out' what our avatar self tells about our real self.
Dissonance between these leads to much pain, suffering, trauma, disagreement and confusion.
First off between our own 4 selves and then with other people's 4 selves.
Healing The World
The work we do in raising our own awareness is the most important work we can do.
Why?
Because it leads us towards an opportunity of achieving total self congruence.
Aligning all our four selves into one, unified form of self.
Where we never have to 'skirt around issues'.
Where we never have to lie and manipulate.
Where we can Be who we truly Are, all the time and in all forms and media of life.
There is no need for fantasy in life, as life is a fantasy already.
The ultimate state of Being we are all living towards is to Be living our own fantasy at all times.
That state of Being, my dear reader, is available to your right this moment.
after reading your post, i think i will just stick to one, myself =)
This is really good if you can achieve that. Have you done much of the self realisation work to know who the real you actually is? If so, what is your conclusion? Can you answer that question here perhaps? https://steemit.com/life/@letsgetintegral/who-are-you