Psychology of The Self

Psychology of The Self

by

Ram Bansal

Copyright Ram Bansal 2015

Published at Smashwords

Contents

Preface : What is 'Psychology of The Self'

Section A - Meaning of The Self

Section B - Human Personality Traits

Section C - The Base of Attitude

Section D - Impression and Expression

Section E - Emotional Craving of Relationships

Section F - The World of Health

Section G - The Asset of Capability

Section H - Work and Economy

Section I - Characteristics of Human Life

Section J - Humane Conduct

Section K - Power of Thoughts

Section L - Innovation and Creativity

Section M - Reforms you may Need

Section N - The Ultimate Goal of Happiness

About the Author

Preface

What is 'Psychology of The Self'

The Self of a person is neither his/her body nor his/her mind, neither his/her physical health nor his/her mental health, neither his/her intrinsic characteristics nor his/her extrinsic conduct, but a sum total of all such things forcing him/her to think and lead his/her life maintaining his/her social relationships. Thus, 'The self' is the overall constitution of the person under consideration. It is even more individualistic than the person appears to be for the external world for each of the constituents of the self is individualistic too. If we want to pinpoint one thing that is the closest to the self is the individuality of the person that isolates him/her from all others yet makes him/her part of the society and environment surrounding him/her.

Psychology is the study of a human-being the way he/she thinks and relates him/herself with the external world through his/her speech and actions. Thinking of a person is most often different from his/her conduct, but still depending on it. This proves that the person intentionally creates this difference between this thoughts, words and actions. The psychology takes care of this fact of human life and incorporates in itself reasons of this differentiation.

This makes 'Psychology of the Self' a study of the wholesomeness of a person, leaving nothing to be discovered, to be developed, or to be deployed. Hence the study has to be vast, exhaustive and detailed and go through the minutest information on the person. This is possible only when an individual is specifically studied. Therefore, the eBook 'Psychology of The self' doesn't deal with the specific information of any individual but paves way for reaching that information when the concepts provided in the volume are applied to a specific individual.

Such a vast study can't be carried out or written about in specific timeframe but goes on for a long period with new frontiers coming to light. The Author had been working on this project for 14 years and writing articles every now-and-then. The eBook is the collection of such articles of the Author written by him on the subject.

An individual being the basic unit of humanity, transformation of the World to a better place depends on transformation of individuals which is a psychological exercise. Secondly, succeeding being desire of each of us, each one need to be better than others. For fulfilling these conditions, understanding the 'Self' by every individual is the first step followed by its further development and then deployment to the world. All these matters are discussed through articles here in 105 articles spread in 14 sections written over a period of 14 years.

Section A - Meaning of the Self

In this Section, we would be studying -

A1. Journey of Self-discovery, A2. Know and Be Yourself, A3. Know Your External World, A4. Be Self-compassionate, A5. Differentiating between the Self and the Role, A6. Actualize your Self to be Real You, A7. Be Owner of the Self, A8. Live by Yourself

A1. Journey of Self-discovery

The first thing one must realize before starting a discovery of the self is that you can't know yourself through your own sensory organs directly, as these are directed outwards to know things external to you. You can know yourself through reflection of your image in sensory organs of others close to you. Hence, be receptive of others close to you provided they are unbiased and free from their own vested interests in making their judgments. Indeed a tall order, since you hardly find good unbiased persons so easily.

Since, we can't know ourselves through our sensory organs, is there a way to know one-self without involving others? Yes, it is your mind, which is always directed inwards and keeps on working for you incessantly in its conscious and subconscious states. The problem with knowing through mind is that its major functions are performed in its sub-conscious state and you often don't realize what is being done or the plans to do next.

Knowing involves consciousness which is always limited by the preoccupations and doing only one thing at a time. Conscious state of the mind means its reference of a matter to the brain. Therefore, it is the brain which may lead you on the path of self-discovery. The brain is also the seat of intellect carrying experiential information in memory and faculty for logical thinking. Through this intellect, the brain distinguishes right from wrong and it lets the person know his/her shortcomings too apart from his/her plus points.

Knowing the reality of the self is needed for its expression and application to one's life. For this, the brain has to take support of the mind which commands all the sensory and action organs to make expressions to the external world. The mind has wisdom also which works for the benefits of the self irrespective of right and wrong. So, on getting information about the self from the brain, the mind hides in expressions that is wrong with the self and presents only good things to the external world. These expressions about the self, thus, bias perceptions of the self and others about the self. This is the greatest stumbling block of discovering the self. 

Why does the mind block limitations of the self from others? It is because every one of us wants to succeed in the external world in multifarious associations with the world. For this the brain tries to make a good impression of the person on others through its expressions. Therefore, it is ultimately the person's will to succeed through making good impression on others.

Therefore, for self-discovery we need to create a mindset to meet one of the following four conditions -

Stop worrying to succeed, or

Be confident of succeeding on our own merits, or

Stop bothering about making good impression on others, or

Be perfect as far as possible in our character and conduct to have a good impression on others without hiding anything bad or projecting anything good about the self

Out of these four paths, the ideal and practicable path for anyone to pursue is the fourth one which would be beneficial for the whole humanity. Until all humans pursue this path, those on it would be the real super-humans of the world.

A2. Know and Be Yourself

Everyone needs to be loved by someone for feeling good intrinsically. But remember that only those persons are loved by others who love themselves and take adequate care of their health, happiness and humanistic traits, like a smile begets a smile. So, before you expect to be loved, love yourself enough.    

Identify Yourself

Often a person is identified by his/her profession. This may go wrong because adopting a profession may be a circumstantial compulsion. For a check, ask yourself, are you doing what you love to do, if not, look into your hobbies and pastimes for what you really are professionally. Even if you are unable to change your profession, identify yourself with what you really love to do, and make it as your focal point. Once you have identified yourself with a profession, you will gradually move closer to it and adopt it.

Personality Mixes

As aforesaid, individuality of a person is influenced by the ratio of the three elements discussed above, and it is dependent of personal preferences of the person given to the three elements. There are wrestlers and body-builders whose priority goes to body resulting into a physical strength with low levels of intellectual sensibility and emotional sensitivity. There are philosophers and highly creative persons, who have high intellectual sensibilities with low emotional sensitivity and often a frail body. And thirdly, there are highly sentimental persons with low levels of intellectual sensibility and physical strength.

As said in the opening paragraph of this study, each of the three components, physical strength, emotional sensitivity and intellectual sensibility, could be as high as 67% with the other two remaining components at minimum level of 17% each. However, the right mix remains to be 33% share of each component in a person’s constitution. The deviations from this balanced situation amounts to weakness of the person.

Appraise your own Personality

Here is a proposition on how to appraise your own personality through finding the weakness. For this, rate your personality components with deviation of each from the balanced mark of 33%. Sum of the absolute values of deviation percentages is measure of your total weakness in the personality.

For example, for a particular person, his/her personality mix may be appraised as follows –

Thus, the person has a weakness of 33% in his/her personality with the greatest weakness of his/her being highly sensitive emotionally. His/her second weak point is lack of physical strength and on the third front of intellectual sensibility, the person is marginally deviated towards a weakness.

Update your Characteristics

Your conduct is generally guided by what you consider your characteristics. In your childhood, some labels are put on you by others and these may be sticking to you affecting your conduct today even if you are grown up with new characteristics. Shake off your old labels and understand what your characteristics are and conduct yourself accordingly. In my childhood, I was very weak and sick. Though good at my studies, I was unable to face any adverse physical situation. As I crossed over my schooling, my health improved making me a tall healthy young man. It took years for me to understand my physical well-being and readiness to face the physical challenges. After understanding my real self, I have travelled on tough terrains with confidence and fearless, enjoyed extreme climatic conditions of rains, heats and colds with boldness, making myself stronger and adaptable to any challenging circumstances. Until her last breathes, my mother never realized my new strengths and was always worried for my bad health.

Like the old outdated negative traits, outdated positive traits of youthful days keep on sticking to the person even in old-age, leading him/her to misadventures.

Recognize the Aging Process

Aging is surely a positive aspect of life for higher experience and exposure in old age than those of youthfulness. This must change the person’s conduct from being a doer to being a guide to younger generations. Physically strenuous activities must taper off gradually to give place to intellectual activities, thus making life more and more refined as one advances in age.

Beauty all around makes a person healthy and happy. Beautiful faces enriching boyhood and youthful days may not be present in old age in their earlier roles, but if you treat them lovingly as your children and grand children, they are always there to make you feel healthy and happy through enriching your environment. At my age of over six decades, most of the girls and boys of my locality prefer to play jokes with me, share their secrets with me frankly and fairly as if they are my friends though I treat them like my children and grand children. Their company keeps me healthy and happy.

Conduct Yourself Rightly, Rightfully

After having your true identity, update of characteristics and natural developments, conduct yourself accordingly forgetting what has been the perception of yours and others about you in the past. This conduct is your true recognition and love for yourself providing you with a new real self-confidence and self-esteem.

Be Yourself

For anybody in the world, nobody is more important than the self and the most important thing need be loved truly. For loving yourself, you have be yourself in full. Being yourself is no simple task because circumstances force us to pose as something else and so, we need to confront such adverse circumstances to be true ourselves. Circumstances are combinations of many individual factors, so to overcome multiple circumstantial hindrances, it is easy to eliminate the factors individually. Let us count these factors here.

Society

Society, aiming at cooperation, wants everyone to be a conformist to avoid confrontations. But being oneself needs one to be an individualist irrespective of a social thrust for being just the opposite. Humans are called to be social animals. Even this hypothesis forces one to be a conformist. An individualist always goes by his/her own convictions without bothering for being a social animal, so he/she is often a misfit in society.

This provides one for choosing between society and the self. If he/she wants to love himself/herself, he/she must e prepared to be an outcast in the society. This can be done in two ways - with and without self-confidence. If you do it with self-confidence, you are going to be an extra-ordinary person, and if you do the opposite way, you are going to be treated as an abnormal person.

Pioneers of society are made out of those who keep their self-confidence in going by their own convictions and respect their individualities. So, be a pioneer and without any fear of being outcast in the society be yourself and love yourself.

Short-term Benefits

Most of us have to work for benefits to earn our livelihoods and luxuries. It often happens that one seems to lose if he/she goes by his/her personal conviction irrespective of social norms. But this loss is of short-term and is paid back as self-esteem. Remember, essential needs can always be met through honest means, but luxuries, which have no limit, can always be sacrificed for self-esteem through going by one's own convictions.

So in this case also, one need not bother about some material benefits at the cost of going by personal convictions, and so being oneself and loving oneself is always beneficial.

Fear Within

A person can overcome huge hurdles but overcoming a fear within is the most difficult. Whenever you are going ahead with something unusual, you are confronted with a big question mark - what will people say? And this fear prevents you from being yourself and loving yourself. It is not a fear of the society but from within. It often happens that you anticipate a lot of bad reactions, but when you do it, nobody takes notice of it, making your fear baseless. So, don't have any fear and go by your own convictions howsoever unusual these may be. Be confident that ultimately people will accept and appreciate what you are going to do.

You are not born out of society and for the society, but the society is made of persons like you. It is not to buck you down you but a tool to boost you up. Lastly, remember that pioneers are extra-ordinary persons, are rare and they are there to lead the crowds. For this they have to move lonely.

A3. Know Your External World

Every individual has to deal with two worlds of his/her - one internal or the self, and the other external including everything except the self. Although, the self seems to be too small as compared to the rest of the world, its importance to the person him/herself is no less than the whole external world. To make one's life meaningful, he/she must deal with both the worlds successfully.

Here my purpose is to discuss one's dealings with the external world. The external world of a person has three aspects - Nature, People and Wealth, and the person is required to deal with each of these equitably.

The Nature

Each individual is an organic component of the Cosmos. Since, we still know very little about our Cosmos, we remain concerned only with what comes in our direct contact in routine ways - such as the Sun, Moon, Earth, Air, Water, Space, Fire, Time, Matter etc., to which we have given a common name 'Nature'. Since, we all species of life are produce of Nature, it is the most basic thing we deal with day and night. From ecological point of view, we know this Nature by another name environment. Needless to say that our lives are dependent on our respective environments which we are obliged not to destroy by our omissions and commissions.

Study of Nature and its various objects is carried out under physical sciences - principally Physics and Chemistry, which we have developed quite a bit in the last 300 years or so. To know our Nature and deal with it in a right way, we need not be a scientist but having a scientific temper is desirable which expects us to think logically. Our knowing what damages the environment and restraining ourselves from doing that is the call of the logic.

Nature is too big a thing to be tamed by even combined efforts of the whole humanity, we can only keep on investigating and knowing it more and more gradually, and aligning our lifestyles accordingly with a spirit of coexistence with Nature. Any humanity-Nature confrontation proves disastrous to life on the planet. The most important fact about dealing with the Nature is that we keep cleanliness all around us, produce no waste that is not biodegradable and try to recycle materials from one usage to another, from one person to another.

The People

Dealing with people is often called developing and sustaining inter-personnel relationships to have harmony in the society. This subject is studied under social sciences such as Psychology, Politics, Sociology, Civics, etc. Since humans, once upon a time long back in the history, decided to organize themselves socially with a spirit of mutual cooperation and we have been following that tradition, let us not only continue it but keep on developing it using all our faculties including our wisdom and intellect.

Communication is key to relationships for which we have developed languages, gadgets, media, etc and no more depend on body language only as many species of life on earth do. Through these developments, we can convey our exact feelings to others overriding even time and space barriers. Books written thousands of years back are messages to us from our ancient ancestors. Through telephony, we are able to communicate globally and instantly. Internet has the potential of making the whole humanity to live in a virtual village where intermingling is so easy. We only need to restrain ourselves not to misuse these great facilities of communication.

Since historical times, there have been two distinct classes of people on earth - developers and exploiters. These two channels of humanity have been developing themselves in their own ways. As a result, there has been a great progress in every field of human life on one side, on the other side, ways and means of exploitation have also become quite advanced. Thus, human progress is coupled with painful exploitation of a great majority of humanity by a minority with evil minds. These exercises begin at individual levels and get exploded to global levels gradually. International conflicts, revolutions, terrorism, etc. are some ways and outcomes of such exploitative tendencies.

What an individual can best do in the prevailing situation is to improve his/her relationships with his/her fellow humans in an empathetic way with having virtues of patience and alertness while saving him/herself from exploitation by the evil minds.

Wealth

Human life is essentially a phenomenon of continuous needs - foods, clothing, shelter, good health, education, protection against exploitation, etc., to name some basics of life. All these needs money and that must be acquired by each of us for survival and happiness. Acquisition of money has two ways again - productive or creative work and exploitation, both being quite prominent in our world. Therefore for any individual, mere earning money is not enough, he/she must protect it too from getting taken away by others.

The most cunning way of getting others hard-earned money is through power of more money than that being earned by the prospective victim. This is called capitalism quite widely in practice in the today's world. Advertisement and publicity through communication media are glaring examples of capitalistic exploitation. Every evening, every individual sitting before his/her television set for entertainment after the day's hard work is flooded with brain-washing commercial advertisements overshadowing his/her genuine need of an entertainment.

Protection of a citizen's right from exploitation is the responsibility of political leadership and administration of the country through a policy framework. But these two groups have become the most dominant exploiters of the common people particularly in poor and thickly populated countries like India.

Morality needed to be at the core of every economic activity has been put to rest by policy makers and those responsible for its implementation, thus, encouraging every citizen to be an exploiter by him/herself of somebody weaker than him/herself. The chain reaction continues until the poorest in the society.

A4. Be Self-compassionate

Compassion is one of the most valued human traits and this charity begins with the self, else with none. Compassion is being passionate for likeness for others which means you do to others passionately what you would like to be done for you by others.' Treat others like yourself' is the golden rule of humanism.

When it comes to self-compassion, it is about treating the self well to be comfortable and relaxed and free from stresses or, in other words, making the self happy by doing what one loves to do. This, in turn, means that one loves what he/she does. And this is how one's best performance comes out. Therefore, self-compassion is not losing the performance edge but sharpening it by doing everything happily, and facing the results, even failures, with equal happiness.

Failures and successes are circumstantial to one's mindset. A failure under one set of circumstances may be a success in others. After coming out of the University on completion of my Engineering education, I was called for an interview by the State Electricity Board. I attended the interview for an experience but with the aim of failing because I didn't like the job for its being the most corrupt. I succeeded by failing and soon got another job of my choice.

A person who is not self-compassionate punishes him/herself by worrying about the failure and putting him/herself under stresses. A self-compassionate person takes failures as ripples of life stream as he/she takes successes. Therefore, an important part of being self-passionate is not repenting for whatever is done or happened but look forward how to sail ahead into the future through the present.

A self-compassionate person lives in now-ness, using the past just for learning new lessons and adding them to experiences, and making his/her future through inching ahead in the present. Thus, his/her future is what he/she makes his/her present time in life. An approach with self-compassion makes every day a happy day.

Being in now-ness doesn't mean that he/she has no plan for the future. There are plans but not for seeking happiness through earning wealth or comforts of life but through seeking happiness directly today and also in future. I have a plan to go to a foreign land after two months and my passport is held up for the last six months in bureaucratic corruption. Some friends suggest that i manage the passport through paying a bribe to the officials concerned which won't make me happy for the sacrifice of my lifelong principles. So, I would like to struggle, wait and see. At the worst, I would be getting the passport through instant service by paying a higher fee, or cancel my visit to remain happy as I had been so far without visiting any foreign land. My approach in such cases is that nothing external is essential for attaining happiness but the mindset of the self. This is my self-compassion.

Self-esteem is not opposed to self-compassion as many thinkers like to preach, but a part and parcel of it when viewed in its wholeness. If someone is able to protect his/her self-esteem, it amounts to his/her being self-compassionate. Only a person with self-esteem can be careful about mutual-respect and that amounts to compassion for others.

A5. Differentiating between the Self and the Role

Each individual has his/her own value system, he want to stick to in his/her dealings with others. Similarly, each other person in the deal too, has his/her own value system to stick to. Since these value systems are highly individualistic, these differ with each other, hence, may cause conflicts between individuals in the dealing.