I've been reflecting alot on meditations of the self. Growth and development of the self, the pursuit of truth and the nature of true happiness - what drives actions, what it is that people spend their lives seeking; motivations for the impulse of direction and the defining points of life for the individual. This type of reflection is always critical but I think now, this moment between what we know as youth and what is projected as adulthood is the only time where we will be able to reflect at the precipice of our future(s), before or as we jump into the river of everything and thus now is particularly critical. We - both this group of friends and the broader family or tribe if you will of friends from home as well as the peers of our generation - have so much to consider. The concept of control for example, I don't think we can ultimately decide who it is we want to be, or what our "self" will culminate to be, we can only craft or mold ourselves by constructing or fitting external factors to model what it is we aspire to be. By creating and manipulating an ideal environment for a particular kind of growth into existence. This holds only of course if you don't adhere to a belief of preordained identity. (This is part in particular is definitely up for discussion)
I got through the better half of Siddartha for the first time today and have been doing assigned Anicent Legacy of Greece class readings of Boethius's The Consultation of Philosophy. Siddartha's awakening when he realizes after all of his teachings as a Brahman, as an ascetic, as a brief student of Gotama that he has only really been deceiving and taking flight from him/(his)self is when he realizes he knows nothing. He has lost himself in learning and realizes that looking to external sources to understand the internal is mislead.
Socrates also made it the goal of his life to understand and held the seeking of this understanding of the self above learning anything else. Because why would one bypass the change to perceive the epitome of one's being to study the external? To him, this contradicted reason and this is why Socrates is always accredited with incessantly questioning those around him and provoking thought. In the end, he was executed for it. I don't think he found what he was looking for in the external before he was killed though and maybe he never would have.*
This seeking of truth and understanding in the external is also explored in Boethius's text. Boethius is a philosopher who becomes a wealthy politician and hopes to bring his conclusions about philosophy to higher office. Eventually he is persecuted and brought down by his political enemies. Prior to being executed he spends a short time in jail where he falls into depression. He then has a vision of his "nurse" Philosophy appearing and speaking to him. The dialogue that follows is how Boethius is healed and brought to enlightenment by Philosophy before he is executed. Among many motifs explored in the dialogue is true happiness. Before Boethius's downfall he was wealthy and Fortune was on his side and he believed himself to be truly happy. But what Philosophy imparts on the despairing philosopher is that if wealth, etc. can be lost it can never truly be had and thus, all the external things man seeks - wealth, fame, power, pleasure, love, possessions - are only false roads to true happiness. True happiness being defined as a state of perfect self sufficiency, lacking nothing. So based on the Bothetian logic for true happiness to be had it must come from a place internally where nothing can be lost or taken away.
I think subconsciously this is similar to what Siddartha realizes in terms of how he must learn from himself and be his own pupil to solve the riddle of himself. I'm still working through all these concepts and forgive me if this first post is unorganized or lacking in genuine conclusions but I feel like a lot of literature has been converging with my own thoughts on how I want to develop and grow as a person, as an intellectual, as a philosopher and then at the same time I'm being voluntarily subjected to external forces of familial and societal expectations. I think because discovering the truth of the self is so complex yet weighs so heavily on who we are is why people graduate from college utterly confused, because for four years they've been studying only the external and teaching themselves nothing of the internal and they become lost. I think there must be a balance that can be struck in which a harmony can exist between the two but I think to be most effective, for me anyway, an understanding of these realms and harmony between them must begin in its process now rather than later.
*Maybe Socrates represents a sort of self-discovery continuum in which questions are incessantly presented because knowledge of the self is never ending?
