I Contain Multitudes - Self as Multiplicity

The separate self is a shape shifter. It has many faces, many self-concepts. It may feel worthy or worthless depending on hormones, weather and so forth. But the ultimate shift is the attention shift out of any identification.

The “you” in question is the assemblage of self-related prior beliefs, values, goals, memories, and perceptual best guesses that collectively make up the experience of being you.

helpful to view ourselves as a kind of ‘community of one’, a sort of constantly shifting democracy of the many different sub personalities (or parts) that comprise our individual persona. There are a number of different psychological models that attempt to map out the many parts of our selves,38 but one of the more comprehensive frameworks is that

The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing

despite believing myself to be an integrated self, I talk to myself as if I am composed of several ‘people’.

Subpersonality” refers to one of many aspects of an individual, all of which share the designation “I.” The idea that we are an aggregation of widely diverse identities that share a body has been around a long time in Eastern philosophy. The Buddha taught that each person is made up of such aggregates and that a constant, unchanging self is an illu