Socrates was wrong.

He should have said:

Know Thyselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Considering your parts you might discover the human tendency to hold on to a "me", an identity that states who you are. For this you have developed the skill of identification. And it starts already when you are a baby. As a baby you discover that you can make the body move and talk, that your body needs food and touch. You learned to react to every itch, ache, tension, pain, or pleasure that you felt. To this day, you still doing that. If your body gets hurt, then ‘you’ feel it. It makes a lot of sense to identify yourself with your body.

As you get a few years older, construct your Box, and acquire language, the Box tells you, “I think,”, “I want,” and you automatically include your Box along with your body as your identity. You mix together the body’s needs with the Box’s needs and you say to yourself and others, “I need…” It is radical to question the necessity of having an identification.

The distinction, “I am not my Box,” also implies “I am not my body.” These are the first two authentic adulthood initiatory processes: disidentification from your body and your Box. Yet many people have died rather than disidentifying themselves.

At this point you should be asking, “Alrighty then. If I am not my Box, who am I then?”

Consider that you have a whole zoo in there. You have multiple "I"s inside you. Each "I" has its own gestures, voice, behavior, way of walking, emotional reactivity, way of speaking, et cetera shaped by past experiences. For the most part, you pass from one "I" to the next, unaware that the "I" you were a moment ago differs from the "I" you are identified with now. Probably you have seen people shift from one identity to the next whith them being unawares that any such shift occured. Yet you notice the tone of voice and gestures the person across from you uses while speaking to you and then their mother calls and they immediately unconscously shift their way of speaking. Does this sound familiar?

You are wondering why you want something on one day and suddenly want different thing on another day. Each "I" has its own wants. Depending on which "I" currently sits on the driver seat of your life, the results that you are creating may differ immensly from the results you (which you?) have set out to accomplish. That creates a huge conflict inside you. We could say it creates a conflict of identity.

Some of your parts you have designed to maintain a fassade of normality and be accepted in society by being viewed as a good wife, a good worker, a good father, a good girl, a good citizen. Other parts you have designed to get what you want while again other parts represent your emotional wounds by holding onto incomplete past experiences.

Here are some examples of parts. You have a part that is:

- your Box with its rules, assumptions, conclusions, buttons

- your Gremlin commited to irresponsible shadow purposes

- your physical body with its aches and physical needs

- your emotional body feeling anger, sadness, fear and joy as emotions and feelings

- your intellectual body thinking about ideas, verbal reality constructs

- your energetic body sensing spaces, timing, ownership, presence

- your archetypal body containing your destiny

- your Being

- your child ego state holding on to unmet childhood needs

- a rescuer, always ready to save others from their misery and potentially the whole world

- a wounded victim, whipping up stories of how you have no choice

- a persecutor, attacking people for their incapabilities

- searching for his/her place in the world

- wanting to live full out at any moment

- hoping for someone else to create a bright future for humanity

- a researcher/experimenter/adventurer, ready to try out new stuff

- a lover, with no doubt about the deep connection already happening between human beings and Gaia

- a magician, creating out of nothing even though you do not know how

- a pirate, breaking rules consciously to establish a space of winning happening

- and so on