What Is The Self? When You Say 'myself' what do You Mean?

What is Self? When you say "myself" what do you mean? Can that "self" awaken?

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Besides talking and writing about Non-Duality I am also an artist. Painting with mostly acrylics, but sometimes also with mixed media, on canvas and paper.

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[em]

Thank You, Hans!✌❤😊
Ps.Hans Christian, coming to you live, from the International Space Station.😉🌏
( thumbnail pic)

[shlomobachar]

Yes I find easy to answer. Myself is the body the I see and feel it’s boundaries and the thing that has thoughts and memories.

[nicolasresimont]

I wish your videos would last much longer 😊

[mariannebancroft]

It seems so obvious to say this is me. But what does that even mean? To question that is the beginning of truth.

[louisj]

I love you Hans Christian Lundholm, but I think you may have confused the phaneron for the objective physical reality. You are right that the entire reality that we can experience has its foundation in consciousness (not necessarily surface-consciousness, because we can count the subconscious as part of consciousness too) and forms the phaneron, which is the phenomenological representation of the reality it inhabits and which created it, but science would say that the phaneron is an emergent property of that reality rather than the foundation preceding its existence. In fact, if we look at the animal kingdom and the fossil record, we see that the further back we go the smaller the brains generally get. Basically, I think that you need to have a brain to have consciousness, and the truth that you're touching on is that the world that we perceive (i.e. with colour, taste, feeling, and indeed any felt quality) does not exist unless the brain perceives it. It 'evaporates' if there are no brains. However, what does still exist are the preceding stimuli that are there to potentially be perceived by consciousness - colour, for example, only exists in our heads but the wavelengths of photons that produce those colours do still exist even if no-one is there to perceive them. Yet those colours are not set in stone because, as we know, different animals (brains) see colours very differently!

And yes, I know, you could say "but how do you know any of this would be true if you were not conscious to perceive it in the first place?" and this is true, I do need to be conscious as a starting point for thinking about or perceiving the world at all, but this felt and perceived world is my phaneron. It's my "maya". Not objective reality. Therefore you might say "well, then this objective reality you speak of does not really exist or precede anything" but I think you would be falling into the same linguistically conditioned trap that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer fell into when he correctly made the distinction between the "represented" world and the "real" world, only to make the incorrect conclusion that the "real" world therefore has no quality because quality is a properly only of the "represented" world, as are time and space (in his view). The truth is, "objectivity" and "subjectivity" in terms of perceiving the "real" world exists in degrees. It's evolutionary - no, our perception of the objective world is not and cannot be a direct 1:1 representation, but it has to be at least good enough to enable us to navigate it. For example, a schizophrenic person would be a lot further down the "subjective" end of that spectrum than a neurotypical person because only they can experience their delusions, or their "maya", and their functioning in the world suffers as a result of this. You can therefore say that the world we perceive is just "a delusion that most of us happen to agree on", but most of us happen to agree on it for a good reason. Because it was evolutionarily beneficial for us to agree on it. Because it's accurate enough to the "objective" nature of things to enable us to consistently get by. Science is the ultimate proof of this - you are never going to drop a bowling ball and a feather from the same heigh in a vacuum and have them fall at different times. You are never going to exceed terminal velocity. You are never going to drop a pure alkali metal into water and get no reaction. So, there's my analysis.

Ofc we can still talk about the Buddhist concept of Ananta and the idea that "form is formlessness, formlessness is form" and that "nothingness (silence) contains potential for all things" but I think it is better spoken of in terms of "potential" than in terms of "consciousness".