Person Study / Childhood Memories
The contention as to whether there is person or not, continues and is an avid cause for disagreement among ascetics. Some feel that person is an aberration. Others assert that no, it is a reality unto itself. Which opinion should one accept?
There is no denying that a new human body is tagged with an identity which is characterized by a birth certificate. It is then subjected to social and environmental pressures which cause it to be represented in a particular way. It is molded and squeezed socially and genetically to be a certain formation with certain habits. These pressures change from time to time, causing changes in the body. How then can anyone say that there is a permanent personality as a reality? The evidence is that the formatted personality alters every step of the way. That denies for it any permanence. Except that to format something, one must begin with something; to add on, one must have a core factor to which the additions adhere.
I took an inside look at this during an experience of a memory of some childhood events. This was a crystal-clear memory during meditation, when the events recurred with intense clarity, such that it could be analyzed more accurately than when the events took place years ago in the juvenile years of my body.
The event was this:
I was on a ship returning to Guyana from Trinidad. The ship rocked and rolled on the sea for two days. Then it entered the mouth of the Demerara River and docked at the Bookers Company wharf. The body was fourteen years of age. I was requested to get my luggage ready to disembark as the cook of the vessel was assigned to escort me to my home there.
The sailors on the vessel knew my father because they sailed with him for years on the same vessel until he left the company for a job in Trinidad. In the memory event, I could feel even the wind and the balmy climate. I could see the wharf and other adjacent waterfront structures. I could see the gangplank, the ropes which keep the cargo ship against the peer and the men on the wharf who eager waited to talk to the sailors.
I could feel the relief that the ship arrived safely and that the captain and chief mate knew how to navigate successfully from Port-of-Spain to Georgetown. The company was owned by a British company, Bookers, but every seaman on the vessel was of black ethnicity.
I reviewed my attitude and knowledge, as well as the assessment ability I had at that time. It was different to what I use now in retrospect. Was I the same person then as I am now or is person an aberration as some philosophers propose? Was there a part of me existing then which still exist now? Is the retrospective perspective something that developed recently? Was it added to what I was then? Was it missing then?
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Those are important questions you are able to articulate. Not easy to put into words the action of thinking through, peering through, sometimes traveling through the undivided continuum.
I know the questions are rhetorical but I'll put my answers down anyway.
Was I the same person then as I am now? Yes, but having moved through developmental stages.
Was there part of me existing then which still exist now? Absolutely.
Is the retro perspective something that developed recently?
I would answer that you must have had a juvenile retro perspective even then but compared to the insights you have now, may seem underdeveloped. Yet I would imagine as a 14 yr old you were possibly having flashes of more recent stages of your development during those times. Retro perspectives of your childhood.
As the bio/subtle form develops, especially with conscious effortful involvement, the retro perspective capacity grows. So in that sense it is something that is added, or developed to what you were then. It wasn't missing then it was just functioning at that stage of it's ability.
Recognizing the undivided continuum has been an important aspect of what I've learned from inSelf Yoga instruction. To thin out the divisions between our sleep and waking state, dream state and waking state, astral states and physical states - makes us more aware of ourselves as a less segmented entity, and more aware of what we really are;
an eternal entity flowing through these so called life stages and dimensions of creations.
The self, atma, is the ultimate undivided continuum traveler! Although so few seem to be genuinely aware of it!
Their self is divided up so much that they think it doesn't even exist.
To capture insight into the undivided essence of one's existence is to see for oneself the constancy of the spiritual self.
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Lack of objectivity over the lifetimes …. The same person identity but the filtering apparatus (sense intellect and) the environment change constantly. The apparatus is making regular assessments sometimes every single moment, these are not noted by any regular person. The inSelf yogins are tasked to develop objectivity into all things external to the core-self. From this perspective, the philosophers are asking the wrong questions.
Consciousness is constantly checking itself against the environment like the fish in the water whether it is aware of it all the time or not, it is always moving around the water environment and growing or evolving within it. So the subtle/ body as mentioned by devaPryia is indeed doing such work, by definition.
The summum bonum of the experiences are to benefit to the attentive core-self hopefully!
