does it still count as a note-to-self if you don't write it in 2nd person? seems to me it doesn't count but anyway, this turned into a thread exploring some new thoughts I've been having about partswork, so keep reading for that 🥰🧵
Fractional second-person pronouns and non-reified parts work
17 tweets · October 2020 · 17 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
I'm thinking I want to do more writing to myself, and also feeling like it would be fun to have a fractional second person pronoun for that. y'all :: you : you : ___ (here's a ridiculous idea: repurpose "thou" for that)
I've been reaching whole new levels of self-integration recently and part of me is raising the concern that somehow having fractional pronouns would cause fragmentation. I appreciate thou, part, for raising that concern 🙏😛
And... I find myself noting that the same argument could be applied to claim that people would be more united if we got rid of "I/me/mine", and that's literally one of Ayn Rand's communist dystopias (Anthem—only novel of hers I've read, and it's quite good)
Anyway, I seem to also think having fractional pronouns may be less problematic than having *names* for given parts. Internal parts are slipperier than individual people, whose neurons don't tend to migrate between craniums. (Not saying naming parts is bad, to be clear!)
The self-integration work I've been doing lately hasn't involved reifying any particular parts in any ongoing way. I simply recognize that each of my thoughts represents the output/process of some subsystem. These systems evolve, and also may overlap. Can't neatly carve them up.
I refer to the parts contextually, eg "Ahh, there's a part of me that is fending off blame here. It's fighting. Hello fighty <3 Yeah, you're trying to insist that I'm completely powerless and blameless, because you really don't want me to feel blamed." No ongoing "fighty" part.
In this case, the next day I ended up going a lot deeper in dialogued with this part. Turned out it cares a lot about me not being blamed, & sometimes blames other people, but doesn't particularly *want* to. Just wants to not be blamed—okay! Blame nobody.
(The perspective from which it's actually coherent to blame nobody is a whole treatise in itself, but as far as I can tell, blame as a framework for explaining behavior is outdated in the same way geocentrism is outdated. Study Systems Thinking for initial sketches at helio.)
Another example: "the part of you that wants space right now" Later, that "part" might want something else, and/or another "part" may want space. These arise and pass. We relate with what is here to be related with.
Sometimes I feel a sense of unity around what I'm thinking. It feels like the whole picture. Often it's not tho! In fact, invariably no perspective is ever the whole picture, even if I have a unified sense of myself in a given moment. Others still see things I don't.
In particular, I'll also note that anger & frustration, being very left-hemisphere lateralized, tend to block out the presence of other perspectives, including whatever fears or shames or panics they're guarding. Can welcome them and also ask "what else is present?"
Anyway! Rather than thinking about myself as "having" parts, ie "whatever thoughts of mine I don't identify with" (aka egodystonic) I'm trying to not identify with any thoughts in particular, and to identify myself with the process that observes and organizes these thoughts.
The "observe" part may sound like I'm talking about some nonconceptual awareness, and I think that's sorta true inasmuch as I'm probably referring to something right-hemisphere lateralized. But it's also, I think, what IFS calls Self. Not denying self. my "selfing function"
This seems to me to be very compatible with the dharma as I understand it, although many people approach the dharma in ways that may not be compatible with this.
In particular, "no-self", ie anatta, might actually just *be* the thing I'm referring to when I say I don't reify or identify with any parts of me! Would love to hear thoughts on this from @xuenay, @mattgoldenberg, @meditationstuff, @Meaningness Start 👇
Realizing that this thread of @mattgoldenberg's from the week before, is very relevant/resonant. I guess I had read it at the time (and it maybe inspired stuff?) though I'd forgotten about it by the time I wrote this one.