Daily Journal #29

The actual idea of Self itself is a very abstract and vague idea that Whitman proposes. While Self is in each one of us, it is also shared by everyone else, so it is not really a Self, rather a collective consciousness. Whitman breaks self down into a Trinity just like Christians do with their God; there is the spiritual self, the self-perceived self, and the actual self. The spiritual self is the part of Self represented by everyone’s abstract, unique personality and the different trends and similarities that people share across the world. The self-perception part of Self deals with how each individual person sees themselves and how they believe other people think of them as. The last and hardest to define part of Self is the Real Self. I think it is the hardest part to define from person to person because there are many different factors that affect how people perceive a person and it usually varies from how people perceive themselves. Whenever someone asks themselves “Who am I?” they are not talking about the self-perceived self because they already know how they see themselves; it is how everyone else sees them and what they are actually like. Finding out the Real Self requires one to look inward on their actions and how it might be seen by other people and also how their actions affect people around them. Since nobody is perfect and we live in a world with many other non-perfect people, the Real Self is mostly always different from the self-perceived self.

I know that, personally, the way I see myself is most likely different from how other people see me. Some of the things that I do may come across as odd to some people but as people get to know me and my sense of humor, it is easier to see why I do what I do. It is because of this that I try not to judge other people because I myself do not like to be judged.