WHO ARE YOU?

                                                          WHO ARE YOU?

 

              Which came out of Alice in the Looking Glass by Lewis Carol: a mathematician, turned politician, who found an escape from his frustrations, in a kind of cartoon literature?

                And yet the philosophical question remains: Who are you?

                Since it's posed objectively, one might refer to the superego of Freud, which vacillates between the id and the ego. A sort of referee in the harbors of the mind. In other words…should I do this or that? The existence of free will allows us that much latitude.

                 But even with a free will, is it possible to understand completely who we are?

                 Now we are becoming subjective, because we are us and that includes not only our family, rather our environment: the country where we live, with all the ramifications of its laws and customs.

                 Consequently the who is you and you remain an individual: isolated in a mass of humanity, which requires conformity, in order to exist.

                Nevertheless, all existence, in a sense, is united in the existential question of who and the antecedent of you.

               It could be a simple measure of semantics, if not for the fact that a human being is born with more than scientific reasoning. He was born upright, as opposed to the other animals, who labor to survive, with their heads buried in the earth.

              This advantage allows him to contemplate the heavens and thus the universe. The very idea of this vast enterprise encompass the infinite as well as the finite; the latter reflecting the individual.

             Thus man maintains a superior place among the other animals, which remain subject to his determination and still man is an existential it, who because of his reasoning faculties, endeavors to be defined.

           If a Hindu considers his salvation the river Ganges and Muslim should go to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, they are (perhaps indirectly) explaining their existence. Likewise a good Catholic considers Rome as its base, while a Jew prays to Jerusalem. This also defines their beings and become the what of who they are. That much might be established and yet within these cults, there is still the individual.  Depending on his education, he can either become an innocuous conformer or secretly, perhaps openly, question the lot in which he is placed.

         This might complicate traditional matters, but man himself created tradition.

         In the modern world of high technology, tradition is lost, while the substitute is an onslaught of information, which inundates his means of communication in an untenable morass. It was as though one had access to the largest library in the world, but does not know which book to read first or why.  It is at that point that the who wavers and the individual becomes distraught. In some cases he could even become violent, simply because he does not know who he is. He is buried under statistics and facts, that don't relate to him at all. He instinctively knows that, but cannot describe his feelings concerning it, since he's been reprocessed by High Tech domination.

            In other words, what was once simple to determine, turns into a quagmire of incredulity. The question of who you Aare, is almost obliterated on the screen of your lap-top and the owner of same is more subject to it, than the reverse.  All of this is not only plausible, rather innately understood, for all who enter that world.

            It would be absolutely indiscrete not to recognize the millenniums which preceded our apparent pristine age and further folly, not to acknowledge there was always an individual, who intrinsically inquired: Who am I?

           If I might be allowed to open the aqueducts of the mind, notwithstanding the right or left lobe, I would have to say….You are You…