Thanks, as usual for your post and thoughts on the overemphasis of the first person. I believe there are several studies that have shown that high achievers, as a group, underestimate their skills and accomplishments, whereas others (I hesitate to call them under or low achievers) often overestimate their skills and accomplishments. Of course there are those among us who are high achievers and also arrogant braggarts, but their behavior probably masks an underlying insecurity of not measuring up. I have been intrigued with a Zen concept of nothing or emptiness, a concept that has had numerous interpretations over the centuries. One interpretation explains emptiness as a mode of perception in which one neither adds anything to nor takes anything away from what is present, noting simply, "There is this.” In a modern physical sense this is equivalent to the principle of conservation of energy/mass; that is the total amount of mass (or energy which in modern physics is the same thing as mass) in the universe is a constant. Another related interpretation states that not-self does not become apparent because it is concealed by "compactness" when one does not give attention to the various elements which make up the person. Compactness here meaning, I think, clinging to the concept of a circumscribed individual. Again a modern analogy: each of us, in a reductive sense, is nothing more than atoms, ions and molecules interacting, and in principle no different than any other set of chemical reactions occurring in the universe.
Thanks, as usual for your post and thoughts on the overemphasis of the first person. I believe there are several studies that have shown that high achievers, as a group, underestimate their skills and accomplishments, whereas others (I hesitate to call them under or low achievers) often overestimate their skills and accomplishments. Of course there are those among us who are high achievers and also arrogant braggarts, but their behavior probably masks an underlying insecurity of not measuring up. I have been intrigued with a Zen concept of nothing or emptiness, a concept that has had numerous interpretations over the centuries. One interpretation explains emptiness as a mode of perception in which one neither adds anything to nor takes anything away from what is present, noting simply, "There is this.” In a modern physical sense this is equivalent to the principle of conservation of energy/mass; that is the total amount of mass (or energy which in modern physics is the same thing as mass) in the universe is a constant. Another related interpretation states that not-self does not become apparent because it is concealed by "compactness" when one does not give attention to the various elements which make up the person. Compactness here meaning, I think, clinging to the concept of a circumscribed individual. Again a modern analogy: each of us, in a reductive sense, is nothing more than atoms, ions and molecules interacting, and in principle no different than any other set of chemical reactions occurring in the universe.