You know roughly where your body is at all times, but where in it is your “self”?

Your center of mass is around the solar plexus, yet that doesn’t seem to universally be where people feel the center of their self to be. Most people feel they “are” right behind their eyes, probably in the brain.

Sometimes people have out-of-body experiences, completely changing their anchor for a while.

When pointing at themselves, people tend to point a thumb at their chest or face. Do they feel differently about it, or is it just convenience?

Are you a body with a head full of thinking goop and sensors on top, or are you a head sitting on a body?

And wherever you feel you are, have you felt different at any time? Can you change it?

Personally, I can’t separate the feeling of self from my vision, so “I” am directly behind my eyeballs and I can’t change it.

  • @Candelestine
    link
    English
    21 year ago

    So, you’re talking about perspective, basically “where it seems someone is looking from”. You can control this, it’s not locked-in to how it normally feels like it functions, even if it normally seems that way.

    It just takes significant amounts of practice in directing and controlling your attention instead of letting it control you. There’s a lot of ways to practice, but meditation regimens are probably generally one of the quickest.

    Like, your internal dialogue for instance. Just because it’s always on doesn’t mean it has to be. But unless you can turn it off, the constant stream of dialogue through your head is going to make it very difficult to “look from” anywhere else. It’ll always pull you immediately back so long as it is present.

    • @DeestanOP
      link
      21 year ago

      I was trying to keep it separate from perspective, since a person peeking through a telescope for example could change perspective without feeling like they themselves are somewhere else.

      • @Candelestine
        link
        English
        21 year ago

        I think the commonalities between the two are more important than the differences. It’s the same phenomenon at the end of the day, Einstein’s Relativity does not have anything genuinely unique to say about perspective.