July 15, 2016

If our inner and outer selves can never completely match, are we condemn to live two separate albeit dependent existences?

I don’t think mindfulness practices can ever completely resolve the experience of duality. Subjectivity and objectivity can never really be transcended except maybe by imagination and empathy. What we think and feel we are is and will mostly remain different from what others perceive of us.

Is it then actually a condemnation? Or is it more a blessing that affords us some rest from the incessant change of life and the world.

While our interior self does also experience change, it does not do so at the same pace as the body, even when we try to regulate mind, breath, body and environment through meditation practice. There is a lag, a gap, without which the conscious mind might be overwhelmed.

We can also hide, delay and filter the presentation of our emotional or psychological states of being to the exterior world. This comes naturally, with self-awareness, and it affords us the distance to diagnose, learn and act intentionally, to which we owe our survival as human kind and as psychological individuals.

We want to be perceived as who we think and feel we are. Our condition is otherwise. Sartre was haunted with the idea that part of us did not belong to us and could never be accessed, making us never complete.

With mindfulness practice, we aim at reducing this separation. And while we work on that, we should remember that if part of us is outside of our sovereign self, we should care to collaborate with others that are the only window into our outer self, this partial stranger, that we share responsibility for.

Have you tried sitting in front of a mirror with someone else and asking them what they see of you? How does it correspond to your perception?

There are several excuses often used to justify speciesism, and believing in them or not, some people argue that other animals aren't like humans.

Yes, some animal species have paws, others have beaks, fur, horns etc. Although, is valid to claim that since they don't look like us, their rights of life and freedom should be erased?

Let's take a look at something we share with them: sentience. The ability someone has to perceive or feel things. It's the mental, emotional, affective and conscious condition one has (this can be seen in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness). Birds, mammals, (in)vertebrates, octopuses etc., have it. 

Animals (human or not) are aware, can feel, have central nervous systems in order to process things. They aren't objects, machines or products, willing to be used, harmed and exploited by us. They have interests, preferences.