The link works, but we have to log in to see anything and read...
What it the link...*would I use it often if I signed up on the page?
Is it your own page or someone else's that you belong to?
Thanks..H
ya ok, i was afraid of that...ill blog it here or something, mainly good for keyword search to do your own investigating prolly...
intro
Although it is virtually impossible for most people to really grasp pre self consciousness, having become self conscious, it is possible to remember the time when you were not aware of your self. Since this is probably the state that our religious or mental models seek to reproduce (despite failure in a Google search of
pre self consciousness~the only return {before this article was published} was for
pre reflective
self consciousness), it becomes pertinent in one's walk to examine this concept from another angle; that of
remembering when, or at least the doorway from there, rather than
aspiring to. Iow, as we are often reminded, there is nothing to learn so much, but rather to unlearn,
become like a little child
Pre reflective self consciousness provides an interesting analog in helping to understand your state of mind at the time, so we'll look at a brief of this concept:
"One can get a bearing on the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness by contrasting it with reflective self-consciousness. If you ask me to give you a description of the pain I feel in my right foot, or of what I was just thinking about, I would reflect on it and thereby take up a certain perspective that was one order removed from the pain or the thought. Thus, reflective self-consciousness is at least a higher-order cognition. It may be the basis for a report on one's experience, although not all reports involve a significant amount of reflection.
In contrast, pre-reflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in the sense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any reflecting on our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order awareness rather than an explicit or higher-order form of self-consciousness. Indeed, an explicit reflective self-consciousness is possible only because there is a pre-reflective self-awareness that is an on-going and more primary self-consciousness. Although phenomenologists do not always agree on important questions about method, focus, or even whether there is an ego or self, they are in close to unanimous agreement about the idea that the experiential dimension always involves such an implicit pre-reflective self-awareness.[1] In line with Edmund Husserl (1959, 189, 412), who maintains that consciousness always involves a self-appearance (Für-sich-selbst-erscheinens), and in agreement with Michel Henry (1963, 1965), who notes that experience is always self-manifesting, and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty who states that consciousness is always given to itself and that the word ‘consciousness’ has no meaning independently of this self-givenness (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 488), Jean-Paul Sartre writes that pre-reflective self-consciousness is not simply a quality added to the experience, an accessory; rather, it constitutes the very mode of being of the experience...” (
Sources)
Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Or in other words you, completely in the moment, before mental processing.
We’ll take a look at how to remember when you came to self awareness, but unfortunately--even though this experience alone will be quite a jolt--all you will be left with, most likely anyway, is a memory of that moment; although intriguing echoes of pre self consciousness will reverberate. And who knows? Maybe
you will be the one who writes the article about further regression here, since the Indians apparently are not.
ok and by "regression" i mean remembering, only a bit more concentrated, over a couple days or so. We--like five or six of us--drank some mildly euphoric, relaxing tea, old indian who was obv legit tells us a story of his early childhood that was apparently chosen for its broad familiarity, as there was lots of head nodding and identifying, so, tea sinks in and he says "recall your earliest memory," and we go around describing it briefly, and its getting late we're getting sleepy kinda, long day and tea effect, and he says "remember what happened right before that now (our earliest memory), and if you have any trouble, just relax and dont try too hard, just fill out your earliest memory as much as you can, stay there and remember," and it was like staged to kind of trance us out a little, some kinda soothing fluty stuff playing, and some kind of smell, incense, not sage, almost smoky in the teepee, even the indian's voice/cadence, soothing, and i think only one girl recalled her day that night, i remem hers came looking in a mirror too, many were i guess, but most of us didnt remember the day we first recognized our "selves" until the next morning, through about noon. Only one person couldnt recall earlier than about age three, and turns out she had been traumatized i guess, her house burned down or something at age almost three.
So, i'll blog the whole article for anyone who cares, it was def an experience, the memory still blazes in my mind, my mom and me walking in the front door where a mirror was and me realizing we looked just like Leave it to Beaver and his mom doing the same thing, and click! So it's a lot about associations i guess
