All About Self in Karate

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To deal with the proverbial "self" in karate or in any part of life you first have to understand what the "self" is and then you learn how to deal with that. When people think of "self" they are actually thinking of those self aspects that are our very, "Consciousness." This opens a huge can of "What the" for all of us and maybe that is why many people just assume they know what their "self" is and how the "self" works in our daily living. 

I am not a neuroscientist or medical professional or a medical physio science researcher or professor but my personal research has taken me to what I propose in the next set of paragraphs. So, let me begin by quoting a neuroscientist who has studied and researched this very thing, he states, "Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience — and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it."

He teaches about, "bodily self, perspectival self, volitional self, narrative self, social self" as those self's we all have to one degree or another. The following is what I extracted in research, not from the professor but my own searches, that define each of these "selves."

Bodily Self: key feature of bodily self-consciousness: its global character. This is because a fundamental aspect of bodily self-consciousness is its association with a single, whole body, not with multiple body parts. The scientific understanding of bodily self-consciousness and its multi-sensory mechanisms can be informed by the study of autoscopic phenomena [seeing one's body from outside it (out-of-body experiences)]. 

Perspectival Self: To be a perceiver, one must be capable of keeping track of the ways in which one's perceptual experience depends on what one does, and also more generally on one's relation to the world around one. Perception requires "perspectival self-consciousness. Example: as an object looms larger in the visual field as we approach it, and its profile deforms as we move about it. As perceivers, we are masters of the patterns of sensorimotor contingency [sensorimotor dependencies (or 'sensorimotor contingencies'), defined as the regularities in how sensory stimulation depends on the activity of the perceiver.] that shape our perceptual interaction [Perception -- seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, feeling the positions of joints and the tension of muscles, balance, temperature, pain... -- begins with the stimulation of sensory neurons.] with the world. 

Note: Pain receptors respond to certain chemicals produced when tissues are damaged.  Touch receptors involve cells with hairs which, when bent, cause signals to travel down the cell's axon.  Balance, movement, and even hearing involve similar hair cells.  Temperature sensitive neurons response to heat and cold.  Taste and smell receptors respond to environmental molecules in the same way that other neurons respond to neurotransmitters.  And the neurons of the retina respond to the presence of light or the specific frequency ranges of light we perceive as color.

Note: Vision involves constant movement - of our eyes, head, and body, or of the things we see or all of the above. The outer parts of our retina are particularly sensitive to motion, so when something comes into our field of vision, our attention is drawn to it. Even the fact that we have two eyes (binocular vision) is a kind of movement: The two views are slightly different, as if we had moved a few inches to the left or right. If we kept our eyes and the scene we are looking at perfectly still, everything would all become white!

Note: perception is not something done with the eyes or the ears or any specific sense organ. It is a multi-sensory, full bodied thing.

Volitional Self: Volition or will is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action. Others include affect (feeling or emotion), motivation (goals and expectations), and cognition (thinking). Volitional processes can be applied consciously or they can be automatized as habits over time. When it comes to volition, to intention, agency, and will, the picture of who we are turns foggy indeed, being a mix of truth and illusion. The fact that we do things, that we cause things to happen, implies that there is someone, a self that is me, who is the causer, the doer, the decider and chooser. This is our apparent volitional self.

Narrative Self: the narrative sense of self: the sense that we have of ourselves as having a narratable past and future. It is argued that the narrative sense of self is not at all the same thing as a sense of a narrative self. There is no interesting notion of a narrative self: a self that is in some way constituted by the narratives that we tell about our lives. The narrative sense of self is separate from questions of personal identity — one’s narrative sense of self as is conceived here it really has no direct connection with the metaphysical question of one’s numerical identity over time, although the narrative sense of self presupposes it.

Social Self: the social aspects of the self by considering the many ways that the social situation determines our self-concept. Our selves are not created in isolation; we are not born with perceptions of ourselves as shy, interested in jazz, or charitable to others. Rather, these beliefs are determined by our observations of and interactions with others. Are you rich or poor? Beautiful or ugly? Smart or not? Good or poor at video games? And how do you know? These questions can be answered only by comparing ourselves with those around us. The self has meaning only within the social context, and it is not wrong to say that the social situation defines our self-concept and our self-esteem. We rely on others to provide a “social reality”—to help us determine what to think, feel, and do (Hardin & Higgins, 1996).

In a nutshell meant to spur curiosity and further research this self thing is about social connections, perceptions, beliefs and experiences that don’t just get absorbed by the encounters and experiences of the “real world” but rather the sensory input detected by our senses that our internal memories actually create our reality. It is good to note the professor also states that reality is about our creative processes from within that take the external stimuli and crate our reality, our consciousness, and that when a group of us all have the same Matrix-like creation of memories that means it is our collective reality. 

Our brains are our own “Matrixes” that generate experiences as a combination of internal stuff with external sensory date it records. The brain cannot see, it cannot feel, it cannot hear and it cannot touch but it does take in all those “1’s and 0’s” data that compiles and is created to provide us what we need to live, evolve and especially “survive.” Note: the 1’s and 0’s data thing are simply a symbolic way to convey a thought for the reality of how the brain does this is more complicated and complex.

The professor explains, “consciousness for each of us is all there is. Without it there’s no world, there’s no self, there’s nothing at all.  … consciousness has less to do with pure intelligence and more to do with our nature as living and breathing organisms. … AND think of consciousness in two different ways. There are experiences of the world around us, full of sights, sounds and smells, there’s multi-sensory, panoramic, 3D, fully immersive inner movie. And then there’s conscious self. The specific experience of being you or being me.”

Finally, he states in his TED talk, “All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals.”

This warrants a great deal of study, contemplation and attempts to understand for it drives all of us and explains things like our social need to collectively gather in small like-minded groups. Once people begin to understand this concept the term, “Like-minded,” takes on a whole new meaning explaining that social constructs literally make us who and what we are and that leads to the survival of the group, a natural nature’s way of the species. 

When we speak of the self in the dojo we think of how we manifest established beliefs and perceptions that come from those beliefs. Often they are already set then we look to things like dojo-kun or codes of conduct but does that really address the self we have evolved to through our experiences of culture as dictated by traits involved with it, our experiences and exposure to others in our family, our groups, our neighborhoods, our work environments and other things, and how our understandings effect the process, mostly a process not consciously detected or realized by our conscious minds, that creates what the professors calls “Human Hallucinations” that make us into our “self.” 

I propose that coming to an understanding of what makes us, us; what makes us conscious; what makes us the types of personalities and characters that are a part of the “self” that is us then we can start to recognize consciously those things that will effect that self in ways that are conducive to what we have come to believe as an intricate part of our karate and martial arts efforts. 

Thinking of “self” is not just something we do naturally for it is a product of many effects of ourselves from memories that come from an accumulation of memories within each of us to create reality from the limited stimulus of sensory input our brains work with from external world stuff. 

Contemplate and Meditate on this now, then do the studying and research and finally come to a creative understanding of that which people don’t know they don’t know that is “self” and use that to your advantage. In survival, especially in modern self-protection against aggression and violence, it is the very core of what, why and how we exist and evolve and “literally” survive even if society today says and believes otherwise. 

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