Hindsight, and an Interesting Side-Effect of Online Forums

[MoonlitSunshine]

The post you linked to is fantastic, I love finding people who in the face of argument will approach it with gusto and good humour I've also had problems with the... length of my posts before: My record on any forum thus far is 3000 words in one post, on the subject of moderation (the reaction of one of my friends when he saw it was "oh sweet jesus, I have to read all of this?" ). Personally i'm a great fan of expressing one's self, and so long as the paragraphs don't go above 10 lines or so they're generally easy enough to read!

I wouldn't, however, say that you are going off-topic. The "topic" in itself, is primarily how Forums can reveal interesting information about who we are and how we develop. Surely whether or not our souls are eternal as evident by how we change is an interesting concept? certainly if forums can be used to argue this immortality, it is related, and relevant to the topic by definition of its interest...ing...ness. I have to say though, that I would disagree with you with regards to your reasoning: I was me 4 years ago, 16 years ago, 21 years ago, and I still am me. And yet, everything that is me is different to how it was then. I have grown, and changed, and yet I am still me. If I can grow in such a way, who is to say that my soul cannot too?

I think however that you hit the nail right on the head when you said

I think you are very right that your sense of self may not change even as you yourself do, so that you don't recognize the changes.

This is, I think, the effect that fascinates me the most out of everything that I came to realise when writing this post. It is quite incredible that even as we change so much in who we are, that the way in which we view ourselves can remain so constant. Originally I had thought that it is because the change is so gradual that we simply don't recognise the change over time, but if that were the case, we would be able to remember how we used to see ourselves, and once a sufficient amount of time had passed, we could see that distance growing between our past and present selves.

Hmm. And now we reach the reason why one should never write a post while thinking about the same ideas. But what about those moments in life, those epiphanies, in which our perspective of ourselves and the world changes?

For example, July 2009 I met a group of people who were to change my life forever, and how I saw myself. It's funny, before I met them, I thought I was happy, and that I was totally comfortable with who I was. But when I met that group... it was like I suddenly realised who I actually was, what I liked, what I didn't like, how I acted. It suddenly didn't really matter what other people wanted me to be. I was me, and that's what really mattered. Up until that moment, I hadn't realised just how much of who I was I was suppressing for the benefit of people who thought I should be different to who I was, namely my girlfriend at the time (amusingly enough, i think she wanted me to be who i was but she didn't like who I really was, which resulted in the problems that occurred :P) And yet, as I look back on who I was, I can't detect that suppression at all, I can't "see" myself the way I used to, i can only see myself back then the way I see myself now. Does that mean that there's an intellectual block which means that we literally cannot see ourselves in any way other than the way we see ourselves now? Or does it mean that, deep down, I haven't changed at all?