Medusa jellyfish how to#

Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, weвЂ™ve celebrated by giving it a real name. YouвЂ™d think, to read about it, that weвЂ™d only just now discovered selves. Self-enlightenment can be taught in college electives. Groups of self-respecting people pay large fees for three-day sessions together, learning self-awareness. There are instructive books, best sellers on self-realization, self-help, self-development.

Medusa jellyfish how to#

The popular magazines are filled with advice on things to do with a self: how to find it, identify it, nurture it, protect it, even, for special occasions, weekends, how to lose it transiently. WeвЂ™ve never been so self-conscious about our selves as we seem to be these days. A century after Whitman, another great poet and great seer of the human experience articulated the terror and the beauty of this elemental fact: вЂњThe self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth,вЂќ Robert Penn Warren wrote in admonishing against the trouble with вЂњfinding yourself,вЂќ вЂњa process that is the image, we may say, of the life process of a healthy society itself.вЂќДЄround the same time, a poet laureate of the life process - the great physician, etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913вЂ“December 3, 1993) - explored the confounding nature of the self with uncommon insight and originality in the title essay of his altogether magnificent 1979 collection The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher ( public library).

Whitman lived in an era before the birth of neuroscience, before psychology as we know it became a robust field of scientific study - before, that is, we began examining more closely whatever it is that we mean by the вЂњself,вЂќ only to find that it doesnвЂ™t hold up to systematic scrutiny. вЂњThere is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal,вЂќ Walt Whitman wrote in contemplating identity and the paradox of the self.