You can *directly* viscerally experience a large number of your different ‘I’s if you try out the ‘Big Mind’ process – which is a mix of Gestalt therapy, Zen and Jungian ‘voice’ work. You can even do it at home – it takes minutes.

It is pretty much idiot-proof – it worked for me

Don’t philosophise about this, try it for yourself!

One of the long-running East-West spiritual approaches is Gurdjieff’s ‘Fourth Way’ – it revolves around the core idea that we are made up of a crowd of different, competing ‘I’s, and has plenty of experiments you can do to try to verify what’s going on (in your inner conversation of multiple ‘I’s).

Prof Bill Torbert’s ‘Action Inquiry’ approach to organisational development draws strongly on this 4th Way work – so it’s not just ‘New Age’ woo-woo.

Prof Kegan’s recent book from Harvard Business Press on ‘Immunity to Change’ also revolves around a way of identifying competing ‘I’s within oneself.

My view is that modern progressives need to get to know all this stuff – not be faintly embarrassed about seeking this kind of self-understanding (or focused on it merely as a something to read about, rather than ‘do’!)

As Kegan and Torbert show, it can be important to building resilient, capable ‘Learning organisations’ – just don’t expect a paper on this from IPPR or Demos…

God I sound arrogant…

Just one of my many ‘I’s, the humble ones sometimes go quiet when I write comments on blogs

Cheers,

Matthew

I do think that new thinking about who we are will over time alter how we see ourselves and how we behave, but I think it’s challenging (though I’m sure not impossible) to manage that process to particular public policy ends…

Anyway can we have a Levi-Strauss memorial lecture? This post from the LRB blog may convince you in which he talks about the duality of his self in extreme old age. “He said he felt like a ’shattered hologram’ that had lost its unity but still retained an image of the whole self.”

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/

Then there is the conscious subjective “I” which is what is recording the seeing.

But I think that there is also an unconscious “I” which is intuitively making the value decisions which your subjective “I” then rationalises. This is the “I” that decides that the moustache has to come off when subjective I observes objective I in the mirror…….

I have been attracted by Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality” since I first came across it: and I think that it is the unconscious “I” which defines our relationship with reality.