50 Disputes of Self-Esteem: I Am Not Feelings

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Face Your Self-Esteem Lies that You’re Feelings & End Them

Ego will help you to recognize, remove, and replace your ego: a.k.a. self-esteem.

“Once you label me, you negate me.” —Søren Kierkegaard

Read and discover the best journaling system to reduce and remove your ego.

SELF-ESTEEM IS IDENTIFYING WITH FEELINGS AS SELF

Prove right now that you are the feelings or emotions you are judging your self to be! Where is the evidence that you are the feeling that you are judging your self to be?
Where is it written that people are or can become their feelings or emotions? Where is it written that your being becomes your good or bad feelings or emotions?
Whose law is it that you must regard your self as your feelings, and especially so if they are negative? Where is the evidence that you must become your negative feelings?
Prove that because you had some ignorant or foolish feeling in the past that, that damns you to repeat it forever. Where is the evidence that just because you were or are feeling badly that, that makes you, your being, bad?
Prove that the feeling is the judgment of it! Where is the evidence that the feeling and the judgment about it are one and the same?
Is a computer the software that controls it? How can you be your software (feelings)? You are much more than a computer! Is the world made up of all the feelings or emotions of the people on it? What kind of mess would that be?
Where is the proof that you are definitions, names, or terms about your feelings? Aren’t you your nonverbal being?
Prove that your being can become some feeling or feelings? What happens to your self when you imagine it becomes feelings or emotions?
Why can’t you ever find and demonstrate your self as feelings or emotions in the here-and-now? Why can such identities of self as feelings only occur about past feelings? Isn’t all feeling only about the past? Aren’t you in the present!?
What are the fair, just, and consistent procedures that you use to judge your self to be one feeling and not another? Is there any way to validate why some of your feelings or emotions should get the “I” label, and some shouldn’t?
Prove that your unique being is general just because you need it to be to assume it is feelings or emotions because you name or label feeling identities as general feelings.
Prove that you were ever able to surround and experience your entire self at once so that you could know it to rate or judge it as some feeling or emotion.
Prove that you were able to stop time and your own flowing, your own process so that you could judge your self to be some static or past feeling? When did you capture your self as a feeling?
Show how you can now be your past feelings when they are obviously not here now but are only represented by distorted, incomplete, and subjective memories.
Prove that some feeling is your experience of your self. What happened to the sensations of your self without feelings? What are the feelings or emotions about if they are you and you have feelings or emotions about your self?
Where is the evidence that any feeling knows reality, knows all of it, knows enough truth to make any judgments? When does feeling perceive or sense under its own ability or power?
Prove that your feelings or emotions are the experiences that they claim you were and are. Can feelings or emotions be experiences or only limited, partial, and fragmented experiences, interpretations, or representations of them? If feelings or emotions are not the actual or real experiences, then what are you if you are feelings or emotions?
Prove that feelings or emotions–can know your being and your infinitely complex situation. Don’t feelings always have to isolate you from your situation to classify you as one of their kind? Can or have you ever existed independently of your situation, environment, milieu, circumstances, or conditions?
If your self is feelings or emotions, then how does it continue, how does it remain alive, how is it more than an experience or a memory?
Prove that feeling is or can be responsible for your selfhood or your being. Isn’t there some agent other than feeling activating and directing your responses?
Where is the evidence that simple or complex feelings or emotions can ever know or understand the dynamic self or any living thing?
Where is the evidence that feelings or emotions have ever or can ever be your dynamic self or even a plant?
Where is the evidence that feelings or emotions are ever or can ever do or perform as your dynamic self?
Aren’t all your feelings or emotions of self at best only experiences of the territory of the self? Is the experience the territory? Can it be? Should any experience be mistaken for or treated as the territory or the whole of reality?
Prove that the necessarily limited bits of reality that feelings or emotions can be about can be your whole self. Realize that even a true sum of the parts can’t be the whole, let alone the sum of your limited memories of your limited feelings.
Where is the proof that your feelings about your self are more accurate or more real than anyone else’s of your self? How do or can you determine whose feelings are accurate? Yours are too subjective, and theirs are too lacking in your experience. So which feelings are supposed to be you–yours, theirs, or a combination of both?
Can a feeling observe the self? If a feeling cannot observe the self, then how can a feeling know the self? If a feeling cannot know the self, then how can a feeling claim to represent the self? If a feeling cannot even represent the self, then how can a feeling claim to be the self?
Can the observer observe itself? Can your self observe itself? Who is it that observes the self and names the self as a feeling that is not observing the self?
Does the self see the self? Does the self name the self? If the self is seeing itself, then how can the self only be what is seen? If the self is naming itself as a feeling, then how can the self be the name of itself?
Prove that you can be feelings when feelings have variable expressions and are not limited to any one interpretation. Won’t everyone interpret your feelings differently? So which of the different interpretations are you? Prove yours are more real, accurate, knowing, or complete than everyone else’s combined.
Prove that you are in the present what you feel you were in the past just because you felt you were before. How does that follow logically? Isn’t that a non sequitur?
Since nothing, including you, can ever repeat, then how is it that you believe that you are something that has already occurred in the past? Are you what has happened that cannot happen again? Isn’t this just what you claim when you claim you are some feeling from the past?
How can you repeat being the feeling that you were feeling when that feeling you were feeling in the past is not here now, but you are here now?
Where is the evidence that the nonverbal self, the true self, can ever be known or captured by any feeling or emotion?
Prove that your ego is permanent. Isn’t it your assumption that your ego is permanent when you define and create it using feelings or emotions and memories of feelings or emotions? Are not all human feelings fleeting? Isn’t it true that anything experiential including feelings is impermanent? How can you make your self into what is no more? Are your feelings or emotions permanent?
Prove that you are one with your ego feelings or ego emotions. Aren’t you separate? Don’t you judge, choose, persecute, repress, praise, enjoy, suffer, and experience all manner of sensations in regard to your feelings and emotions? Aren’t you in the present and aren’t your feelings or emotions sometimes in the past; aren’t you sometimes in the present observing your feelings or emotions in the present; aren’t you sometimes in the present imagining your feelings or emotions in the future? When do these different times and realities meet and form you?
Where is the evidence that your relationship with the world is a feeling? Is this not what you claim when you think of yourself in relation to your experiences as some feeling or emotion?
Where is the evidence that your fixed feelings about your self are part of your fixed feelings about your relationship with the world? That is, how do your feelings about yourself become your feelings about the world, and vice versa?
Does your self exist in two separate worlds? Does your self exist in the world of feelings about yourself and in the world of feelings about the world? Can your self exist in both of these worlds at the same time? What happens to your self when these worlds collide?
Where is the evidence that your feeling about another person is a part of your feelings about your relationship with that person? That is, how does your feeling about yourself and your feeling about another become your feelings about your relationship with that person? Does this amalgamation transform either your self or their self?
Where is the proof that your self is the separation, the individuation of your feelings about yourself from your feelings about your relationship with the world? In other words, by what logic do you claim that you are more your self-feelings than you are your social-feelings?
Prove the reality of any fixed feelings about yourself–enmeshed with feelings about others or differentiated feelings from others? That is, are fixed feelings (e.g., ego-feelings or self-esteem feelings) anything more than imagination, than imagined realities that have no substance, form, or direct relation to a self existing in the real world (outside of the mind or imagination)?
Prove the reality of the imagined relationships of ego-feelings or self-esteem feelings? That is, is the relating of ego-feelings (e.g., self-downing) any more than imagination? Your social-feelings are imagined realities that have no substance, form, or direct correlation in the real world (outside of the human mind): they are just Maya.
Where is the evidence that you are a god who can create themselves out of feelings or emotions? Isn’t self-esteem just fanciful emoting?
Prove that you are omniscient and omnipresent. Prove that your senses are omnidirectional. Obviously, you can’t. Hence, all your claims for feelings are limited and at best only arbitrary. If they are limited, then your self is limited by them. If your self is limited by them, then what happens to the parts of your self that are left out of your feelings? If your feelings or emotions are limited, then how can they honestly be the complete, full, or total you?
Please show us your logical system for determining your ego. What? You have none! You mean to say that if you are honest, then you must admit that you determine what your self is without rhyme or reason? Then how can the self you fabricate be fair, honest, or real?
When did you study and learn a system of self-esteem feelings that would at least more often than not provide an accurate picture of you? You mean to say that you decide who and what you are without anything more than circumstance, emotion, and whim to guide you? Then surely you cannot take the resulting nonsense seriously!
Do you magically become whatever it is you feel that you are? Do others also magically become the feelings or emotions that you feel they are? Does the world become the feelings that you feel it is?
I suppose it is not superstitious to think that if someone does not like you that you have become some bad feeling. I suppose it is not superstitious to think that if you are having a bad day that it is because you are a bad feeling. I suppose it is not superstitious to think that if you have some bad feeling that that makes you a bad feeling.
When do all the feelings about a university become that university? That is if we collect all of the feelings about anything and put them into one place, will we then have that thing? No. Yet, you do not bother to collect all of the feelings about your self into one place. No. You can take any one feeling and claim that it is you whenever you desire to. Great job. Yes, humans are quite rational.

The above was excerpted and modified from the first edition of Planet Earth Insane Asylum for the Universe: The First Report to the 2000 High Council. It was further modified for Planet Earth: Insane Asylum for the Universe, 2nd Ed..

Read and discover the best journaling system to reduce and remove your ego.

Quotations Various Sources

“After all, conflict arises, does it not, through the desire to be something, to be other than what is.” —J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, p. 349

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” —Edgar Allan Poe

“And it is impossible to treat human beings as human beings if you label them, if you term them, if you give them a name as Hindus, Russians, or what you will. It is so much easier to label people, for then you can pass by and kick them, drop a bomb on India or Japan.” —J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, p. 66

“Are we extensions of our cars or are they extensions of our self-esteem?” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice

“[REBT] Attempts to help humans eliminate all self-ratings and views self-esteem as a self-defeating concept that encourages them to make conditional evaluations of self. Instead, it teaches people unconditional self-acceptance.” —Albert Ellis, The Practice of Rational Emotive Therapy, p. 61

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” —Dr. Seuss

“Buddha said that life is suffering. However, life is not suffering; ego is suffering.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice

“But inwardly we are as corrupt as the person who sits in an office and plans war—because, we want to be somebody in the family, in a group, in society, in the nation.” —J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume V, p. 339

“But precisely this—not to be conscious of oneself as spirit—is despair.” —Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 44

“That which is real is not the continuation of identifying memory.” —J. Krishnamurti, The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti, Volume IV, p. 53

“Self-esteem steals souls.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice

Read and discover the best journaling system to reduce and remove your ego.

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