Will the real me stand up please,

I see it happening in my 10 month old granddaughter, Sujin. The development of an individual personality. A set of cultural practices and norms she is taking onboard that will equip her socially as she grows toward adulthood. Like a jigsaw that is slowly coming together; her mothers smile, her father's quiet gentleness, her own growing sense of self awareness and importance with in the family, etc,etc.When she was born hers was a world that's borders were largely closed to us. At first we couldn't laugh together or communicate joy or sadness or personal need, or anything. She was Gods creation, born for eternity, but like a tourist from another planet who knew nothing of our culture or our ways.

I know from our own recent travels through Central Asia and across the Tibetan Plateau how totally out of it you can feel. You don't know the language, you have no idea what food to eat. You don't know the social norms and you can't even find your way to the bathroom! Its a feeling of total dependency and helplessness. Like that of a baby. And yet to survive, you need to build your own persona, a social identiikit, a construct through which you can relate to the world around you, even though your visit there may be only for a limited time. So it was for us as travelers, and If you have any belied in life after death, so it is for each one of us on planet earth. We are born with a unique (eternal) and individual personality onto which we must weld one that's more temporal and useful for the culture in which we must survive.

So which is our real (true self) identity?

The one we were born with (and will probably return to when we die), or the one we develop during our comparatively short time here? The identity which for want of a better term we call our ego, or by comparison, false self.

It's a question I have been struggling with over the past several months as I've cared for Sujin and observed this process unfolding before me. And its a question a fellow blogger from Stockholm has mentioned to me only to day. Talking of this process in her own life she says, 'It is an ongoing struggle of becoming more and more of our true selves'.

Though it's a blinding revelation to me this concept of true self / false self is not a discovery I can claim as unique. As I Google the phrase I see that religious and philosophical scholars have been using the term and discussing this paradox for years. So who am I to try to clarify the issue.

For me these are important considerations though as I work through the personal issues of my new lifestyle. So for myself, and possibly my fellow blogger, it's more a question of how to hold both of these identities, the true and the false self in some sort of healthy tension. How to know our real eternal value as a child of God/Allah/Yahweh with out believing too much, the publicity of our own burgeouning ego.

And I used to think life would become less complicated the older I became!