Who are you?
You were brought up by your parents or one of them, or by someone else. These people moulded your behaviour, your responses, your likes and dislikes, your prejudices. You probably had teachers for years. To what extent did their attitudes influence you?
Is it possible that you see the world the way you want it to be? What about aspects of the world about which you can have no direct perception; things such as the atoms and molecules you are made of?
You only know of this level of reality because other people tell you it exists. You have no direct experience of it. You can learn through studying or reading or listening to people, that there are processes going on in your body that change the food you eat into a different form through the breaking up and reorganising of molecules. Whether you know it or not, such things on and are the basis for life.
Who do you think you are?
Who is the you able to contemplate and respond to these questions? Is it separate from your mind? Does it dwell in your mind? If your mind is you, how do you relate to your feelings and emotions?
Who do you think you are?
Descartes is often quoted for his famous “I think, therefore I am”. Is it the thinking that creates me? Is the fact that I think, proof of my existence? Interesting questions.
The Book of Lies
Mary Horlock
Text Publishing 2011
ISBN: 9781921758102
$32.95
288 pp
Mary Horlock twists her yarns expertly into the strands that form the lay of rope that winds its way through a difficult, interconnected past and present on the Island of Guernsey. She tackles aspects of the Nazi occupation in the Second World War and the struggles of a teenage girl more than forty years later. Horlock uses her extensive and intimate knowledge of the island and its people, along with an understanding of teenage angst and imagination, to give us an inspired tale of family frictions, loyalties, courage, deception and betrayal, loss, love and loneliness.