Individual Self Research Articles

Makna Teologi Buddha Djawi Wisnu Dalam Kitab Weddo Djojo Sampurno

Djawi Vishnu Buddhists’ belief teaches its followers to respect and love those who intercede for God's will as a result the individual self exists in this world. If there is an imbalance between the Bhuwana Agung (the universe) and Bhuwana Alit (the human self) a catastrophe can occur in the lives of Djawi Vishnu Buddhists. The text of the Weddo Djojo Sampurno book contains several quotes that emphasize the beauty of nature as a reflection of the Bhuwana Agung and the sincerity of meditation as a reflection of Bhuwana Alit. This aims of this study is to figure out the Buddhist theology of Djawi Vishnu as a discourse of worship presented to Gusti Hulun Hyang Bhatara Wisnu in his manifestation as the ruler of the universe based on love and compassion. The love and affection intended are capable of loving oneself or Ingsun who is aware of the existence of the universe as a place to interact with other living things. The theory applied in this study is the semiotic theory proposed by Roland Barthes in terms of the meaning of the second level. The data being applied was qualitative data. Further, primary data sources are manuscripts, Weddo Djojo Sampurno books and secondary data sources include research results, books, internet sources. The research instruments were a dictionary as a medium for translating Javanese text into the target language translation. At the stage of presenting the results of this research data analysis were analyzed using formal methods and informal methods. As a result, it was found that the sincerity of meditation based on compassion as a form of controlling the concentration of the mind towards Gusti was aimed at the highest awareness. It is when humans are able to realize who they are and focus their minds on one single goal (moksa) to unite with Hyang Gusti.

Temper Tantrums and Breath-Holding Spells

Temper Tantrums and Breath-Holding Spells

The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche

The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche

Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker

Reviewed by: Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza Michael Jimenez (bio) Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker. Feminist Press, 2020. Pp. 184. Cristina Rivera Garza's book of essays Grieving opens with violence in Mexico against journalists as a context to comprehend global horrors against the bodies of the most vulnerable. In this sense, Garza's book is another study of the horror in recent Mexican history that has led to a deeper analysis of femicide. The subtitle would make Mexico the wounded country. However, Garza does not isolate violence in Mexico but looks at its global connections. She asks: "Can writing keep us company—we, the broken ones still alive with rage and hope" (7)? This is a personal question for Garza, who lost her younger sister to domestic violence (8–9). As she comments, "the violence of our contemporary history has never been foreign to me" (72). The rage from this event, in light of the callous indifference and ignorance of elected officials toward our contemporary horrorism, fuels the essays of Garza's book. The forgetfulness toward violence comes with ignoring history. Garza declares: "Awake, history hungrily moves through the city streets or countryside. Sleepless jaws. History reminds us, as always, that we are mortal. That there are things left unresolved" (27). In a short poetic essay, "Horrorism," Garza builds off concrete history to espouse an "ontology of vulnerability" that does not allow [End Page 113] human beings to forget that we are beings-in-relation, charged with caring for one another (98–99). She continues this train of thought about vulnerability in an essay titled "Mourning," featuring the theoretical work of Judith Butler (135–38). The Other person can't help but change us, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, questioning the stability of the individual self in the first place. For example, it is impossible to think that Garza would be the same after losing her sister to violence. Garza points out that this is especially relevant for women's history: "It was a world founded on women's silence. It was a world that required the most intimate silence from women—their demise—to keep functioning" (153). One way to deal with this forced silence is public mourning. The public nature of this event makes us "more vulnerable" and "more human" (138). Garza leans on the classic works on pain and horror by Elaine Scarry and Adriana Cavarero. The fact that these are not new studies reveals that the "frightening grind of femicide" has been around "for decades" (151). However, what differentiates Garza's book from others is the inclusion of literary and historical sources from Latin America. For example, one essay, "Writing in Migration: A Desedimentation with Chilean writer Lina Meruane," features a juxtaposition of Meruane's experience with Garza's (139–46). The comparison begins with both sets of grandparents and their migratory journeys; Meruane's traveled from Palestine to Chile and Garza's from Mexico to the United States. Garza utilizes this idea as a way to discuss how language, both bodily and verbal, carries over to their progeny. This is oftentimes an unconscious inheritance. Both Meruane and Garza physically return to the place of origins and attempt to retrace the steps. The closing section of this chapter has some of the best lines in the book. Here is just a sample: "There is always someone who has migrated before.… There is no tabula rasa. We are just guests on the surface of a land that we experience in common" (146). As in the Meruane chapter, Garza's work continually circles back to Mexico, yet many essays have a global scope. In "Writing against War," Garza links the violence in Mexico with the war in Bosnia, wondering if both stories of violence will ultimately be forgotten (147–50). In addition, Garza references the people disappeared during the Cold War with special focus on the mothers of the disappeared. In short, femicide and the grief that accompany it are a worldwide problem that should not be separated by fictitious borders. On the one hand, what I find compelling about Garza's method...

The slow but persistent self-improvement boosts group cooperation

Prevalence of cooperation within groups of selfish individuals is puzzling in that it contradicts with the basic premise of natural selection. Grasping the force that fosters and sustains cooperative behaviors is thus of central importance for the understandings of how companies develop and how societies thrive. In this paper, by means of evolutionary game theory, we refresh the strategy updating rule to be matched with a more realistic scenario where individuals choose someone excellent as the role model and improve themselves continuously to narrow the gap. Under the force of role model, individuals adjust their instantaneous strategy with the increment δ in the next continuous M time steps. And a new role model needs to be selected unless its payoff is more than the focal player’s. The computer simulation results illustrate that the self-improvement driven by role model facilitate group cooperation significantly, and the slow but persistent self-improvement performs better. Therefore, in order to achieve higher enterprise performance and build a more harmonious society, managers and government officials should spare no effort to encourage people to keep improving themselves to keep up with their role models.

포스트 코로나 시대의 국내 영문학교육: 트릴링의 문학교육관을 중심으로

This paper tries to apply Lionel Trilling’s liberal views on literary education, which characterize his later thought, to the practice of English literary teaching in higher education in the post-Covid Korean society. Trilling argues that literary teachers must help (undergraduate) students dialectically form their own selves through and against the subversive modernist texts. The reading of literary text, especially that of the novels, contributes to the formation of an autonomous self by cultivating moral realism, liberal imagination and egalitarian and pluralistic fellow-feeling that is required in democratic society. This formation of an autonomous self has a vital importance in that it is linked to the formation of autonomous individual selves equipped with realism, flexibility, respect for diversity and democratic fellow-feeling in this post-Covid society rapidly polarizing into individual selfishness and collective madness. Likewise, teachers of English literature in higher education of today can contribute to the formation of autonomous individual selves compatible with the modern liberal society by fully foregrounding the subversiveness of social constructivism in critical theories, encouraging and respecting the students’ own judgment resulting from their wrestling with those subversive texts and directing their attention, especially in their teaching of the novels, to the protagonist’s struggle and fortitude, to the characters’ moral judgments and different, autonomous and equivalent fates.

Ngiyabonga belungu bami

Considering how Black People are often seen/unseen as a monolith of ‘Black Bodies’ in township spaces in South Africa, I attempt tounpack what it looks like for Black People to blend into or stand out from contradictory, collective-led definitions of who/what Black people are in these spaces. By exploring where the individual Black Self meets the collective and how this delineation is blurred, I aim to delve further into notions of individuality and how these seep into a real or imagined whole. What does it take to be ‘kasi’? Whowants to be known as ‘kasi’? Who is ‘uDarkie ekasi’? As an arts practitioner developing an interdisciplinary praxis, I’m keen to explore these kinds of identity politics through the lens of translanguaging and township-based experiences and expressions. My aim is for this text to offer alternative insights into the intersection of ‘Black Bodies,’ the various notions associated with how ‘Black People’ are perceived, and their self-perceptions within township spaces.

Exploring identity positionings in scholarly texts on management

Abstract Background and research aims Since scholarly texts on management have been criticised as being no longer effective in communicating today's changing sociocultural, disciplinary, and practical contexts, my purpose in this paper is to conceptualise the identity options management authors can assume to communicate disciplinary knowledge and beliefs. Theoretical perspective The theoretical perspectives involved in this analysis include selected aspects of Harré and van Langenhove's (1999) positioning theory that I linked with my model of writer identity as a trichotomy of selves (individual self, collective self, depersonalised self), textually conveyed in the three types of voice (Lehman, 2018; Lehman and Sułkowski, 2020). Key findings Based on this conceptual framework, specific advice is provided as to how academics can create a reader-inclusive or authoritative writer persona in their texts. In doing so, I support the recent efforts in Critical Management Studies (CMS) to ‘write differently’ in order to address the aesthetic, moral, and political concerns of writing in the field.

You (plural): Political configurations of punk’s DIY ethos

This article traces the evolution of punk’s do it yourself (DIY) ethos from an emphasis on individualist-contrarian to collectivist-participatory forms following its initial commercial period (c. 1977–80). The focus is on 1980s American hardcore as locus of shifts in music content, media production and distribution, and venue infrastructure, which together developed and ultimately linked local punk scenes into a national and international network. The article identifies ‘punk comradeship’ as the mechanism of social enculturation that reorients punk into an inclusionary, activist endeavour working in its own interests rather than those of the culture industry. The contemporary relevance of punk’s commitment to institution building is considered in the context of increasing dominance of biopolitics and reformatting of the DIY ethos as the entrepreneurial curation of individual selves.

Прощение как встреча и как прощание: философско-антропологический анализ

Due to the way people, culture, value orientations of the current generation are changing, the moral and moral grounds for the formation of a socio-cultural background, the purpose of the study is to study the need to preserve traditional humanistic values in the information society era. At the same time, the main categories of ethics (following society) are undergoing global transformations. As a consequence, the result of the work is the assumption of the need to recognize the importance of traditional moral and moral pillars of personality development, in particular the importance of forgiveness as one of the markers of moral education of a person for the possible preservation of individual selfhood, since it is in the process of communication that a person is able to discover his true nature, or essence, thanks to the opportunity to make a moral choice between forgiveness or by unforgiveness, thus revealing oneself to the present for the other or in relation to the other.

Electrophysiological Markers of Fairness and Selfishness Revealed by a Combination of Dictator and Ultimatum Games.

Individual behavior during financial decision making is motivated by fairness, but an unanswered question from previous studies is whether particular patterns of brain activity correspond to different profiles of fairness. Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 39 participants who played the role of allocators in a Dictator Game (DG) and responders in an Ultimatum Game (UG). Two very homogeneous groups were formed by fair and selfish individuals. At fronto-central cortical sites, the latency of ERP early negativity (N1) was 10 ms shorter in selfish participants than in fair participants. In fair DG players, the subsequent positive wave P2 suggested that more cognitive resources were required when they allocated the least gains to the other party. P2 latency and amplitude in the selfish group supported the hypothesis that these participants tended to maximize their profit. During UG, we observed that medial frontal negativity (MFN) occurred earlier and with greater amplitude when selfish participants rejected less favorable endowment shares. In this case, all players received zero payoffs, which showed that MFN in selfish participants was associated with a spiteful punishment. At posterior-parietal sites, we found that the greater the selfishness, the greater the amplitude of the late positive component (LPC). Our results bring new evidence to the existence of specific somatic markers associated with the activation of distinct cerebral circuits by the evaluation of fair and unfair proposals in participants characterized by different expressions of perceived fairness, thus suggesting that a particular brain dynamics could be associated with moral decisions.

Review: Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels, by Pamela J. Prickett

In this engaging ethnographic account of an African American masjid in South Central Los Angeles, Pamela J. Prickett explores how Islam is a complete “way of life” that provides guidance on religious practices, community engagement, economic concerns, political activism, and racial justice (2). Prickett expands on Saba Mahmood’s work (2005) by centering on how Islamic practices, not only beliefs, are ways to embody a pious individual self but also to cultivate a more ethical community. In the context of South Central LA, piety “involves the cultivation of virtues that must be achieved through engagement with others” (3). Prickett’s intimate and honest accounting of the conflicts within this community of African American Muslims addresses how working through these struggles is a way for the members to grow closer to God (11).Throughout the book, Pricket astutely presents the specific concerns of this particular Muslim community, such as the racism they face both in United States society and within Muslim American communities, the political and economic struggles, plus the criticism and ignorance they face from Black Christians. This Muslim community is met with a particular challenge to support the significant needs of the South Central LA community. While they seek to help the community with resources, the Muslims are reluctant to let negative forces into the masjid, such as drugs, violence, and sexuality.These conflicts over how to serve the community are the heart of chapter 1, in which Prickett discusses the “symbolic boundary marking” (24) of the members. She explains, “they are pulled by religious obligation to focus on helping the less fortunate in the immediate neighborhood, yet they are pushed by a desire for righteousness to disassociate from people they deem of the hood” (22). She makes an important distinction in this chapter that the members are aware of the institutional barriers to escaping poverty, but they don’t look to religion as a way to magically escape their current conditions. Belief is not about achieving material wealth, as might be preached in Christian prosperity churches, but rather, as Prickett observes, “belief motivating them to move toward something deeper, more existential in character” (28).Chapter 2 uses the death of Imam W. D. Mohammed in 2008 as a jumping off point to examine the transformation of African American Muslims from the Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam. The significant leadership role of Mohammed is shamefully ignored in U.S. religious history. Prickett also discusses the financial collapse of the Nation after Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975. In chapter 3, she discusses economics: the entrepreneurial projects of the masjid members, the financial struggles of the masjid, and the economic anxieties of the members who live in precarity. Rather than concentrate on poverty and suffering, however, Prickett provides a nuanced analysis of how “money is funny” in this community.Chapter 4 focuses on gender dynamics. While the sermons emphasize that men and women have distinct roles—granting men authority in the mosque and women responsibilities in the domestic space—the African American Muslim women often create their own female networks of support and do not rely on men. Finally, chapter 5 explores class issues, specifically the scrutiny that African American Muslims often face from immigrant Muslims of Arab and South Asian backgrounds. While the ideal is that Islam is a religion without racial hierarchies, immigrant Muslims see the advantages of participating in the American project of anti-Black racism. Through personal stories of institutional racism and micro-aggressions in the mosques, Prickett describes the personal harm of racism and classism, especially when it defines Black Muslims as less pious.Much has been written about the spiritual lives of African Americans, from work on the Black Church, emerging from enslavement, to the Nation of Islam and other Black nationalist religious-political movements. Prickett offers a needed contribution to this literature in her discussion of the religious lives and identities of Black Muslims in the post-NOI era. Another strength of this volume is Prickett’s appealing writing style that is supported by the close connections formed with members of the masjid and her honest reflections of her own positions as a White, non-Muslim researcher. This up-front and at times self-deprecating style allows Prickett to explore the debates and struggles within this masjid. In turn, readers gain an understanding of how Islam is lived out in South Central LA.

Communal recognition and human flourishing: a Kierkegaardian account

ABSTRACT Recent debates over the role of recognition by the community for one’s development and flourishing generally discuss community in a univocal sense: the way that recognition functions in particular communities is not fundamentally different from the way it functions in the larger community. They also tend to logically prioritize a fundamental human identity over particular religious, ethnic, or societal identities, which are understood to be secondary to, and derivative of, this basic identity. In his depiction of how communal recognition contributes to individual selfhood, Søren Kierkegaard challenges these accounts by (1) differentiating between how communal recognition occurs in society in general and in one particular community, the Christian church and (2) questioning the idea that the self created in the former is more fundamental than that created in the latter. For Kierkegaard, one’s identities as both a Christian and a fully-developed self depend essentially on recognition by the Other: initially and fundamentally on recognition by God alone, and secondarily and derivatively on recognition by the human Other.

Exploration of self- and world-experiences in depersonalization traits

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a qualitative study exploring anomalous self and world-experiences in individuals with high levels of depersonalization experiences. Depersonalization (DP) is a condition characterized by distressing feelings of being a detached, neutral and disembodied onlooker of one’s mental and bodily processes. Our findings indicate the presence of a wide range of anomalous experiences traditionally understood to be core features of DP, such as disembodiment and disrupted self-awareness. However, our results also indicate experiential features that are less highlighted in previous work, such as faster time perception and blurriness of the self/other boundaries which may play a key role in altering one’s sense of self and sense of presence in the world. Our qualitative study provides an in-depth examination of self-reported disturbances of one’s relatedness to one’s self and the world, thereby shedding further light on the nature of altered subjective experiences in DP. In doing so, this paper draws attention to key aspects yet overlooked that may prove valuable for shedding further light into the phenomenon of depersonalization. We conclude by highlighting limitations of this study and a number of open questions that further work needs to address in the future.

Lived beliefs

AbstractRapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) poetry allows us to understand how lived beliefs can be central to the realization of the individual self in community. In this paper, we focus on the poetry of Mata-U’iroa Atan, a Rapa Nui poet who characterizes his political project as walking to fly like a bird. His poemKi Te Reva(‘To the Flag’) exemplifies a particular form of corporeal consciousness leading to a project of political persuasion. His poems are written in Rapa Nui, an indigenous Polynesian language and draw attention to sociolinguistic and historical “disjunctures” (Meek, 2010) in contemporary Rapa Nui community life. We argue that lived beliefs are produced by corporeal consciousness, and verbal art can be central to the mobilization of lived beliefs in the process of persuasion for emancipatory praxis. Poetry can give people an imagination, and this imagination is constitutive of a kind of truth underlying political projects.

Self-Hierarchy in Perceptual Matching: Variations in Different Processing Stages

People have three cognitive representations of the self, namely, the individual, relational, and collective selves (CS), which are indispensable components of selfhood but not necessarily given equal preference. Previous studies found that people displayed varied self-hierarchy in miscellaneous tasks involving different research materials that had pre-existing learned associations established over long periods of time. Therefore, this study tries to explore a purer self-hierarchy without the influence of research materials, using perceptual matching tasks. The behavioral and event-related potentials’ (ERPs) findings showed that people recognized information association with their individual self (IS) faster compared with their relational (RS) and CS. Smaller N2, stronger P3 and late positive complex (LPC) amplitudes were evoked during IS compared with RS and CS. However, the three selves evoked equal P2 amplitudes at the early processing stage. Moreover, CS showed a weaker advantage than RS, demonstrating a longer reaction time, lower d prime, and weaker P3 and LPC amplitudes in the parietal region. Overall, self-hierarchy during simple perceptual processing manifested as IS > RS > CS at the late processing stage but manifested as IS = RS = CS at the early processing stage. Self-hierarchy varies according to the processing stage, even without meaningful information and during the simple perception processing. This result provides direct evidence that all selves can be tagged with neutral actions, which would fit the idea of an organism attuned to self-survival at multiple processing levels.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL NATURE OF “WATER”: FROM UPANISHADS TO EARLY TAOISM SCRIPTURES

India and China are two important ancient civilizations with a long history and profound philosophies in the world. There are some similar descriptions of water in both cultures, especially in their philosophies. The “water” was considered as the original source of everything, and one of the five elements, also a manifestation of Ultimate Reality, and the forms of water often compared with the river as the individual self and the sea as the Ultimate reality. This paper will analyze the inherent meaning of “water” in the early scriptures of the two countries, and compare the similarities and differences of "water" in the two cultures based on Upanishads in ancient Indian philosophy, Tao Te Ching, and Zhuangzi in early Taoism philosophy.

Early exclusion leads to cyclical cooperation in repeated group interactions.

Explaining the emergence and maintenance of cooperation among selfish individuals from an evolutionary perspective remains a grand challenge in biology, economy and social sciences. Social exclusion is believed to be an answer to this conundrum. However, previously related studies often assume one-shot interactions and ignore how free-riding is identified, which seem to be too idealistic. In this work, we consider repeated interactions where excluders need to pay a monitoring cost to identify free-riders for exclusion and free-riders cannot participate in the following possible game interactions once they are identified and excluded by excluders in the repeated interaction process. We reveal that the introduction of such exclusion can prevent the breakdown of cooperation in repeated group interactions. In particular, we demonstrate that an evolutionary oscillation among cooperators, defectors and excluders can appear in infinitely large populations when early exclusion is implemented. In addition, we find that the population spends most of the time in states where cooperators dominate for early exclusion when stochastic mutation-selection is considered in finite populations. Our results highlight that early exclusion is successful in solving the mentioned enigma of cooperation in repeated group interactions.

The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche: Thinking Differently, Feeling Differently

The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche: Thinking Differently, Feeling Differently

Archival Virtue: Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives

Archival Virtue: Relationship, Obligation, and the Just Archives