The Paradox of Self in the Imagination of Goa Trance: The Trancer

Persona

Vision is our main sense and the window to our innermost experience of self but we insist in hiding the object of our perception under extra perspectives and ideas that don’t actually add to the thing as it necessarily is. Be it an outer or inner object of our self-perception, this process of trying to find who we are blocks us from knowing it. The development of comfortable ideas and practice of defence behaviour mechanisms to protect and show to others that we know who we are creates our own delusions. We trick ourselves and adopt matching personas (Jung, 1989) to produce the empathic levels required for connecting with others in a conceptual standpoint, building up the minimal confidence which allows for the exchange of trust. This is done on emotion, taste and interest, coming from personal notions of self or from other selves with whom we have some kind of affection; adopting traits and shared cultural experiences and what we think the self might be in our psychological understanding. We eventually end up hiding ourselves in the process, as if we’re trying to run from who we are, searching for something we believe to be more interesting or appropriate, forgetting there’s nothing more appropriate then who we genuinely are and how that is more interesting than any of the other versions we create for our own being, in its own relation to and with all others in the world. We must be honest! We have to come clean and really observe these innermost experiences to get to know our own true self. We have to see!