When I think about my past self I create a large secondself structure of ideas, feelings, and beliefs which anchor me to the illusion of an “existence” beyond my moment. In this incantation, I unravel them with a real example. The example I use is my distinct memory of a project I spent hours on creating a fantasy world when I was between 10 and 12 years old called “Maracia”.
I imagine a timeline and space. If I am reflecting on my youth, then I construct a larger timeline and place myself within it. I believe that I was 10 years old, it was 1990, and these events occurred in a larger chronological framework stretching backward into the past, and forward into the future.
I imagine myself in the third person. I do not recall my experience from my first-person perspective. It is more of a collage of feelings with still images of my 10-year-old self from the third-person perspective. I imagine myself as a boy I have seen in pictures.
I imagine peripheral noise. To this memory, I add all the environmental noise and associated contexts. My interests at the time, the popular trends among my friends, and a larger world I imagine to have existed. Details are fuzzy; it is more of an ambiance.
I introduce presentist notions. I reflect on who and what I was at the time in terms of who and what I believe I am now.
I introduce demiscience. For example, when I think back to when I began searching for a “theory of everything”, I imagine a set of people and principles beyond my imaginary then-self.
The thing to note here is that a simple self-reflection can grow and expand in countless directions. One of the more challenging activities of self-reproportioning is distilling down my self-reflection by removing the ambient sensations, and withdrawing from it altogether. There was no past me that existed separate from my moment.
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