¶ … social world. • Apply life, including -concept, -esteem, -Efficacy. • Describe social experiences affected personal development. Personal Reflection on the Self

He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a bracing air. One must be made for it, otherwise the danger is no small one of catching cold in it. The ice is near, the loneliness is tremendous -- but how peacefully all things lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath oneself!

Nietzsche

I would like to start by introducing a life fact I read while documenting for this essay. I find the bigger picture in the story to be revealing in regards to our status as social beings. It went like this: an adventurer set on establishing a record at sea, left the east cost of the United States in his rather simple craft and sailed for about 2 months across the Atlantic by himself. Just as people started to wonder whether or not he was still alive, reporters spotted him off the Irish coast and, as he sat foot on the ground, asked him what had he learned from his solitary journey. His answer: I learned a lot about people. This goes to show that whatever is exterior to us comes from the inside as well, as contradicting as it may sound.

It is often that we reflect on ourselves, that we analyze our thoughts and feelings in terms of understanding how our mind and conscience function when reported to the outer world and we need not sail across oceans to find the time for that. This, after all, is what separates us from other living beings like animals, for example: self-awareness, the ability to distinguish...

The self has been the topic of philosophical discussions since ages. Nietzche valued the role and importance of the self in society and he believed that, in order for a society to function properly, every human being has to work on the character and to mold it according to developing standards constantly. No man or woman could ever achieve that without a disciplined sense of self-awareness and valuable conduct. On the other hand, Buddhism touches the topic of the self slightly different. In fact, in the Pali canon, where the Buddha is asked about the existence of the self, there is no straightforward answer and the reluctancy to provide one is seemingly because ?to hold either that there is a self or that there is no self is to fall into extreme forms of wrong view that make the path of Buddhist practice imposible?
, which is a rather vague statement especially because, since most religions believe in an after life, and Buddhism is not the exception, then what else, if not the self, is eternal? However, Buddhism aims, if such a self should exist, at renouncing it, being either that which separates one from another or the interconnected self. Of course, this is strictly related to the elimination of any form of self identification which the Buddhist practitioners regard as the primal source of all suffering.

The two aforementioned versions of the self are merely to introduce some thoughts on the idea that opinions diverge largely due to one's experience with life and culture. Many times we take old forms of tradition and…