Title: A Meditation, Whose Purpose is to Help You Learn About Your Self

Creator: Sam Kagan

Category: Mind

Creator Commentary:

This guided meditation aims to help people learn about themselves, through the language they use to describe their surroundings and situations that might trigger their emotions. It can be thought of as a response to personality quizzes, which premise themselves on being able to quantify or objectify someone’s inner life. I certainly see it this way, but I also view it as a response to those premises themselves, in whatever form they may take.

This meditation attempts to demonstrate that one does not need to pin down or conceptualize personality in terms of discrete traits or types, or even to think of one’s self as having a personality, to understand and learn about that self. One may not even need language to do so, but language is a useful tool to guide people in such a process, so I use it anyways. Similarly, writing may also be unnecessary, but it gives people a familiar way to begin. Identity and self are notions that resist simple interpretation, and this meditation tries to help people see theirs more complexly.

Submission:

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Creator Bio:

Sam Kagan is a junior Computer Science major with an English minor. Academically, his interests include how language and the concepts we construct from it shape our world, mathematical analysis, how incredibly complex systems operate at their most fundamental levels, how and why oppression remains widespread, reasoning about algorithms and computer programs, artificial intelligence, and how to get people to see video-games as an artistic medium with works worthy of literary analysis. He spends much of his spare time watching TV and playing video-games.