Thoughts on whether you can be good and still be yourself
Can you be good and still be yourself? Or when you are going to do good do you need to act like a different person? Do you feel you are being yourself by doing good, or do you feel you are being who you should be? There is a difference. I believe that when you are not being yourself but acting as you "should", then you will be doing what you think is good. Your action is based on a belief. The good is in this case something external and foreign to us, something that is outside, something that we learned or that we were taught, it is a concept, it is the idea that we should be in a certain way that we are not. It's an idea that came from outside and something or someone put in our head. Because otherwise, if the good came from within us, if we had a connection to the good, then we wouldn't have to be someone else to be good, we could be ourselves. And if you feel that you are yourself when you do good, then you are doing what you feel is good. Knowledge comes in this case from an intuition, from a presentiment of what is good.
And although I usually give a lot of importance to reason and the rational, I believe that our mind and our reason are more fallible than our intuition, because intuition, when we feel it, takes into account things that we know unconsciously, while our reason only works with what happens in our conscious mind, and that limits it.
So, when we do the right thing simply because we think it is right, I think I would be careful and self-reflective, to realize and have the discernment to know if that is truly right. Our mind can be easily deceived, and we may be believing that we should be, not what is good in reality, but what is good for the people who put this idea of good in our head. "Be obedient" can be a great example of this. "To whom? " is the question. But again, if you feel that's a good thing, then it can be a good thing for you.
I personally believe that doing good has a lot to do with feeling that what you are doing is right, because good is something very circumstantial and therefore varies depending on countless factors. What is good sometimes is not always good, I think. But if you feel that what you are doing is right, then somehow you know it is. That is why it is said love and do what you will. If you feel it, it's right, and if you don't feel it, it's probably not.
I think it all comes down to having the level of self-knowledge, self-awareness and self-reflection to discern when we are being ourselves and when we are not, when we are doing what we feel is right, and when we are doing what we think we should be doing. Although of course, I think the best is when we do what we think and feel is right, when there is no disconnection or contradiction.
Now, I am not saying that what is right is something that we subjectively decide, that is not true, what I am saying is that we recognize what is truly good in our particular circumstance through our intuition, through the feeling that it is indeed good. So... can you reconcile being yourself with being good?
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