1908
My name is Steve, and I don’t exist in the way that the English language would lead me to believe.
I’m made up of numerous little Steves who take turns in the driver’s seat. There’s the Steve who wants to drink vast quantities of wine and beer. There’s the Steve who wants to smoke a cigar, although these first two are pretty close to one and the same guy.
There’s the Steve who loves art and has actually swooned in the presence of a painting, the one who wants to make art just as good, the one who thinks that would be an awful lot of work so it would be best to start it later, the one who finds physics and philosophy very interesting, the one who loves his family and friends, the one who resents obligations and responsibilities, the one who thinks his taste in clothes is indisputably the best, and for all the right reasons, the one who worries about the environment, and the one who believes that there is only one Steve. This last one also rides shotgun with all the others. These are some of my nafs.
Carl Jung would call the nafs complexes, an idea he shared with Freud. Jung also stressed that complexes are merely heuristics – believing in their independent existence won’t help the situation.
As far as I know, the Sufis see the nafs mostly as unworthy, carnal aspects of the ego, but there’s probably a lot more to it than that. Nonetheless, the unworthy ones are certainly the most obvious. The nafs I disapprove of in myself are by far the easiest ones to see as not actually being me.
But naturally enough, I’m prone to find the most flattering explanation to be the one that is most probably true. This is simply a function of Armstrong’s Bin. Who doesn’t want to think of themselves as a curious, artistic, responsible, loving person. That’s a lot better than being a vain, resentful, procrastinating substance abuser.
If I were to see all my proclivities as not me, I would find that there is nothing left. There is also a threatened little Steve who thinks that’s frightening. This one is standing in the way of progress.
It seems that my accomplishments are, in a way, the achievements of a termite colony. As my grandmother used to say, “Fancy that”.
wegway 
Thanks – how could I not relate to this … as somebody who tries to combine spam poetry and physics. In the past I tried to separate my nafs by running different websites dedicated to “science” versus “weird”.
My usual confession about my learning experience: I had to google ‘Nafs’. I like Amstrong’s Bin a lot – it seems much more useful than Ockham’s Razor 😉
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Your compliments have got me thinking that Ockham’s razor might sometimes just be a rationalization for delusion, the corollary being that Armstrong’s Bin is way better. My Bin is functioning, all is well. Things are very complicated.
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It seems you’ve bought the line that a resentful, vain, substance abusing person is unworthy. You have inhaled it. Me too. Sigh. Let this one rise or fall in the bin. No matter. Rising is good. Falling is bad. Duality bad. HAH! Aarifa
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HAH to you too. I’m the one who gets to decide whether or not I am a poor wretch in need of something amazing. My vanity convinces me that all my sins are venial. There isn’t a mortal one in the lot. And agreed, duality bad.
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