 46. Ego (who are you) |
WHO IS THIS PERSON CALLED THE “BRAIN”?
Human beings have, since ancient days, constantly engaged in efforts to identify, isolate, define, and name the socially-required and culturally-invented myth of a separate “self”, or ego-“I”.
Every society and culture has its own characteristic ego-mythology and egodefinitions— and every culturally distinct ego-definition has its own peculiar characteristics and code-language of ego-mythological reference.
The generic name (or ego-reference) “I” is, in accordance with the culture it “inhabits”, otherwise assigned particular defining names, associations, and characteristics.
Thus, all terms of ego-defining “self”-reference—such as the “body”, the “mind”, the “soul”, and (in the current fashion of scientific materialism) the “brain”—are, actually, culturally prescribed modes of ego-definition that are peculiar to one or another cultural time and place.
To the key “self”-referential terms of ego-definition, many metaphors and virtually iconic attributes are, also, culturally, and by tradition, added—in order to concretize (or “objectify”) the generic “I”-reference and “elevate” it to the status of a “local” (or, indeed, “tribal”) myth.
Therefore, the ego-“I” is a humanly-universally “objectified” (or sociallyconstructed and culturally-concretized) myth—and, because the ego-“I” is (thus) an “object” in the pattern-field of human contextual awareness, the ego- “I” is (paradoxically) not a “self”, but it is, rather, intrinsically of the nature of not-“self”.
The ego-“I” is a humanly-universalized “self”-idea projected by human conceptual thinking, but “it” is, in fact, not-“self”, a social and cultural construct, an “objective” persona, a fiction, an “other” that is invoked as “self”.
The ego-“I” is a mentally-projected “self”-idea (or “self-object”), made to “seem” by the mind.
The ego-“I” is a human pseudo-“double”, an illusory figure made to “seem” by means of the exercise of the mentally-activated energy of the bodily-based social reflex.
The ego-“I” is always nothing but the natural bodily state of social and functional relatedness, invoked via a mentally-projected re-vision of the “I-am-thebody”- idea, and (thus and thereby) projected (in one or another guise) as a fictional “entity”-apart.
The pervasive ego-model of the present day is, fundamentally, secular—as required by the current dominant culture, which is scientific materialism.
Nevertheless, even though the culture of scientific materialism (or scientific “realism”) pretends to have “rescued” humankind from what (according to the “new realist” perspective and “point of view” of scientific materialism) were its ancient “religious” and philosophical illusions and dead-end metaphysical failures by replacing the “vague” and “insubstantial” ideas of “soul” and “mind” with the “true realism” of “body” and “brain”, the references to “body” and “brain” are, themselves, like all other (and more traditional) terms of “self”- description, merely the current code-words (or re-visionist substitute definitions) that indicate the present-day myth and representation of the separate (and entirely fictional) ego-“I”.
