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The Self is not a person

 The Self ("I am" or Atman) is not a person, nor is it any form of individuation. In the here and now, there is no psychological memory projection, no personal past. What is here and now of me, if I do not make any appeal to my memory, is a more transparent identity, a basic presence that realizes that it is being, that derives deep joy from being, and that to the extent that it does not representations form is expressed as a continuity of non-determinable identity. The memory that expresses Being is the genetic memory in which the "I am" takes the form, a form of negentropic potential energy that is actualized by that non-personal presence.

As we saw in Aeschylus's Paradox, any attempt to proclaim individuation is contradictory, since it has to be done through language, and language is not a personal creation. The different social persons that we adopt in our lives are objectifiable phantasmagorias, elements of complex social actions that go beyond the framework of individuation, that use individuation as a formative and evolutionary element of life-intelligence. This is the great secret that the initiates of Eleusis learned, the great teaching of the Greek Tragedy: behind each person, each mask, the same energy is hidden, Dionysus (Shiva in Indian mythology). Schopenhauer, and later Nietzsche, raised the old veil again, with which we cover what for the person is the terrible presence of the numen that dissolves it. Our body and the tendencies of our mind are the inheritance of an endless list of grandparents. Our language, the inheritance of a smaller list in which some poets have intervened (forces where life increases its emotional intensity). There is nothing of ours in ours: the history of our life is an egoic narrative that repeats the joys and misfortunes of any other human following the mythical patterns in use in our mythic-ritual axis.

This knowledge is an immense liberation, the beginning of a spontaneous and free life. 

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