Skip to main content

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. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ritual, Scientific Experiment and Truth

 Human rituals have their roots in animal behavior, and the animal pattern has its roots in the need for repetition of living organisms, in the cyclical structure of physiological actions. At the human level, ritual behavior involves a delimitation of space and time, as well as a different meaning of both with respect to the spaces and times of everyday experience. From the ritual ceremonies of cold societies, we observe the care and thoroughness of the shaman to determine with precision the spaces, times and elements that intervene in the rite. Sacred space delimits the world, not only as a place of action, but also the scope of meaning of the things contained in that space. It is a space loaded with meaning: there is an order in things. Time itself acquires its meaning in relation to this order of things, and cyclically closes the space in the “tempo” of the rite, a tempo that is a symbol of the tempo of the World. What is not in the rite or is not referable to the rite has no re...
Post a Comment
Read more

Metalanguages are formal metaphors

  In a logic class, the professor tells his students: "Yesterday, while talking with my Sufi gardener about happiness, we ended up talking about metalanguages, because he said that orchids are 'chambers where light plays between amorous encounters.' I told him: 'You have to be a poet to talk about poetry.' He replied: 'You just have to be human.'" In what way can we say that my gardener is proposing that every metalanguage is a formalized metaphor for its object language and what would be the metaphor for arithmetical addition? Furthermore” -he asks-how does this little narrative show that Kurt Gödel was a Platonist? One student answers: “The gardener uses orchids as a metaphor for biological reproduction, and from this he makes a second-order metaphor at the human level, calling reproduction a loving encounter. The gardener is a Sufi; in Sufi ontology, the word 'encounter' is used as equivalent to 'existence,' a double meaning (Wujud)....
Post a Comment
Read more