Higher Self

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Discussion

William Irwin Thompson:

"The Christian tradition argues that the self is not a pathological aberration emerging from grasping, reification, or misplaced concreteness, but that the ego is actually the emergent domain of the extensive field of the delay-space, and that the higher self or soul is the mathematical domain of the principles that determine self-organization from noise.

"It ain't the meat, it's the motion." The ego is this temporal field of all the "nows" held in synchrony by a natural history of processing, a sense of a past that is constitutive of identity. If an ego is an emergent state that arises in the stabilization of the "nows" in the delay-space, then it is not necessarily a pathological phenomenon of "grasping," but rather apart of the architecture of life. It is the relationship between the mathematical domain, "the principles" and the meat domain of the flesh, the neurons and the network in synchrony at forty Hz.

If one has an inappropriate vision in the imagination, one generates an inappropriate "phase-portrait for the geometry of behavior" of the self. Our culture, lacking a vision of a multidimensional model of consciousness, simply oscillates back and forth between an excessively reified materialism and a compensatorily hysterical nihilism. This Nietzschean nihilism, in all its deconstructionist variants, has pretty much taken over the way literature is studied in the universities, and it also rules the cognitive science of Marvin Minsky, Dan Dennett, and Patricia and Paul Churchland, in which the self is looked upon as a superstition that arose from a naive folk psychology that existed before the age of enlightenment brought about by computers and artificial intelligence. This materialist/nihilist mind-set controls the universities. Although there is no authorial intentionality in deconstructionism, and al-though there is no single author or Cartesian theater of the self for "the multiple drafts" of Dennett's philosophical deconstructionism, I choose— in the words of Berkeley, who said, "We Irish think otherwise" —to think otherwise. I choose to focus on precisely what the metaphors bring forth when we use words like "principles" and "self in this contemporary language that speaks about "principles of self-organization from noise." In this emanation versus emergence debate, the Buddhists don't ^ant to have emanation from some other mathematical, platonic domain, for they fear that it reifies an eternal soul or atman outside the very relationships that bring forth an identity in time. So the Buddhists opt for emergence and claim through their great classical philosopher Nagarjuna that if the soul or self Ave re outside and transcendent then it could have no relations with anything. But the Hindu and the Christian traditions of the higher self or eternal soul see the self as having a different modality of time. There is a vanishing mode of perceptions, but there is the other bird in the tree, the bird that only witnesses the bird that actually tastes the fruit. Once again, it is the condition of the intelligible and sensible realms. The Buddhist tradition that Francisco Varela and my son Evan Thompson articulate in their book The Embodied Mind holds that when one looks for a self, it is not really there. In their language, there are selfless minds in worlds without ground. But this doctrinal contentment with selflessness eliminates the opportunity to understand precisely the dynamic in which a self does emerge in"."

(https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Coming_Into_Being)