Ref,
RESPONDENT: My view of this is that the mind directs the body and something behind the mind directs the mind.
RICHARD: Yes … for 6.0 billion people this ‘something behind the mind’ is their genetic identity (‘being’) echoing through the millennia via the germ cells (the spermatozoa and the ova).
RESPONDENT: How can an identity be genetic? A body can be genetic … not an identity.
RICHARD: Any metaphysical identity (a psychological, emotional, psychic or autological ‘being’) is an epiphenomenon of the rudimentary animal ‘self’ that forms itself, out of survival necessity, as the centre-point of the instinctual passions that blind nature genetically encodes in all sentient beings at conception in the genes … ‘I’ am the current end-point of myriads of survivors passing on their genes. ‘I’ am the product of the ‘success story’ of blind nature’s instinctual passions such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire.
Being born of the biologically inherited instinctual passions genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically speaking – umpteen tens of thousands of years old … ‘my’ origins are lost in the mists of pre-history. ‘I’ am so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed … carried along on the reproductive cell-line, over countless millennia, from generation to generation. And ‘I’ am thus passed on into an inconceivably open-ended and hereditably transmissible future. In other words: ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’; ‘I’ am aggression and aggression is ‘me’; ‘I’ am nurture and nurture is ‘me’; ‘I’ am desire and desire is ‘me’ and so on. This is one’s ‘Original Face’ (to use the Zen terminology); this is the source of the ‘we are all one’ feeling that is accessed in spiritual practices and mystical mediation.
Because, genetically speaking we are indeed ‘all one’ inasmuch as all carbon based life-forms – not just sentient life-forms – have a common hereditary ‘survival instincts’ origin.
Being is not ‘I’ or ‘me’
RICHARD: [..] all sentient beings have, at the very least, a rudimentary sense of ‘self’ and ‘other’ … and I am not suggesting for a moment that any reptile or mammal has an ‘I’ or a ‘me’. I mean it in the sense that an animal displays behaviour that indicates that there is an awareness of its physical form as being separate from the form of the world about … which a tree, for example, does not display. This has been tested with monkeys, for instance, where a mirror is placed in the cage and the monkey first looks behind the mirror to find the – apparently there – ‘other’ monkey. After a while, an understanding that is observable dawns upon the luckless creature … and it starts pulling faces at itself and otherwise enjoying the clearly demonstrable fun that comes as a result of the monkey knowing that it is its own reflection it is looking at. In other words: a sense of self.
Being has one feel that ‘me’ (and think that ‘I’) exists
RICHARD: With the hormonal power of the feelings engendered, one feels that a ‘me’ exists … generally felt to be somewhere in the region of the heart. This is the ‘me’ that I consistently call the soul … for convenience. This feeling – and feelings are so powerful that they can override intelligence – makes one think that an ‘I’ exists … generally located in the head. This ‘I’, which for convenience I consistently call the ego, [..]
RICHARD: The human animal, with the unique ability to know its impending demise has taken the awareness of being this rudimentary self and blown it up all out of proportion into a feeling identity, an affective ‘being’ … no animal has a ‘me’ as a soul in the heart.
Let alone an ‘I’ as an ego in the head.
Being is redundant
RICHARD: ‘my’ survival being paramount could not be further from the truth, for ‘I’ need play no part any more in perpetuating physical existence (which is the primal purpose of the instinctual animal ‘self’). ‘I’ am no longer necessary at all. In fact, ‘I’ am nowadays a hindrance. With all of ‘my’ beliefs, values, creeds, ethics and other doctrinaire disabilities, ‘I’ am a menace to the body. ‘I’ am ready to die (to allow the body to be killed) for a cause and ‘I’ will willingly sacrifice physical existence for a ‘Noble Ideal’ … and reap ‘my’ post-mortem reward: immortality.
That is how real ‘I’ am … which is why both ‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul must die a real death (but not physically into the grave) to find out the actuality.
See also
- Social Identity, which is overlaid on top of ‘being’
- Identity Building