1. Starting out, what *is* the ego? The definition I'll use is, the ego is a mental pattern of identification, that is, of a "me"-making. It is the periodic thoughts that attribute this or that thing (thoughts, feelings etc.) as me, and some others (eg. objects, body) as mine.
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2. It bears repeating that the ego is just that: a mental pattern. Things go on inside and outside of the body, and the ego is what gets to call some things me or mine. It is a thought among thoughts, and the disappearance of the ego does not compromise much of any other function
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3. As a fun fact, ego wasn't the term that Freud used! In his writings, he used "Ich" which is just German for "I", which got translated into Ego in the Standard Edition of the collection of his psychological works, deriving the term from Latin.
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4. A more illuminating angle is ego as pattern of *appropriation*: it is the *claiming* parts of experience and existence as me or mine; self-definition by means of thoughts, personality, etc. and by means of objects, propriety can be observed to be the same underlying mechanism.
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5. To reiterate, property is just the outside manifestation of the ego mechanisms; ego in general is what one pours this sense of identity into, and what ends up being enmeshed with it.
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6. The difference between me and mine in the ego contexts is that "me" is what the ego has declared being so much "mine" that the sense of identity has crystallized around the thing. It is something that the ego is not being willing anymore to consider as separate from self.
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8. Ego is the claiming of propriety over reality, which is an act that is fundamentally pretense. Reality is not owned by anyone or anything. Reality just *is*, and in fact continues to *be* as such even after some silly mind decides what's owned by who.
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9. Specifically, the ego-personality (or what we usually just call personality) is the aggregate of behaviours and patterns that people feel it most identifies them, or to put it another way, represents them.
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10. The term itself, "personality", is extremely telling - it is a Latin word for the theatrical masks that actors wore in order to represent a character and potentiate their own voice through a hole in the mask (per+sona, "through which sound goes").
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11. In the same way that theatrical masks are temporary and disposable, so personalities are fixed representatives of a much more dynamic phenomenon - people will plainly behave in different ways under different contexts, heavily straining the concept of a static personality.
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12. As much as one could possibly reevaluate personalities as personal tendencies, rather than traits, the underlying pattern remains - the ego is what the sense of self is invested in, and the more investment, the more fixed the thing or trait are required to be.
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13. This pattern is endemic, and is what characterizes "weak" or "strong" egos - stronger egos identify more with things being a particular specific way, and very ironically, this makes them much more brittle, and prone to being challenged on their grounds by the events of life.
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14. small and big egos are a similar dynamic - a big ego has identified with many things and is unwilling to let go of the association after the inevitable pushback of life, which puts them constantly on the defensive.
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15. An important point to observe is how the ego involves a process of reification. In order to identify with something, that something gets first defined - it *becomes a thing*, so that it can be associated to, and the thing is one particular way and not another, by definition.
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16. The mindstream gets broken up into thoughts; the actions of the body get collected into behaviours, and sets of behaviours into personality traits; the land gets divided up into plots, and realty split up into objects. Those are all the same movement.
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17. The ego is built on this tendency of mind to split up reality into parts, but in the same way that reification is challenged by eternal and irresistible change of all things, so the ego pirouettes over shifting terrain.
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18. The reification tendency has a gradient to it - from the pattern of putting names to things (and in so doing identifying *them*) into more and more of looking away at the territory and staring at the map instead, culminating eg. in reductionism.
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19. Reductionism is the logical extreme of reification: the conception that reality is made of things, which themselves are made of other things, and that in studying what little things the bigger things are made of, we can come to fully understand them.
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20. One poignant metaphor for reductionism is dissection - while something can be grasped by taking a dead butterfly and gutting it open to investigate the insides, it does not show the insides, or the outsides, at work, and barely hints at *how* they work.
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21. Life is much more about actions and events and movement than it is about fixed things and objects and stillness. Life is change; without change, time would not be observable, and indeed would not exist.
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22. So the ego is founded upon the pretense of things being stable and fixed, and in doing so, is constantly struggling about the fabric of experience itself. It is in constant state of needing to reaffirm itself, and this generates a chronic straining of the mind.
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23. Where does the ego come from in an individual? Turns out, much like the rest of our basic knowledge and conditioning, that it's something we pick up as children, little sponges that they are, through both imitation and the sheer expectation of others.
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24. A baby is born without an ego pattern, or a need for such. Besides observing others doing it, they are also expected to conform to specific behaviours - "You should(n't) do this" or even deeper, "This isn't like you". People expect a sense of self from them, and they get it.
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25. A person could go their whole life just doing things and thinking things without ever saying that's me or that's mine, but society puts pressure on us to separate the acceptable from the unacceptable, and to identify with (and bring out) the acceptable part of ourselves only.
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26. This is worth restating - even with people already conditioned to think/have an ego, such a mental construct disappears once the pressure of society to *have* an ego disappears. The basic nature of man does not include self-identification.https://twitter.com/celestialboon/status/1205952465654484992 …
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27. A personality is, like the name implies, a performative act, which can be interrupted. In a state of social isolation, all the mental constructs of identity, repression, of "behaving", fall away, and what remains is just sheer life living itself.https://twitter.com/celestialboon/status/1205952687377924096 …
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28. Ego is a pattern of identification with *some*thing, but not with *every*thing. This is true at every level - we only own some stuff, we are only what's inside the skin, and even within that, there are parts of us that the ego necessarily disowns - the Jungian Shadow.
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29. This of course implies that reuniting one's ego-self with the shadow means doing away with the concept of ego-self entirely, because it is unneeded boundary-setting. You are entirely what you are, without needing to define it first, or reify it, or restrict it.
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30. Much like the rest of the meaning-making we do, the ego is an ongoing story. It attributes a body, a mind, a personality, a past, a present, and a future, etc. to a me-character. The "me" is just a concept point to which the rest is connected, AND defined in relationship to.
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