Socrates had his ‘genius’ or
‘daimon’, that he knew compelled his actions, no matter what he thought might
be best for him. St. Paul talked about the dual nature of the will centuries
ago. Edgar Allan Poe described ‘the Imp of the Perverse’ that impelled one to
contrary actions. Alan Watts talked about our consciousness as being only a ‘flickering
spotlight’ on the vast sea of ourselves. Colin Wilson posited what he called
the ‘ladder of selves’; where we mostly operate on a lower rung as an automated
responsory, or ‘robot’, only occasionally with effort becoming our higher
selves. And, of course, we have Sigmund Freud and his mental trinity of the
Ego, Superego, and Id, ‘the primitive, unconscious part of the human psyche
that contains basic instincts, drives, and impulsive needs.’ It all implies
that what I call ‘me’ may not be the sole or even largest component of myself, that
there’s a largely hidden mind behind what I call my mind. That ‘I’ might simply
be the avatar that the greater ‘me’ is using to interact with reality.
Several, I suppose
anecdotal, pieces of evidence make me wonder if it may be so, and what are the
possible implications of it if it is. One is the recorded fact that the brain
seems to make a decision seven seconds before one is consciously aware of
making it. And, more tenuously, there are the countless times I think my brain
is trying to sabotage me by having me saying or doing something incredibly
stupid before my ‘thinking self’ can react. Or my brain suddenly spits up a
fact or a memory I could swear was nowhere in the files. Or a dream that astounds me with its insight and coherence.
But perhaps the greatest piece
of evidence is when I’m operating creatively at ‘peak experience.’ That’s when
my ‘thinking self’ seems to vanish, or at least become less aware of itself,
subsumed, as it were, into a piece of working machinery in a greater whole. I
emerge from that state sometimes marveling at what I’ve done. It’s not a state
you can force. But you do have to build the altar, so the divine fire has a
place to come down. What’s produced may not be perfect, but it is the unplanned,
primal stuff you never guessed was there.
So the idea that regularly
freaks me out is that I only know myself shallowly, that if I ever met my true
self and realized that what I called me was just a useful persona, what I call
me will “softly and silently vanish away … and the notion I cannot endure!”
Probably anybody with real psychological or spiritual insight could knock these
thoughts down in a minute, if I could ever explain it properly, which I’m not
sure that I have even now.
Perhaps the Greater Brain is hindering me from expressing the idea clearly. You see? An insidious thought. What if the Monster from the Id is the real me, and I’m just a puppet, a scarecrow, a mask?
