The Ego – that sense of one's self-importance in society – is needed to mediate between you and society, but like a rocket booster, once you have reached the right altitude, you need to drop it.
Introversion increases with age, as you feel you no longer need a large cast of supporting actors for the play that is your life. The audience dwindles, too.
Or maybe that's just me?
Solitude makes ego redundant. I can go days without direct social contact. Walking around my neighbourhood, there will be days when I actively try to avoid other people, to avoid having to put on the merry mask of being social, donning a cheery smile and ready to engage in small talk. Other times, however, I'll happily stop for a chat with neighbours.
My brother asked in a comment to yesterday's post, "So how does your ego describe your subjective 'I'?" An excellent question. Is my ego promoting my subjective 'I'? In effect using it for self-promotion? Or something metaphysically deeper?
Well, why do I write? Ego legacy? Perhaps. It is indeed gratifying to the see number of page views on my blog climbing over Lent (in past years it would halve from around 20,000 per month to 10,000 or less); my ego is gratified to see it's up to over 36,000 now. But essentially I write for myself, so that I can review my writings in future to see how my thinking has evolved. It's all about nuance, detail, stripping away false premises and wishful thinking, and cutting short meanderings down blind alleys.
Once again, I remembered today my father's words towards the end of his life; "Why was I so lucky?" and my conviction that he knew the answer.
There's also the 'notes to a future me' aspect of this blog; the notion of somehow coming across the blog in a future incarnation. But is this at all possible, or just that wishful thinking I want to avoid?
Losing your identity at death, merging the small-c consciousness with the Big-C consciousness of the Cosmos, might be equated theologically with returning to God, to achieving mystical unity with All.
Does transcendence of the self mean ultimate loss of self? Is this what we principally worry about when contemplating death? Whether it means the atheist's oblivion or a metaphysical merging into Oneness?
Are we destined to merge into the Cosmic Unity at our bodily deaths, or only at the end of all time?
Based on my lifetime of anomalous qualia experiences – anomalous memory flashbacks to feelings experienced in a time before my current biological life – I would posit that whilst body and ego die, not all of one's of small-c consciousness merges into Big-C consciousness. At least traces of it continue to exist, to be experienced elsewhere in spacetime. By a different biological entity.
But I hold that spiritual evolution is true; merely merging into the Unity, the Love, the Wisdom of God after one dies is too quick a solution for my intuition. An eternity of heavenly bliss after one life well lived?
I would rather that over a succession of incarnations, our consciousness develops, it learns, it observes, it finds answers, it grows in wisdom – it earns a place within the Unity of God, but this must take many lives.
Lent 2023, Day 36
Money and metaphysics
Lent 2022: Day 36
Losing sight of God
Lent 2021: Day 36
One life is not enough
Lent 2020: Day 36
Accounting for talent
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