There is something else beyond the conscious Ego

The limits of the conscious Ego

In this site the conscious Ego has always been considered as the central, fundamental core of the inner experience of each human being. However, a clear distinction has been made – and repeatedly confirmed – between the conscious Ego and the psyche's experiences in which it is progressively involved during its life, highlighting how – especially in our culture – this distinction is almost never taken into account, and the experiences of the psyche, not the conscious Ego, are considered the quintessence of the human quality and personality of an individual. Actually the conscious Ego, deprived of the experiences that involves it, seems like an empty shell, a sort of indefinite self-consciousness lost in the void, a fish that, pulled out of the sea of the psyche in which it lives, ends up gasping in vain, until it dies. Therefore there seems to be an inseparable bond between the conscious Ego and its own psyche, and consequently the individuality of the organism system with its mind represents the tuning element of the experiences that involve a conscious Ego in the course of its life.

However, the separation – made at least at a conceptual level – between the conscious Ego and the experiences determined by its own psyche has a reason of being, precisely because, in seeking the meaning of human life, we cannot ignore the enormous complex of variants that the psyche produces, of which – as has been noted several times – each of us experiences only a very limited range during the course of his or her life. For each of us the others can represent something completely alien, because the experiences produced by their own psyche are very different from ours, especially in the socio-cultural systems that tend to enhance individual experiences, presenting them as values of freedom, as is currently the case of the one in which we live. But precisely because the conscious Ego tends to be completely dominated by the dynamics of its own psyche, the differences between individuals can become unbridgeable, and instead of recognizing in the other a conscious nucleus very similar to ours, even if subject to different tunings of the psyche, in interpersonal relationships the conflicts that characterize the human psyche as a whole end up prevailing. Therefore the first and most evident limit of the conscious Ego is given by its subordination to the psyche's experiences that involve and dominate it, and the recognition of its own autonomy represents the first (fundamental) step towards the liberation from such domination.

We have also highlighted how, in relation to the experiences of the psyche in which it is involved, the conscious Ego can manifest its volitional intent, aimed at adopting strategies that can be very different from one person to another. Faced with what appear to be analogous or very similar experiences, two individuals can react in a substantially different way: for example, when faced with a situation that endangers the safety of the body, a person can withdraw in search of safety, while another can take on an attitude of challenge, even risking his life. However, in these cases, while the real situation is objectively perceptible, with regard to the reactions experienced by the conscious Ego of the two subjects we can only rely on the descriptions provided by them, without any possibility of being able to arrive at a direct and objective experimental evaluation: the fear of the person who retreats could be much more intense than that experienced by the other subject, but also the so-called willpower, as we know, is a resource of which people are gifted to a very different degree. 

In any case, the level of involvement of the conscious Ego in the psyche's experiences is determined above all by their emotional tonality, and the strategies adopted by the Ego in a more or less instinctive way tend to do so that it can experience positive or neutral emotional states, avoiding as much as possible negative ones. However, in most human lives, the succession of the emotional states experienced over time seems to have its own inevitability (destiny) that goes far beyond the control capacity of the conscious Ego: the strategies adopted are almost always improvised, amateurish, and determined by programs of low value and not very effective, acquired through interactions with the socio-cultural environment. This is the reason why the conscious Ego, instead of being the lord and the governor of its mind, is its prisoner, and the behavior of human beings, instead of being governed by a conscious ruler able to make the best use of its superior resources, appears often unpredictable, destructive or self-destructive, and not infrequently absurd. Obviously, all this can be attributed to natural, genetic and physiological causes: after all, in accordance with our age's prevailing cultural trend, we are nothing more than (more or less) evolved animals, still produced by natural evolution. Therefore the individual destiny cannot be anything else other than the aleatory and temporary result of the variables in play in nature's dynamics.  

The limits of the conscious Ego are determined first of all by its poor ability to react to the experiences determined by the psyche that involve it and to defend its autonomy in relation to them, be they positive or negative in terms of emotions. Moreover, the fact of being part of a social environment composed of millions of individuals, each with its own Ego – in turn subject to other attunements of the psyche – with all the cultural dynamics, the conditionings and the programs deriving from it, represents another very strong limit to the liberating evolution of the conscious Ego: the possibilities of isolating oneself in a positive environment for this evolution are today very limited. For all these reasons so many human beings end up behaving like automata – not in the sense of mechanical robots, but human automata nonetheless – whose conscious Ego, prisoner of its reference psychophysical system, is continually overwhelmed by reactions of all kinds determined by the psyche, towards which it has no other defense resources than the poor programs transmitted to it by the cultural environment in which it lives. The behavior of these human automata can be unpredictable and bizarre: often the consequences of their actions are negative for others and for themselves. As far as their inner life is concerned, the conscious Ego undergoes defenseless, in the course of a lifetime, experiences of every kind, not infrequently negative, and in many cases it is not even able to become aware of the possibility of its own autonomous existence. 

The liberating desire to exist of the conscious Ego

But it is precisely in this context, so little encouraging for the future of humankind, that the presence of something that exercises a call upon the conscious Ego is inserted, something tha seems to try to awaken it from the state of helpless passivity towards the human psyche in which it remains throughout its life. We could also consider this call as originating from some particular tuning of the psyche, given that everything which the Ego consciously experiences can be considered psyche, but in this case it is a liberating experience, which presents characteristics substantially different from the normal tunings of the human psyche. These tend to have a coercive and dominant, or deceptive and illusory, effect on the conscious Ego, whether they demean it through negative emotions or sensations such as fear, pain or punishment, or that they conquer it with positive and tempting, even if illusory, allurements like pleasure, ambition, power and the desire for happiness through wealth. All these aspects, however important and convincing they may seem to the conscious Ego, are limited to human life and its duration, while the desire to exist of the Ego goes beyond time, so that the human psyche reinterprets it in the (illusory) terms of a limitless elongation of the duration of earthly life (only to then have to deal with the problems arising from the deterioration of mental faculties due to age). 

A separate discourse must be made for those mental states that show, merged with the characteristic tunings of the human psyche, other experiences that are connected to a different kind of existence, such as mystical experiences, achieved through ecstasy or through the assumption of psychedelic substances, or some NDEs, as we have seen in the section devoted to them, or related to the state of happiness sometimes experienced by the conscious Ego of people in reciprocated love. Even if these experiences have a temporal character, in the sense that after some time the mind of the experimenter comes back to the ordinary tunings of the human psyche, in the course of the experience the perception of time can be suspended or replaced by an indefinable feeling of eternity.  

Strong reality and the conscious Ego

The progress made by scientific research, and the knowledge derived from it, assert that all the psyche's experiences are determined by the functioning of our brain. Not only that, but in the context of strong objective reality, as it appears in our age and in our culture, what exists in time is the brain and its activity, and the same conscious Ego would be nothing but a product of such activity. This topic has been dealt with in the page on human consciousness. Consequently, also the conscious Ego could be annihilated when brain activity ceases definitively, due to the process we call death. There is nothing strange in this position, because the human brain is destined to deteriorate and dissolve: up to now, at least, it has always been so. Therefore the brain of a living organism cannot in any way escape the certainty of its own temporary state and death (expressed by the saying: who was born must die) and it is no wonder if this form of awareness is also reflected in the conscious Ego.

Faced with this knowledge, which is also well founded in the context of strong reality, the personal psyche's reactions vary greatly. There are those who accept this fact serenely, considering the strong reality as inevitable and therefore incontestable, and useless and illusory any form of faith in the continuation of our existence in another dimension. Then there are those who, believing that the continuation of existence after death is impossible, are seized by a feeling of discouragement or despair that induces indifference towards life itself, up to the point of making them perform negative actions for others, but even for themselves. There is also the multitude of those who adhere to one of the various fideistic programs that provide for the continuation of individual existence in the afterlife, without explaining how this transition can occur. 

It should be well understood that, while remaining within the limits of the strong reality and the scientific knowledge that refers to it, even my I (my body, my brain, my psyche), like other billions of human beings, is nothing but a particular fragment of an evolutionary process that transcends it, going far beyond the comprehension and control abilities of which it is endowed. At the same time, my conscious Ego – whatever be the cause that created it – has assumed a role of knowledge and a peculiar dignity in front of this process, which give it the right, if not to make judgments, at least to defend the self-affirmation of its own conscious activity. Since I consciously go through the vicissitudes of life, assimilating and digesting both positive and negative experiences, I acquire the right to give a meaning to my individual existence, something that represents an advantage, an achievement or a merit for me as a conscious Ego, beyond the possible advantage for the evolutionary process that transcends me, in which I find myself temporarily involved as an actor. And since this meaning is not revealed to me satisfactorily in the course of this life, I can at least defend my right to a more complete existence, more in harmony with my spiritual needs. 

Weak reality and the spirit

Precisely because at the end of my life I will still have to cross, in one way or another, the threshold of death, I cannot and I must not delude myself that my conscious Ego can continue to exist as a product of the brain's activity. The mental experiences that it will eventually encounter in the afterlife should be allowed by an energy structure of a different nature. The weak reality shows us a particular representation of this energetic structure, which is commonly called spirit. In the context of strong reality the nature of the spirit escapes us completely, so much so that even its very existence can be questioned. The phenomena and events of weak reality do not give us an adequate knowledge of the characteristics of the spirit, but present us with a complex (and controversial) picture of the operative possibilities at its disposal. The most important fact for us is that, as we cross the threshold of death, our conscious Ego – freeing itself from the body and brain – would be associated with the spirit and to a certain extent it would also be assimilated. The possible relations between the conscious Ego and the spirit in the course of human life have been examined in the page dedicated to the theories about the spirit. Here it is opportune to remember that, even in the context of strong reality, when one tries to investigate the psyche one must come to terms with that ambiguous and misleading factor which is called the unconscious.   

Besides the mental events that can certainly be attributed to the unconscious activity of the brain (among which the same creativity, whose results can become conscious almost suddenly, after a more or less long period of unconscious elaboration), attempts have been made to attribute to the unconscious also phenomena typical of weak reality, and in particular of mediumistic activity. But in this case we encounter an insurmountable difficulty: in fact, the unconscious activity of the brain is exclusively subjective, while many physical phenomena of mediumism can be framed in an objective reality. Therefore it becomes necessary to identify some instrument – distinct from the brain-body psychophysical system – through which the unconscious activity of the brain can exert a physical action on objective reality, although in the context of weak reality. But, at least until today, this instrument has eluded our capacity for recognition and investigation based on strong reality, while – in the light of weak reality – it can be legitimate to attribute to it a spiritual existence (that is, not physical, but not for this reason devoid of its own energy, even if of a nature unknown to us) and call it spirit. In the above mentioned page dedicated to the theories about the spirit, we have also dealt with the possible relationships, interferences and influences that can intervene between the spirit and the conscious Ego of a person, leaving open the question whether the spirit should be considered as a personal entity, connected with the individuality of a single human being, or as an autonomous entity, which can enter into relationship with different people, now with one and now with the other.  

What can be said, in any case, is that if the conscious Ego were to cross the threshold of death without being annihilated, it would be received and incorporated into the structure of a spirit, going through a process of transformation characterized by the detachment from the psychophysical structure which encloses it in the course of human life, and from the access to a different order of mental experiences, on the nature of which some clues are offered to us by many NDEs and by some mediumistic communications. As we had already occasion to notice, in this new dimension the mental nature of what is perceived as real would be much more evident, even though these experiences would be determined by a psyche certainly different from the one we are accustomed in this life. For example, the desires to which the conscious Ego is particularly sensitive during this life - so much so as to induce many people to imagine as paradise a dimension in which such desires would be fulfilled – could be replaced by completely different desires, precisely of a spiritual kind. It is not to be excluded, however, that the conscious Ego could pass through a transitory phase, characterized by the simultaneous presence both of desires of earthly origin and others of a spiritual nature. 

The conscious Ego and the spirit

The spiritual existence of the conscious Ego, linked to that energy structure that we have called spirit, alien with respect to the body-brain structure with which we temporarily live our human life, will probably involve a progressive evanescence of the earthly experience. We are not even able to know through which instrument the Ego, once separated from the brain, could still access the memories of its earthly life. It could be objected that without memory there cannot be a continuity of individual existence, and therefore of the Ego's sense of identity, but it does not seem to me that it must necessarily be so: the perception of our identity, as well as the perception of reality, can be independent of memory, even though memory undoubtedly enriches and stabilizes our personal identity as human beings. However, in the eventual transition to the spiritual dimension, the Ego could bring with it many memories of its own human experience. But if these memories progressively lose their importance, until they become completely irrelevant in the context of the experiences of the spiritual dimension, what meaning could we attribute to human life? 

One possible answer could be this: based on cosmic laws whose origin, at least for now, escapes us, human life – and perhaps even life on worlds other than Earth – and the experiences determined by the psyche that it entails, could be indispensable for the creation, growth and evolution of the conscious Ego, so that it can then be associated with a spirit in another dimension. In fact, the transformations which the conscious Ego goes through in the course of this life could be interpreted as a preparation and training for a different type of existence. I wish I could say that this operation will be successful for the conscious Ego of every human being, but I'm not sure, and it certainly doesn't depend on me. If we observe the natural processes, we see that of many eggs or seeds produced by an organism only a few develop a new born or a new plant, the others are assimilated by other organisms or deteriorate due to environmental causes. And even among the new born, few reach maturity. Among higher animals, and in particular among humans, the number of new individuals born at each generation is reduced, parental care is more assiduous and the chances of survival are greater, but – even in this case – only a more or less high percentage reaches maturity.

As for the evolution of the conscious Ego, as we have observed, for most human beings, the conditioning, the socio-cultural programs, and above all those tunings of the psyche whose power of involvement and command on the Ego derives from their widespread diffusion and sharing (and from the weakness of the individual Ego towards the mass), end up prevailing, inhibiting the evolutionary process of the Ego, which can remain blocked at the level that I have called the human automaton. At this stage the energies of a human being can be employed in the best way within the productive, organizational and cultural social system of which a person is a part. However, the doubt remains that in this way the metaphorical human eggs, instead of giving life to chicks, become in effect an omelette. But it may be that I am wrong, and that the conscious Ego of every human being can then be associated with a spirit, regardless of its evolution in the course of earthly life. Mine are only particularly insidious lucubrations coming from the psyche, about which it is not permitted to proclaim any certainty. 

However, the fact remains that the mental activity of some people registers instances whose origin can be defined as spiritual, given that they cannot be attributed either to body instincts of animal origin, or to the cultural programs and conditionings widespread in our society; indeed, they often come into conflict with both these and those. It is as if the conscious Ego underwent the fascination of a call from something alien to this world and this life. This call can lead to the search for isolation, hermitage, mystical asceticism, up to a complete indifference towards the organism and its needs, to the search – already in the course of this life – for a liberation from the bonds that bind the Ego to the body-brain system. Obviously, by attributing every mental experience to brain activity, it can be objected that these are phenomena determined by anomalies (perhaps also pathological) of a normal brain functioning, but – as we have seen – not all the phenomena of the weak objective reality can be explained in terms of mental activity. It can therefore be reasonably hypothesized that the brain of some people has a special sensitivity and a better receptive capacity towards signals coming from a different dimension than the physical one. 

The call of the spirit

If we want to consider the spirit as the source of this signal (which manifests in any case as a mental experience that – as or more than others – captures the attention of the conscious Ego), many questions arise which we are unable to answer: is there a link between this spirit and the conscious Ego? is the spirit endowed with its own individuality, its own personality, its own consciousness? why does the Ego feel attracted by this spiritual call? It seems useless to me to try to give answers, which could still seem gratuitous and imaginative, to these questions. But these instances are also reflected by the dynamics of the human psyche, and it is important to remember and reiterate how these dynamics – although manifesting in our mind through brain activity – have an origin that remains for us (that is, for our conscious Ego) mysterious. We can hypothesize their source, recognize it, call it with one or the other name, but not know it and, less than ever, control it. The psyche is a process that controls and uses us human beings, not vice versa.    

The call of the spirit has a particular value because it induces the Ego to become aware of its own autonomy and its neutrality, if I may put it this way, towards the dynamics of the human psyche in which it is ensnared, for better or for worse, in the course of its earthly life. The spirit shows the Ego the possibility of experiencing mental tunings different from the human ones, and the Ego begins to awaken from the sleep in which it was under the illusion of being the center of control and command of the psyche. The conscious Ego begins to observe with wonder, but also with serene detachment, the long, complex and unfathomable chain of events that – through the development of the first single-celled organisms, the subsequent evolution of multicellular plants and animals, the organization of the nervous system up to the complexity of the human brain – has led to the birth and growth of that single psychophysical structure constituted by the organism and the brain from which its conscious individuality originated. It realizes that, beyond the role played in the evolutionary process of human societies by intelligence, will, creativity and capacity for action and organization that are at its disposal, there exists a need that requires its separation with respect to the body and the brain to which it is bound (and of which it is hostage), and must be aware, if destiny allows it to go through the whole route of human existence, of the deterioration to which both its body and the mental activity of its brain may be subject, in the final phase of life. 

The Ego's awakening translates into a connection with the spirit, which can occur already in the course of human life: it is as if a channel were opened, allowing the spirit to communicate directly with the Ego, and the Ego to connect with the spirit. The Ego then finds itself in a better balanced condition even with respect to the tunings of the human psyche, which previously had an almost absolute power of involvement over it. The progressive detachment from the experiences determined by the human psyche no longer frightens it because, instead of fearing the emptiness of non-existence determined by the absence of emotions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and other mental states, all of an inevitably human nature, it feels – and sometimes even gets to experience – the existence of bands of mental tunings of different origins that, based on the evolution of its essence determined by the passing of time, prove to be pleasant, beautiful and more in harmony with its needs. If the conscious Ego succeeds in feeling and following the call of the spirit, a connection can be opened through which the Ego also gets help in dealing with life's difficulties, and in particular with the psyche's tunings characterized by negative emotions, and can prepare to cross serenely the threshold of death. Otherwise people will be forced to cling to the illusions of life, always at the mercy of the reactions the psyche that will involve them from time to time, until the deadline of what they will have to consider the end of their days.

top of page