[Socrates]

What does ‘egoless’ or ‘non-self’ mean?

These concepts cause lots of confusion. ‘Ego’ often has the Freudian meaning associated with it if we think about its usage in a common sense way, but we should know by now that philosophy is never common sense. When we hear people talking about ‘dissolving the ego’, we can easily believe that we are talking about ‘ego’ in terms of self-importance and narcissism, megalomania and placing too much of our self-worth on material possessions and so we enter into an attack on desire itself which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it can be taken to an extreme, like anything else, where people speak as if they can be some kind of ultra-passive being with no needs or desires, which then views selfish actions as entirely negative.

This isn’t actually what the nuanced view of non-self/egolessness is about in philosophy.

Dividualism

‘Folk psychology’ is the common sense view that we are a single, coherent entity, that ‘inside’ our bodies, is a ‘me’, an actual consistent ‘thing’ that resides in the mind and is separate from the body and the outside world.

Dividualism opposes our ‘individual’ view of ourselves and sees the self as being composed of multiple, amalgamated and constantly changing, often conflicting drives, or patterns of desires, values, ideas and instincts. To say we are egoless and selfless is not to say ‘I’ do not exist, or ‘I’ am not real, but rather that ‘I’ is not fixed and ‘I’ is not one thing, but many things, all at the same time while in constant flux.

We are also dependently originated which means that ‘I’ is always constructed and pressuposed with the ‘Other’. You can’t have one without the other. This nondual view of being recognised as a self from the outside, dissolves the illusion of our separateness from the outside reality.

Topic

[Socrates]

Good to see you back.

What I will say as an interjection, is that biological sex defining gender in terms of reproductive capability is a social construct that has been performed from Christianity onwards, see Monique Wittig’s work ‘The Straight Mind’.

[Intellectus]

No ego = acceptance of perspectives with no hesitation of the acceptance/understanding. Unconditional love to seek that which can not be obtained. Perceptibly hard to obtain but ultimate salvation when you reach it.
 *Like running up a very steep hill and then getting to the top and feeling relieved to reach the top to go down hill for some much earned rest. Like you cursed gravity and then praised it. That feeling*

If you are accepting of perspectives, then how come you can’t talk about women? The unconditional love part definitely sounds like the ideal, much like the metaphysics of Gnosticism and Vitalism.

Everything was created by self. It didnt have a gender but had to create in balance. A man and women are just that…a balance to create life.

[Socrates]

No ego = acceptance of perspectives with no hesitation of the acceptance/understanding. Unconditional love to seek that which can not be obtained. Perceptibly hard to obtain but ultimate salvation when you reach it.
 *Like running up a very steep hill and then getting to the top and feeling relieved to reach the top to go down hill for some much earned rest. Like you cursed gravity and then praised it. That feeling*

If you are accepting of perspectives, then how come you can’t talk about women? The unconditional love part definitely sounds like the ideal, much like the metaphysics of Gnosticism and Vitalism.

[Intellectus]

What does ‘egoless’ or ‘non-self’ mean?

These concepts cause lots of confusion. ‘Ego’ often has the Freudian meaning associated with it if we think about its usage in a common sense way, but we should know by now that philosophy is never common sense. When we hear people talking about ‘dissolving the ego’, we can easily believe that we are talking about ‘ego’ in terms of self-importance and narcissism, megalomania and placing too much of our self-worth on material possessions and so we enter into an attack on desire itself which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it can be taken to an extreme, like anything else, where people speak as if they can be some kind of ultra-passive being with no needs or desires, which then views selfish actions as entirely negative.

This isn’t actually what the nuanced view of non-self/egolessness is about in philosophy.

Dividualism

‘Folk psychology’ is the common sense view that we are a single, coherent entity, that ‘inside’ our bodies, is a ‘me’, an actual consistent ‘thing’ that resides in the mind and is separate from the body and the outside world.

Dividualism opposes our ‘individual’ view of ourselves and sees the self as being composed of multiple, amalgamated and constantly changing, often conflicting drives, or patterns of desires, values, ideas and instincts. To say we are egoless and selfless is not to say ‘I’ do not exist, or ‘I’ am not real, but rather that ‘I’ is not fixed and ‘I’ is not one thing, but many things, all at the same time while in constant flux.

We are also dependently originated which means that ‘I’ is always constructed and pressuposed with the ‘Other’. You can’t have one without the other. This nondual view of being recognised as a self from the outside, dissolves the illusion of our separateness from the outside reality.

No ego = acceptance of perspectives with no hesitation of the acceptance/understanding. Unconditional love to seek that which can not be obtained. Perceptibly hard to obtain but ultimate salvation when you reach it.
 *Like running up a very steep hill and then getting to the top and feeling relieved to reach the top to go down hill for some much earned rest. Like you cursed gravity and then praised it. That feeling*

[Author]

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