Self. What is self? Well, some people say the self, or the ego, is really bad and the cause of our troubles, like some christians, and which needs to be fully surrendered to God. New Agers also take this stance, but include the idea that there's also a real self inside of us that needs to come into the foreground. This is similar to the ideas of some eastern religions. Others say that the ego is a valid part of us which needs to be embraced.
So, which one of these is it? There are some big contradictions, how could this be? Let's first start out with explaining what is meant by the ego and the real self, that seems like a good starting point.
Often, when you think of the word ego, you think of the word egotistical. Words like "Me" and "Mine" come to mind. It's the "I". The ego has quite a bad reputation in a lot of groups. Having a big ego is not seen as a good thing. It's often seen as the force in us that takes from others for its own gain, the side of us that loves competition, conquiring and domination, to its own and others' detriment. It's said that it's never satiated and always wants more. More power, more money, more of everything. It wants to be king of the world, but that would not even be enough. It has its own ideas about who it is, and will defend this idea against anyone challenging it, often making up lies for it.
The ego is not all "I want to take over the world!", it's also ideas we keep about ourselves to our own detriment. Think of low self-esteem, the ego is the part of us that has the idea of itself not being worthy, and rejects all evidence that that is not the case, keeping itself stuck in its own faulty ideas. It can act as an internal echo chamber, like I've spoke about earlier.
What about the real self? Discovering and empowering the real self is often seen as the ultimate liberation. People speak of it as Nirvana, or ultimate freedom. They experience their spirits soaring high, and expanding to contain the whole world. Whole religions are built upon discovering the real self. They speak of being in a complete flow with the whole universe, even becoming it. They speak of every singing bird being a heavenly song, and every sight a beauty. Some people see the real self as an innocent child, that needs to be nurtured and acts as our source of creativity.
I've had some experiences with this so-called real self people talk about, at least to a certain point. When I was more active in meditation, I sometimes found myself in a curious place. It was a place where my mind was completely still and all my actions were fluid. All was the present moment, future and past simply didn't exist at that moment. I was fully absorbed into my senses, my thoughts were gone. Every sight had a spark of magic to it, the grass blowing in the wind was the most magnificent sight. Everything had life, even the dead stones in the ground.
It's like I was in another world, I had finally found myself in the real world. It was just the most complete flow, without a care in the world. Everything I was already familiar with looked entirely new, I had a fresh perspective. I was perspective itself. It's similar to some people's descriptions of taking LSD, but I was completely sober. These experiences were pretty scarce, and I sometimes long to always exist in that world.
When I first started meditating, I had never experienced that world before. It completely shocked me to know that there was another way of being in the world, and ever since I've been exploring it.
To bring the story back, I currently believe these two ways of experiencing the world are because of our two split hemispheres in the brain, with the ego reciding in the left hemisphere and the real self reciding in the right hemisphere.
The left hemisphere is concerned with language, models, predictions and tools. It receives information, and breaks it up into parts to find out how it ticks. All with the goal of making the information manipulable and useful. It categorizes, plans, and makes things orderly and explicit. It's concerned with our survival and competition. It's our specialist, and a very useful friend, even if it sometimes has its flaws.
The right hemisphere is concerned with new information, connections, and social experiences. It takes information as a whole and passes it on to the left hemisphere to be deconstructed. It sees things in wholes and relations, in connections. It's the part of us that best understands facial expressions, body language, humor, art, and all other implicit things. It's our generalist, and it's our source of life, allowing us to escape our preconceptions.
One sees all the details in neat order, and the other sees the bigger picture in all its glory. The left hemisphere contains the model, and the right hemisphere brings the new information that evolves the model.
In this perspective, it makes sense that our sense of self is also split into these two faculties of our mind. The two hemispheres are almost completely separate. The biggest channel of communication between them is the corpus callosum, which is a small strip of nerves in the middle between them. Our brain is dual-core, and both hemispheres are able to contain consciousness on their own.
The left hemisphere, concerned with categorization, survival, and usefulness, sees ourselves in neat labels and categories. "I am Tom, I'm a firefighter, I like pizza, and I am a funny guy". It really likes these labels, and therefore it tries to make sure these labels remain consistent, sometimes in the wrong way, by lying to itself. It sees things in separation, causing it to see things in either/or, in black or white. If I am funny, I am not unfunny. It sees things in generalizations. It's concerned with our survival, and therefore it tries to make sure our needs are met, sometimes going a bit too far. It's the ego.
The right hemisphere is very experiential. It's focused on new information and living in the world, from all the senses, which is its sense of self. It sees things in their individual wholeness. It doesn't think in "I am this" and "I am that", it doesn't even think in words because it doesn't know how to use language. Surprisingly, language is not even a requirement for thinking, I've found out. You can still think perfectly fine without language. It thinks implicitly. It's very manual and conscious, because it doesn't have the capability to automate. Remember, it's the generalist, so it doesn't specialize. It sees things in their wholeness, and sees life as it appears. It sees everything in connection to everything else, it even sees itself as being connected to everything, and not separate. It's the real self, as many people call it.
So, to recap, from my research and from my own experience I've come to the conclusion that our senses of self, the ego and the real self, both recide in a different hemisphere in our brains. The hemispheres both do the same things, they just do them in different ways. The same is the case with our sense of self.
In that case, a lot of religious experience and practice is actually the process of going from a predominantly left-hemisphere perspective to the right-hemisphere perspective, which is a good thing, because the right hemisphere is the bringer of the new, and without it we get stuck in our preconceptions and lose our life.
We are severely crippled if we miss any hemisphere, and therefore we need both the ego and the real self to have a complete experience. Still, a lot of people depend too much on the left hemisphere, which means we need to bring ourselves back to the right hemisphere perspective in order to restore the balance again.
To end this post, I want to share a video that perfectly conveys the idea that was lingering in my mind. I discovered the video a couple of days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
Expect a future post about all the books and other sources I used as my research, as you might also like to take the intellectual plunge. It was a completely crazy time for me. I hope you enjoyed reading this.