Cloudscape

The ego, our sense of self, is at the same time the sense of reality, because our material self is the part of us that is real. We know what is real by knowing in what part of our consciousness our ego is.

If we can no longer tell what part of our consciousness is in reality, and what part of us lies in our imagination, neither can we tell the difference between reality and imagination. Our consciousness then becomes a continuum between the two. Moreover, as the ego disintegrates, neither can we tell the difference between ourselves and our environment.

Our sense of self separates our organism from the rest of our consciousness, and thereby separates our consciousness in three parts: in the middle is the ego, to one side of the ego is reality, and to the other side is imagination. The ego serves as a wall between the two, and controls the interaction between the two, like a dam. Without the ego, the two will flow into one another and overlap: without the dam, the water will flood the land.

Said another way, the ego is as a shell, and on one side of this shell is everything that is internal, and on the other, everything that is external. This ego, this shell, is formed by our organism, our body, because our body lies between the most external and the most internal level of our consciousness. Inside of our body, in our head, lies our imagination; outside of it, reality.

The ego is our medium between imagination and reality, but at the same time a dividing line; more accurately, perhaps, it, an umpire which determines which thoughts are allowed to pass this dividing line, which have relevance in reality, and how.

Our ego commands our thoughts and assigns roles to them, and as such it is the command center of our mind. Yet this entire command center, complex as it may seem, is caused by just one single process: compartmentalization.

What causes our sense of self is purely our sense of separation. As we separate our consciousness, we will automatically come to separate it into these three main parts: reality, body, and imagination. By separating our consciousness, we are able to tell one thing apart from another, and are able to tell apart what's real and what's not.

To some extent, however, the ego may temporarily divide, transfer or even dissolve even in healthy people: not only this, but this is actually a very normal process. The ego is a tool that is not always used to the same extent. The activity of our ego may vary depending on circumstances, just as most processes in our organism. In dreams, our ego may become almost entirely inactive. As long as we know how to wield this tool, however, we are able to remain sane. Only once we lose control over this tool do these processes of division, transfer and dissolution become unhealthy.

However, as the ego has no physical existence and is a notion which is usually defined as one's "sense of self," we are here faced with a problem of semantics. The error Freud made when defining separate compartments of the mind was to assume that these are separate. The mind, however, is not a machine with discrete parts, but a fluid continuity. As a result, as one looks deeper into the more holistic mechanisms of the mind, it becomes impossible to tell the distinction between one compartment of the mind and another, as all these so-called compartments flow into one another.

There are no boundaries in the mind, no borders as between its different regions which says where one aspect of the mind end and another begins, and it is meaningless to apply such analytical approach to something so complex as the mind. This may be frustrating to mainstream psychologists, as we have been brought up with the attitude of applying such approach on about everything.

In truth, there is no separation in the mind except that which we create ourselves, and the aspect of our mind which does this is equivalent to our ego. Because of our analytical approach to everything, however, we tend to separate almost everything, and this is both a cause and consequence of the overactivity of the egos of many people.

The concept of "sense of self" becomes hazy when one considers the question what is the self. Of course, the most straightforward answer in this context would appear to be that the sense of self is the sense of the organism. Through this sense of the organism, the mind can make sense of reality and know how to interact with it, which is how the sense of self, the ego, became associated with the other functions we now ascribe to it.

If we define the ego as the sense of the organism, then the ego can indeed be defined in a very specific way, as there is a very concrete boundary between the organism and the environment. In this case, however, there is the question of only a single "correct" sense of self, and in the context of psychology, this term is meaningless. Psychology has no relation to reality. Reality may affect our minds, but the fact that something is real does not make a difference as to how it affects our minds.

That is to say, whether we lived in reality or in a simulation of reality, our psychology would still work in exactly the same way. Suppose that someone lived his life in a simulation, for example, would this mean that this person had absolutely no ego, since he would have no sense of his organism, of his "real" self? Or, suppose that someone lived their life in a number of different simulations, and was a different person in each, then what is the sense of self?

Obviously, in these scenarios the ego would still have the same activity, even though there is no sense of the physical organism. It may be said that there is still a sense of the mental organism, the mind, but what is the mind?  If our mind is our consciousness, and if we define our self as our mind, our consciousness, and we can be conscious of anything at all, then our selves can likewise be anything or anyone at all.

It might be said that one's sense of self is the sense of what is perceived as the real self, but in that case, the word completely loses its meaning, as we may perceive ourselves to be anyone or anything at all. Yet, schizophrenics who perceive themselves as being something else than their organism are said to have a disintegrated ego.

Perhaps we could say that the ego is the mind's sense of its "central" consciousness, the part of the consciousness that remains constant. In this case, the ego seems to fit in the simulation scenarios, since the simulated self would still be the most constant part of one's consciousness. However, this is only so over extended periods of time, whereas for shorter periods of time, the most constant part of one's consciousness may be something outside of the physical organism, especially in hyperfocus. If we define the sense of self as the central part of one's consciousness, then during hyperfocus, someone would basically "become one" with the object of hyperfocus, meaning that their sense of self would become one with their consciousness of the object of hyperfocus. People literally lose themselves in the object of hyperfocus.

Also, note that, if we define the ego based on the constancy of consciousness, then there would be a continuum between the self and the environment, and an element of the environment would increasingly become part of the perceived self as it becomes more and more constant in one's life. This makes sense, as people often associate people or objects with themselves. People often "identify" themselves with other people or even things based on how constantly they are conscious of them, which is how we came to use possessive words and forms: my friend, my father, my car, my home. To the extent that they are constant they will increasingly feel as if they are part of oneself, as if they are "one's own," just as one's limbs are "one's own." In this case, because of their constancy other people or things become associated with the ever constant self or organism.

This process may even be furthered by similarities between people and things. Since a person does not produce duplicates for the information of a property for every person or things that shares it, but simply links the people or things with the same information. Apparently, it is the information of "constancy" that makes up our sense of self. The more constant something is, the closer it is to our selves.

This tells a lot about the causation of schizophrenia: as someone loses touch with their real self for too long, the constancy of his sense of self decreases, which may lead to ego disintegration. One may lose touch with one's real self by withdrawing from reality, for instance, by isolating oneself. Therefore, isolation is not only a possible symptom of schizophrenia, but may also be a factor in its causation. The more significant this factor is, the less significant the biological factor, and therefore, the higher the chance of permanent recovery.

The same processes which are attributed to the ego may also be concerned with persons and things outside the organism. That is to say, people will often treat persons or things outside themselves, to some extent, in the same way as they treat themselves. Their psychology will then react in similar ways to these other people or things as it would to themselves. If a loved one is hurt, for instance, it will feel similar as when the organism itself is hurt, and of course, it's the same way when a loved one is advantaged. In a sense, to some extent the sense of the loved one becomes part of the sense of "self," as the processes which comprise the ego come to encompass both the organism and the loved one alike. That is, the ego comes to account for both the self and the loved one alike.

Since the ego is relevant only as a collection of processes, and these processes may apply both to oneself and to others, the ego is, therefore, more than just one's sense of self. Since our starting point was that the ego is the sense of self, we have arrived at a contradiction.

We have therefore come at a point that the definition for the ego is falling apart. Perhaps we can no more define the ego than we can cut apart a piece of a river, since there is a continuity in the mind as there is a river. There are no boundaries between the sense of self and the sense of the environment, and so our definition falls short in categorizing the concept of "self" in something concrete. This does not mean, however, that the concept is meaningless. It merely means that we cannot say just where the concept begins. Not all concepts can be concretized, after all, especially when it concerns something so holistic as the human mind. The ego is a gradient, and so there are no dividing lines between the ego and the environment. However, this gradient itself may vary. This gradient will be particularly abrupt in egotistic people, and particularly gradual in schizotypal people.

The problem is that it is hard to define the concept "self," and the concept "sense of self" therefore likewise suffers from this ambiguity. Psychologically, we may best define the self based on constancy, but in this case, the self is a matter of degree. There is a degree of selfness to people and things.

It must be noted that this is meaningless in philosophy, unless one considers psychology to be part of philosophy, since what is the self is a matter of psychology, and the concept has no meaning whatsoever in philosophy. Thus one may say that "we are all one" or on the contrary that "everything we do, we do for ourselves," but this is a matter of interpretation, and interpretation is psychology, not philosophy.

We must not confuse our emotions with reality. This does not mean, however, that our emotional views have no value in reality. Since all emotions are equally true, we can just choose whichever we want. They are, after all, just emotions, and our emotions are our own. If we see it as a more beautiful perception that "we are all one," then we may choose to adopt this, but it has no philosophical meaning. Any meaning it has is of its own creation.

The self is defined by nothing but our sense of self, and the sense of self is essentially a series of psychological processes. Our "self" may be said to be that part of our consciousness that we most "identify" with. That we identify with it means that we are most concerned with it. Obviously, we are most concerned with our organism. The more we are concerned with others, too, the more we identify with them.

But just what processes make up the ego? Ultimately, our ego, our sense of self, is nothing but the mental process of separation. We separating our consciousness into compartments based onto how constant they remain themselves. The more constant something is, the more we separate it because it then becomes more important to our minds to do so: patterns that are more constant will recur more often, and therefore it becomes all the more important to recognize them. Thus, rather than memorizing information concerning a certain pattern similar to one we've already memorized, we simply connect it to the old one. Our mind recognizes the pattern it perceives is of a similar kind as it has earlier perceived, and puts it in a certain category.

In this way, the ego separates any pattern that shows some constancy: people, objects, concepts. Above all, it separates the self, which is by far the most constant part of our consciousness, from the rest of our consciousness and therefore from the rest of the world.

Thus, our consciousness is divided into an archipelago of islets of concepts, islands of people, and the mainland of our "self". The landmass of our self is not actually greater than the landmass of the rest of our consciousness. Most mass, in fact, is in the form of concepts. If we use this metaphor, anything that is not conceptualized lies beneath sea level.

Because our abilities of pattern recognition are very strong, we will be more likely to associate similar patterns to one another. This will make us more aware of the constancy of certain patterns, so that we will be all the more likely to separate these patterns into distinct concepts. The more analytical someone is, the more they will perceive patterns in how things are and the more they will separate these patterns into concepts. The more holistic someone is, the more they will then perceive patterns in how these concepts interact and the more they will connect these concepts. The irony is that to be intelligent, we need both to separate and connect.

In our evolution, analytical intelligence turned out to be more practical, so that our analytical intelligence involved slightly more than our holistic intelligence, and as we formed a practical society in which people were expected to conform to practical thought, this imbalance between analytical and holistic intelligence grew. As we analyzed everything, we came to separate everything more than we connected it. It is because of this that we came to develop such excessive egos: we separate ourselves from the rest of the world more than we connect with the world. A familiar yang-to-yin excess becomes apparent.

If we define the ego as the part of our mind which separates, then the ability of our ego is equivalent to our analytical intelligence. More specifically, it is its ability to separate the organism from the surroundings, which is just one application of analytical intelligence. For this reason, people who are more analytically oriented will tend to be more egocentric.

The irony is that the introduction of the concept of the ego is in itself a sign of the egocentrism of our society. It is the ego which separates our consciousness into compartments, and the concept "ego" is just one of such compartments. The concept as it has been held for the last hundred years almost seems like a jest of self-irony. In effect, the concept is quite useful. But as we have used it thus far it has been too analytical for a matter so holistic as the mind.

The ego is our sense of separation — and we introduced the concept of sense of separation as the sense of our self, and so even further separated ourselves from the rest of our consciousness, separating even our sense of selves from ourselves.

Our ego is not as concrete as we have thus far represented it. The ego is a mutable thing. For instance, through empathy we may become conscious of someone else's experiences as though they were our own. When we immerse ourselves in someone else, our consciousness of them may becomes predominate over the rest of our consciousness and so becomes its central part, temporarily superseding our selves. When we "put ourselves in the place" of someone else, this can be taken to mean that we place our egos in the place of our consciousness of someone else, and feel as though we were them.

Over time, our self is usually the most constant part of our consciousness, but time is irrelevant to the psychology of our current experience. If, in our current experience, someone else's experiences for some time become the most constant part of our consciousness, then we may perceive them as though we were them.

Of course, as soon as we become aware of this process, this means that we become aware of our own awareness, meaning that we become self-conscious, and so we at once shift back into our selves. Because we would shift back into our selves as soon as we become aware that we put ourselves in another's place, we can never truly catch ourselves doing so. In this way, we may rapidly shift our central consciousness between our selves and others, sometimes very briefly, and sometimes for very long periods of time.

For this reason, we never notice the transition our minds undergo, the transference of our ego into another person. Afterwards, it really feels as though the other person had been someone else, but if this were truly so, then it would be impossible to sympathize with them at all, and we could only observe them, as external objects. If we saw other people as just this, other people outside of ourselves, then we could never connect with them.

Of course, as soon as we would reflect on what we felt, we would say that we, our egos, felt what they felt, not that we were them feeling themselves. This is, indeed, true, but it does not occur to us that we, our egos, had transferred from one part of our consciousness to another, and that the part of our consciousness that is usually our self had become reduced or even disappeared completely.

Usually, the ego is controlled by the superego: as soon as we reflect on our selves, we automatically return to ourselves. The superego stands above the ego and as such supervises it. The superego is the part of our consciousness that reflects on the central ego, the central part of our consciousness, and one of the reason it does this is to ensure that the ego functions as expected, and, more importantly, that it is still there. The ego flows from the superego as the ego searches to establish a sense of identity and maintain it.

As soon as we ask the question "who am I?" the question is usually answered when we shift back into our selves. When we ask the question "what am I feeling?" the same thing often happens, as, even though we may also feel the feelings of another person, the only feelings we recognize as our own are those that we cannot attribute to anyone else.

When the question "who am I?" is not answered, a person will feel they no longer know who they are. Usually, when someone says they "do not know who they are" this actually really means that they feel they do not know themselves. In this context, there is question of an identity crisis. If they effectively no longer know who they are, however, then there is case of an actual loss of sense of identity, that is, a loss of sense of self, which may be a sign of schizophrenia, usually severe.

This is a dangerously reminiscent but quite different context, and it must be ensured that there is no confusion from the psychotherapist. It can be easily confirmed whether there is case of identity crisis or loss of sense of identity by going further into this matter, but if the psychotherapist is biassed, they may omit to do so.

In the context of loss of sense of identity, the person is actually losing control over the ego, and over how it undergoes transfer, division or dissolution. Usually, the superego controls these processes: by becoming self-conscious we immediately become conscious of what our selves are. Self-reflection takes the parts of our ego that divided from its central part back from transference, division and dissolution, and separates the ego from the environment, constraining it to the organism. A highly active superego will therefore often be associated with a highly active central ego.

Without ego transference, people would take on the semblance of machines, not of living beings, and our only interaction with other people would be practical. To feel someone, to feel what it would be like to be someone else, one needs to become them, and to connect with someone means to become one with them.

This is, of course, just another interpretation, and how relevant this interpretation is is but if a question of how well it could be used. In this case, however, its use depends on how intuitive it is.

It could, after all, also be said that the ego is the map of the part of our consciousness that throughout our lives is the most constant, a map that says "I am here" in the landscape of one's consciousness. But, on the other hand, we may also in the selfsame way use this map to say "he is here," "she is here" or even "it is here" elsewhere in this landscape of our consciousness. The word "here" in this metaphor is significant: our ego is in effect nothing more but a sense of "here." "Here" is always our starting point. That we are ourselves means that we are here in ourselves. As long as we see something as being "there," it lies outside of our ego. As soon as we see something outside of our organism as being "here," however, ego transference takes place.

As we we may create processes for other people which are identical to the processes of our ego, it would be counterintuitive to make a distinction between the two. The only distinction there is between the two is in reality: in psychology, there is none. I use the term "counterintuitive" because I believe that the most important use for psychological concepts is how well they may be used by intuition. The analytical mind has less use for psychological concepts because it cannot process them as well.

Freud's biggest mistake might have been to try to entirely analyze the mind rather than to actually experience it. The psychology of the mind is too complex for it to be understood through analysis alone. On the other hand, it can be easily understood through empirical method: if we can imagine ourselves in a certain situation, we may gain insight into our own psychology through introspection. Considering that our psychology is so complex that we each have all psychological traits to some extent, we may extrapolate our own psychology to other psychologies by imagining some of these traits to be greater or lesser. Sympathy is the best way of gaining understanding into another's psychology, and the best way of becoming capable of sympathizing is through experience. As a result, the most competent psychologists would not be analysts, but people who have experienced much emotion and, through introspection, gained insight into their own emotions.

Emotions are not analytical facts, and so are best understood through intuition. Thus, when we try to conceptualize emotions, it is best to do so in an intuitive way, for instance through metaphors.

Freud saw the mind as a machine and tried to take apart each of its compartments. One might as well, however, try to take apart each current in the water. Our minds are as of water, and its parts ever flow into one another. Our sense of self, more than anything, flows from one object into another.

We may imagine ourselves in certain situations, upon which our ego transfers into our imagination. In this case, we may still be ourselves, and this makes it hard to deny that the transference of the ego from our organisms into other compartments of our consciousness is quite possible. Who we are in our dreams is still our ego, and therefore the same counts for who we are in daydreams. But in our daydreams, we might also be someone else. To be someone else is just another of these situations in which we might imagine ourselves to be. Empathy is therefore just another form of ego transference.

Think of our lives as a series of simulations, and in each, we are a different person. In each of the simulations, we are ourselves, and are conscious through our selves, our egos, but in each simulation our ego plays a different role. Though our ego may transfer itself into any compartment of our consciousness, however, we will rarely imagine being an inanimate object. When this does happen, it is usually a case of schizotypy.

Schizophrenics may sometimes subconsciously put themselves in the place of an object. As the ego allows an exchange between different compartments of the consciousness, when the ego is transferred into an object, qualia may transfer back and forth between the object. The schizophrenic may then transfer their own emotions into the object, and think, for instance, that the object is observing them. Part of the ego is in fact observing the organism from the object. The object may be perceived as being angry, sad or pleased with them. The feeling that the object or the environment is observing them may give rise to a delusion, for example of a conspiracy.

Also, because the ego transfers consciousness from the ego into the schizophrenic's consciousness of the object, the schizophrenic may have the feeling that thoughts are being extracted from their mind. These thoughts are in effect extracted from their ego and transferred into their consciousness of the object. It is therefore perceived that the thoughts are transferred into the object itself. In essence, because the schizophrenic has lost their sense of self and does not know who they are, they will feel as if thoughts can be interchanged with the environment as though the environment were part of themselves.

In a way, this is true: the environment is part of themselves in that their consciousness of the environment is part of them, and beside their consciousness of the environment, they do not know of any environment. If their ego wanders through the environment, the schizophrenic will feel as though they are themselves part of the environment, or the environment itself. This may give rise to the feeling that they are omnipresent, which could bring about the delusion that they are God. The schizophrenic may even entirely transfer its ego into the object and so imagine itself being that object, or being one with that object.

Our ego is supposed to tell us what part of our consciousness is concerned with our organism: it does this by recognizing which part of our consciousness is most constant. The environment changes around us, but our body always remains. Therefore, our ego interprets that our body is our self and compartmentalizes this part of our consciousness, marking it as "self" and making sure that it remains properly separated from the environment to avoid breakdown into schizophrenia.

In this interpretation, the term "ego disintegration" may be thought to be no longer valid, as the ego still exists, but simply strays from the organism, and, sometimes, cannot find its way back to it. However, because the ego is normally a central compartment of our consciousness, it may indeed be said that the ego disintegrates: it disintegrates into smaller pieces, pieces which become itinerant across the schizophrenic's consciousness, wandering haphazardly from one place to another.

In this sense, the schizophrenic really becomes several people at once, several people scattered across a large number of compartments, and these people may talk to the schizophrenic as though they were other people — hence the voices. It is no wonder, therefore, that multiple personality disorder had once been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia.

However, I propose that we make a distinction between the central ego and the vagrant ego. The central ego is the part of the consciousness that the ego most often occupies, its home, so to speak: the headquarters of the mind. The vagrant ego may either be part of the ego that has divided from the central ego, or may be the entire ego which has left its "home" to transfer into another compartment of the consciousness — usually a person, sometimes an object. The division of the ego across objects is likely the origin of animism.

Schizophrenia is an excessive sense of connectedness, or rather, a lack of sense of separation between one thing and another. But one's ego not only separates, it also connects: the central ego separates, the vagrant ego connects.

One's ego, or sense of self, is a medium between one's thoughts the environment. This means that, both if one is very introverted as when one is very extraverted, one's sense of self will decrease, though more so in the case of introversion than in the case of extraversion. People who are highly extraverted cease to be aware of their emotional self, whereas people who are highly introverted cease to be aware of their physical self; therefore, either will bring about a loss of sense of self.

This may be why both extreme introversion and extreme extraversion may lead to psychosis through ego disintegration: psychotic mania on the one side, and psychotic depression on the other. Of course, depression is not necessarily introverted and mania is not necessarily extraverted, but there is a possibility that this may contribute to the psychosis, as one of several factors.

On one side, examples include psychotic depressions triggered in people in meditative resorts, because they turn so much inward that they forget their physical selves. I believe that, on the other side, mania may sometimes similarly be triggered by an excess of goal-directed activity in some people, because they turn so much outward that they forget about their emotional selves. Of course, either will likely necessitate an essential vulnerability.

While the ego has no physical existence, one brain area which may particularly be associated with the ego's functions is the parietal lobe, which, among other things, is responsible for sense of spatial separation. It has been shown that during meditation, activity in the parietal cortex decreases, which accounts both for the sense of oneness as for the psychosis caused by meditation: the ego becomes weakened during meditation. Some have gone so far, therefore, to say that meditation is dangerous (Sandy Brundage: Warning: Meditating May Be Hazardous to Your Health). It is true that excessive meditation has its dangers, but so has everything that is excessive. In moderation, meditation is still healthy, and one is likely to best feel oneself when one is losing touch with oneself and with reality, at least if one meditates in the right way. After all, meditation is meant to increase awareness of what one feels, thus, if one meditates in a balanced way, one is also likely to feel when one has achieved one's balance.

Unfortunately, in many meditations it is seen as the goal to get rid of the ego, and this is a very unhealthy approach to meditation. We need the ego. If someone meditates to destroy their ego, it is no wonder, of course, that psychotic depression is the result, as psychosis is the result of ego disintegration. Instead, it is better to seek out one's balance. For most people the ego is too active, but this is no reason to seek out the opposite extreme. Either how, meditation should focus on consciousness, not on ego death.

Meditation is not supposed to be the dumb execution of a mechanical process but an insightful improvisation of contemplative compassion. For this reason, insight meditation may perhaps be the most helpful form of meditation, as it may encompass any form of meditation, whichever is at a particular time considered to be the most helpful to achieve balance.

In many cases, however, meditation is an example of an activity which temporarily causes a partial dissolution of the ego. This is why some people who meditate excessively will feel "spacy," and why meditation often causes a sense of connectedness with the universe. The ego does not actually dissolve but, in the manner of a mineral dissolving in water, splits into numerous tiny parts, like the atoms of the mineral dissolved in water. Therefore, dissolution is actually a more complex form of division, a division into numerous compartments. As the sense of separation reduces, the self is increasingly perceived in the environment, as parts of the ego have split from the central ego and transferred into aspects of the environment.

Ego dissolution may occur to some extent during any kind of relaxation, as separation is needed mostly during activity. Separation is in fact entirely practical, whereas to experience it is more useful to connect with the whole of one's consciousness. The ego may therefore increase and decrease its activity according to the circumstances.

It is clear that the ego is highly changeable, but usually, we may control the way our ego changes. It is necessary for our ego to undergo frequent changes, and that these changes happen very smoothly. In fact, the transitions of our ego are so smooth that we never have the time to really notice them except afterwards. If we do have the time to notice the transitions of our ego, this is a sign that we have weak control over our ego, and therefore, a weak superego. If our superego disintegrates, our ego will soon follow, because there is nothing to keep the parts of our ego together into a single central entity.

When the ego's processes of transfer, division and dissolution occur outside of our control, psychotic symptoms may be the result. When we keep too much control of these processes, however, the result may be that we become egotism  — a different kind of mental illness. Egotism is, of course, so called because it is an overactivity of the ego. Because we have the obsessive need in our society to keep control over everything, egotism is far more common than psychosis. Because of our tight control over ego, it remains more static, and less transference can occur, so that dreams, empathy and spirituality are curbed.

People are like stars. We call our star the sun just as we call our organism our self, but in effect, our organism is just one of many stars, and we may travel to other stars until they become as bright as our own sun. Our consciousness is an island universe, and our ego a superluminal starship.

It must be noted that this has no relevance in reality. It is merely a useful way of understanding the human mind. Nor would it be possible to verify it: it is, in fact, just another way of interpreting things, but one that may prove to be highly useful.

There is no way we can connect a computer to the brain and look for an "ego" directory to see if we are correct, nor would we find one if we could do so, as, unlike ourselves, the human mind rarely makes such fine distinctions between its compartments as we do ourselves. The concept of the ego is a psychological construct, and as such we can do with it whatever we deem fit, that is, we can do with it whatever will make it most useful, most intuitive.

In conclusion, the ego is the mind's ability to compartmentalize consciousness: this part is the organism, this part is reality, this part is imagination, and so forth. In psychosis, this ability fails and the boundaries between the compartments fall away, so that they merge. Without the ability to compartmentalize, the psychotic can no longer understand what part of its consciousness is reality, what part is the organism, and what part is imagination.

Many people see depression as a weakness, in contrast to other illnesses, which, today, are usually tolerated. By communicating this, they are in fact likely to assist the mechanisms that cause depression, as depression is brought about largely due to shame. Shame drains the ego of energy, as it no longer wants to care for itself when it is ashamed; the ego only rewards the organism if it thinks itself deserving of reward.

This is because reward and desire are two forms of pleasure, in psychology called consummative and appetitive pleasure, respectively, and these form of pleasure are both mainly caused by the same chemical, dopamine. Shame causes the reward centers to become less active, so that less dopamine is produced, so that the person feels less desire. Less desire means less initiative.

The purpose of this is to motivate the right behavior and discourage wrong behavior, but unfortunately, this has a drawback in humans: because humans are so emotional, it is easy for them to lose balance, and one way in which they may lose balance is through an excess of shame. If this occurs, the person loses so much dopamine that they have too little left to feel the desire to care for themselves. With so little desire, the ego becomes depleted.

If the ego no longer cares for itself, it will no longer care for anything it wants to do, and so will no longer care to do anything. The ego is the mind's convertor of energy into action, because all action a person does is done by and through their self, their organism, and so requires an ego, a sense of self. In schizophrenics, the ego has become so drained that they no longer even realize who they are, where their organism ends and where their environment begins.

Because of this, it may be very damaging to communicate contempt to people who are depressed, be it for their depression or any other reason. Punishing people who have tried to commit suicide, as is sometimes done, will not prevent them from doing so and is in fact likely to encourage them.

It is even more damaging to call a suicidal attempt they might have tried cowardly, as suicide is at least in part motivated by self-destruction, which, in turn, is motivated partly by shame. Adding to this shame may only worsen their self-destructivity.

Worse still is to call people who are depressed lazy. People who are depressed are often so detached from themselves that they no longer know what they feel, so that they might in fact readily believe people when they state that they are lazy.

Moreover, in their self-loathing, they might willingly use any excuse to hurt themselves, even if they know whatever they tell themselves to hurt themselves is untrue. Because they have become an enemy of their own, they will treat themselves as an enemy, just as though they were someone else. If they feel detached from themselves, this will make this even easier.

Moreover, their pain justifies their inactivity, so that they might, in the inability of action, try instead to hurt themselves, so that they would feel less ashamed, and, in their self-loathing, even feel a certain satisfaction at their own pain. But this only further drains their ego. In time, this may cause a positive feedback mechanism, which only ceases when the ego has too little energy left to hurt the organism, so that it is finally stopped by a negative feedback mechanism. Sometimes, when the person no longer has the energy to hurt him- or herself, he or she may then get better.

In rare cases, however, at this point the ego has not only completely drained, but also disintegrated, in which case the depression turns into schizophrenia. This is one reason why depression often precedes schizophrenia, and is listed as one of the symptoms of prodromal schizophrenia.

See also:

The Evolutionary Psychology of Self-Destruction

Empathy connects our emotions to those of others into one, and therefore, causes our self-respect and our respect for others to affect one another, so that it is hard to love others while hating ourselves, and it is easier to love ourselves if we love others.

The ego controls empathy, partly by constricting it, but also by allocating it appropriately. If the ego is disrupted, one may feel more emotionally involved with someone else than in oneself, or one may feel more emotionally involved with someone one does not know than for someone one is close to.

Metaphorically, one could say the ego acts as a valve controlling the transfer of emotion between others and oneself.

Overprotective parenting increases risk of neuroses and psychosis by stinting the development of the ego. Because overprotective parents care too much for their child, they prevent the child from learning how to care for itself. Caring for oneself is not a matter of skills as this does not require any skills at all: it is a matter of self-respect. Without ego, there is no self-respect because it seems that there is then no self to respect.

Compulsive education may have the same effect, because it replaces any innate drive to learn with force. The pupil comes dependent on this force because in its presence, its curiosity cannot grow. The pupil asks the question in the place of the pupil, rather than having them ask the question themselves.

The school must learn the pupil to become their own teacher, for only then can they truly grow afterwards. If the pupil has not learned to teach itself after it has been taught, then the teaching was in vain. Even to remember is to teach, for if we don't think of something we have learned now and then and thereby rehearse it, we will eventually inevitably forget it, be it in a matter of years or decades.

Similarly, the parent must learn the child to be their own parent. In a way, the parent is to transfer their own parenthood into the mind of the child. We all are our own parents: our ego is our internal parent.

Perhaps all the symptoms of schizophrenia are a direct result of ego disintegration. Under increasing stress, the ego will first forget what it wants, then forget what it feels, then forget who it is, then forget what is real. Bit by bit, the mind thereby detaches farther and farther from its material self until it detaches from matter and reality itself.

In particular, the paranoia in schizophrenia may be caused entirely by ego splitting, in which the person's sense of self, or ego, becomes split into separate compartments which each seem to assume a role of their own. For instance, the person's own thoughts may seem as though they are those of someone (or something) else, leading to the delusion that thoughts have been inserted into the person mind. These thoughts which have separated from the ego may then turn to intrusive thoughts or voices.

At the same time, if the ego has been split into many compartments, it becomes harder to focus one's attention on one specific compartment, because one's thoughts have basically become scattered across each of these many compartments. In this way, one's attention may become distracted as it rapidly shifts from one train of thought to another.

In ego splitting, much of the ego has split up from the person's self and has become transferred onto other areas of one's consciousness, such as daydreams, to such extent that these may become extremely vivid. These may then have such impact on one's emotions that they seem real, whereas the part of the ego concerned with reality has become so small that real events have a much smaller impact on one's emotions. The result is an increased response to imaginary stimuli, and a decreased response to real stimuli. In other words, the ego has partly dissolved into imagination.

In addition, parts of the ego may become transferred onto objects in the person's environment, so that it seems as though these are alive, or as though they contain cameras, microphones or other means through which they might be spied upon, or it might seem that the person can control these objects with his mind.

This may also happen with people: when parts of the ego are transferred to other persons, the person's emotions about him- or herself may become projected upon them. It follows that if the person has a high self-esteem, this may lead to the feeling that people will likewise have a high esteem of him or her, increasing the feeling of high self-esteem and so forth. This interaction may lead to grandiloquence. On the other hand, if the person has a low self-esteem, this may lead to paranoia, because he or she then projects his or her feelings about him- or herself onto others.

In addition, some people who suffer from self-loathing may use daydreams to punish themselves, especially people who have a lot of imagination. They may do this by hurting themselves in their thoughts, but also by making other people hurt them in their daydreams. In one's daydreams, one has the ability to exert full power over all things, and for people who live largely in daydreams, this ability might distort their image of reality, leading to the delusion that reality differs little from daydreams.

As the ego splits up, the person comes to feel one with things that are in reality separate from his physical self. In this way, the person's sense of separation becomes blurred. This may cause the feeling that people are too close to oneself and so worsen the sociophobia already caused in part due to the paranoia. Furthermore, because of this lack of sense of separation, it becomes as if all things in the world are in fact part of the person's own mind, things that are therefore controlled by the person's own thoughts. As the person dissociates from their own thoughts, however, and they come to appear to take a form distinct from the ego, it seems as if their thoughts are not their own, and that they are instead thoughts that they pick up from other people.

Furthermore, because of this lack of sense of separation, it may also seem that everyone is much too close to them. Close enough, for instance, to harm them, or to read their thoughts. Strictly speaking, this is not in itself ego splitting, since the ego is one's sense of self, and the paranoid still knows the difference between themselves and other people, and does not see them as part of themselves as one would see one's arm as part of oneself, for example; but the feelings they believe others to have towards them still originate from their own. This is so because the paranoid's sense of self has partly dissolved, so that they no longer recognize these feelings as their own.

If the person hates him- or herself, it may seem to them that the entire world hates them. If the person is also self-destructive, it will seem as if the entire world is keen on destroying them. But to paranoids, this feeling becomes so extreme that is no longer a mere emotion, but a reality to them.

One might argue that ego dissolution is not the only thing that may cause paranoia. Traumas can be another cause, for instance, which neither directly nor indirectly have anything to do with ego dissolution. On the other hand, one might question if this is paranoia at all, since people who develop fear of people because of traumas have an actual reason to do so, namely, the chance that the trauma might repeat itself. The traumatized person's estimation of this chance isn't even necessarily irrationally high, but he or she is so terrified of this chance that no matter how small it may be, it is still significant to him or her.

In ego dissolution, emotion has become a continuum from the ego's emotions to empathic emotions, with no well-defined line in between, and so emotion can readily flow back and forth from the ego to empathy. At the other extremity, in the case of egotism, the line between the two becomes an impenetrable wall that cuts the ego off from empathy, and the little shared emotions there are are attributed to the ego.

A slighter version of ego-splitting may actually be a normal process involved in empathy, a phenomenon which would likely be most prominent in fiction: the more time one spends putting oneself in another's place, the more one will feel as though one really is in their place. In dreams, the dream ego sometimes takes the form of a fictional protagonist.

It may be that schizophrenics are highly empathic, though this does not have to mean that they are compassionate, and, if they have low self-esteem, they will likely not be.

Some Buddhists, and other practitioners of meditation, practice a form of meditation called metta meditation, or compassion meditation, in which the meditator tries to generate compassion for living beings: first him- or herself, then loved ones, then acquaintances, then enemies, then strangers, and ultimately all that lives.

This form of meditation would not actually work with paranoids, because the issue with paranoids is not their own hate for others, but the imagined hate others have for them. However, if this form of meditation were reversed, it might actually serve as a potential cure or prevention for paranoia.

Since the paranoid's emotions have become projected onto other people, he must deal both with the emotions ascribed to the ego as those ascribed to others, meaning that he must re-place him- or herself in the place of others and then deal with the emotions he feels for himself in others' place.

To the paranoid, the metta meditation should be focussed entirely on the first stage of generating compassion for him- or herself, but from the viewpoint of others. In other words, he or she should imagine other people to love them and send them love. This is unlikely to work, but in the process, he or she might resolve the hate that he or she imagines others to feel for them, which is actually their own self-hate projected onto others.

As this form of meditation would require insight on the paranoid's part that he or she is paranoid, this would sometimes be more useful as a preventive than a curative method, at least in severe cases. Nonetheless, it can also be used in less severe forms of paranoia, or while the illness is not in full force.

The ego is like a despot, for the despot calls itself its nation entire, while the ego sees itself as the whole of you.

If you do not love life, life will not love you; if you do not love yourself you will not love life. For life is you.

Reason should be our tool, not the other way around… yet, in our world it is as if there is nothing else reason could be a tool of - as if we've all become our reason.

Reason itself may be blind to beauty, but it helps us find it.

Our computers will relieve us of our black-and-white thinking. Bit by bit, our left brain half will be supplanted by artificial intelligence, and our consciousness will shift towards the right brain half -- and with it become more creative, emotional, open-minded, holistic, and spiritual. With the need for our analytical mind to dominate us in our daily lives, our overgrown ego will die, and we will be relieved to finally have shed its monumental burden. Thus a new, more enlightened level of consciousness will arise.