Your ‘Deeper Self’

February 20, 2024 Cognitive Insights No Comments

Although the term sounds New-Agy, it denotes well what is scientifically known to be what we are mentally mostly made of.

Thus, it may be the most important as well as most neglected concept on earth. I frequently refer to it from other blog texts.

Humanity has come a long way.

The ‘deeper self’ always has been present at the core of many happenings, and many ways have been sought to give it a proper place. Most of these ways have been – from a rational viewpoint – weird, to say the least, even if metaphorically interesting.

One of the more recent ways was psychoanalysis ― intriguing in showing an interesting direction as well as furthermore showing much of what the deeper self is not.

What it’s not

Your deeper self is not some other self lurking in your depth, ready to jump forward and do some dark thing while you can only helplessly stand by.

Your deeper self is not the dustbin for repressed mental contents that you subconsciously decided not to face anymore.

What it is

Your deeper self is the conglomerate of mental-neuronal patterns that, together, are the basis of all subconceptual processing about which I have written many blogs and books.

Any of your concrete thoughts, feelings, and motivations originate in your deeper self. Probably most important in this is how it continually self-influences you in many respects simultaneously. Some of this reaches your conscious awareness.

To your health

As science shows abundantly – but for which medicine finds no proper place – your deeper self also profoundly influences how you get ill and how you may get better — with far-reaching consequences.

Health being far more than the absence of disease, your deeper self is crucial in broad aspects of your life, and eventually also in the lives of many — say, how culture evolves and, through this, also the workings of the world.

Among other things, this shows the morality of how you heal and how healthcare is organized.

To the future

All the above makes the way we handle the deeper self – as a concrete ‘thing’ and an abstract concept – also crucial in how the future will unfold.

If we choose for comfy inner dissociation, it will end badly — hell on earth, on a path paved with misery. Unfortunately, we frequently tend to be well underway.

If we choose for awakening to who we are to the core, well then, humanity will remain an exciting experiment for a very long time.

The latter is all I am hoping for, especially in view of pending super-A.I. that will or will not be Compassionate. It’s still our choice.