Mortality and ME part 1

I suppose every individual has their own unique attitude to the fact that we are not immortal. Nevertheless, in a future post I'll try to categorise, no doubt in a banal and simplistic way, some of the attitudes I've come across, and I expect you have too. I think there some discernable types. Here, I'm after trying to say something useful about the ego, the sense that I am ME, and how that relates to mortality awareness.

The neuroscientsts, the experimenters and the writers therefrom (eg Damasio, Greenfield, Blackmore)tell us that it looks as though my (our) consciousness, my sense of being my unique self, my separate identity, is not a thing that sits inside my head and is added to or altered. They can't find "me"ness in there - maybe they will one day, though it doesn't look like it. It seems that our sense of a conscious self, separate from the world and different from everything else and everyone else in it, this "me" consciousness, is not one thing in the brain, but is continually created and re-created using all sorts of bits of brain inter-relating like mad.

So the ego itself is a construct, a set of processes. (Bear with me please, I'll get back to death and all in a bit.)It switches off, or at least winds down, at various times - obviously, or I'd never sleep, never be unaware of myself. My sense of a permanent thing that is ME is, in a scientific sense, an illusion. Not that I don't have an ego, but that it's a construct, not a permanent thing. It shifts, bends, dissolves, re-forms.

OK. If you say so. But it's still a powerful thing. I think it was TS Eliot who said that only those with a strong ego know what a relief it is to escape from it for a while. Something may be no less "real" and powerful to me because it is an illusion. Take the fact that to me Gloria M is an elegant, lively, fun-loving tolerant 42-year old, whereas in fact she's probably a grumpy old bag with attitude and many more years than that. My Gloria M's an illusion, but it works well enough, some of the time...

We escape our egos through total absorption in something, or someone, else. Late Beethoven quartet, sex, worship, being in the "mosh" pit at Glasto (to get down and dirty with the kids for a moment..)and meditation. One of the interesting things about meditation is that most people find it difficult to stay awake, even if they're not actually very tired, and yet they need to, because although sleep is an escape from the ego, meditation works because it is an escape whilst we are still awake. Very different effect.

The ultimate escape from ME-consciousness is of course - death. You may feel there is a permanent you that escapes from the body and goes on to an afterlife.I don't like polarising people's beliefs unnecessarily, but on this one we will have to differ, I'm afraid. (That's why I'm a humanist minister not an Anglican etc minister.) But in any case you might agree that a soul is not the same as an ego. OK - so: death is the end of ME-consciousness.

Gulp. That's all a bit stark, isn't it? We may be rational and "scientific" about it, talk about and indeed feel that death is essential, no life without it, all life must end, etc, but my ME-consciousness is not best pleased about that. Psychologist Dorothy Rowe says that above all we fear the dissolution of the self, actually more than we fear death itself. That seems to me to fit in with what the neuroscientists are telling us - the ME-awareness is a construct, and since we need it for a lot of our living, we will do a lot to protect it so we can construct it anew whenever it's needed. So naturally we fear death as the end not just of my life, but of ME.

Long blog posts are wearying to read, so if you're still with me, thanks, I'll pick this up soon.