From Ego to Wego

And there’s potentially a ravenous fixation of the Ego or that part of the mind, into knowing itself. And that really suggests that it doesn’t know itself, that it is this evolutionary stepping stone that we’re trying to remember what we are, who we are and what to do with that. So, there’s many ways we could slice this down in talking about the mind or the Ego or consciousness. And so, I’m going to explore just a few different tributaries of this geography that we all share.

So, here’s an interesting one that you may or may not have come across before – but we know that the sense of “I”, the sense of identity, is a construct that then is layered onto, let’s say the surface of the mind itself. And what we normally think of as the broadcaster of consciousness or the mechanism… we fixate on, is the brain, right. And there’s been a lot of anthropological reasons for that. A lot of looking at primitive man and the evolution of our structure and our brain structure.

And we know that somewhere along the evolutionary path our brain structure increased. And you know, there’s the old Terence McKenna meme and idea that basically, maybe out on the savannah in our prehistory, there could have been an encounter with entheogens, maybe the [psilocybin] mushroom, which bootstrapped our consciousness into a more self-actualized state, which is aware of itself. And yet in so doing it is separate from its environment. It’s doing so at a cost, which is to separate us from the web of life.

Now we basically have these three networks of intelligence, which are all part of this egoic superstructure. What modern science is saying about our makeup is that we essentially have not just the one brain, but we have three brains, essentially the originating three brains or three networks, and the originating brain you could say is the gut, the gut instinct.

And this is really important. There are a lot of advances with biology and looking at the microbiome and looking at the very fundamental nature of our relationship with trillions of microorganisms, which inhabit our being, our microbiome in our stomach and basically send signals and desires and can in some instances control our urges and our actions.

And in the majority of cases, you know, these microorganisms are in symbiotic relationship with us, helping break down foods we can’t break down on our own. We’re actually a colony organism. We’re not just this individual sense of “I”. We think that we’re the “I”, but it’s always changing. And even within the solidity of the “I”, if we drill down there are these relationships with other beings that are part of our “I” -ness that we just don’t recognize and we’re not used to.

So, the gut instinct is a phrase. But there’s something really important in that. It’s an instinct and it’s older than the brain networks of the conscious egoic, modern structure of what we consider to be a human being. They say that you have a thought about a third of a second before you actually register it in the brain. And that’s because the gut instinct is where you originally know your feeling mind, not the thinking mind that we get trapped in, in the egoic structure.

And so that gut instinct with the microorganisms – a neuroscientist once told me that basically neuroscience can measure the electrical impulses in the brain with EEG and MRI, and that theoretically they could also measure that electrical activity in the gut. And apparently the microorganisms in the gut go in and out of their own electrical fluctuations of states of being. And they go in and out of gamma, which is a unity state of consciousness.

So there’s a whole lot going on there in that gut-brain network that is older than the head network. There’s also the heart, which we know has up to 70% of the same neuronal material that the brain is made of, but it’s actually in the heart. So, it’s not just an organ which is pumping blood around the body. It’s also involved in thinking, feeling, making decisions, in connection with the brain.

So, we basically have these three networks of intelligence which are all part of this egoic superstructure.

And that’s a beginning point, that’s the starting point, right? So even if you understand that you have this sense of, “I”, this sense of being-ness that is separate from the web of life and separate from others, there’s also the idea of consciousness itself.

As I was saying, basically the Ego and the mind itself are like these programs running on the operating system. But then you really have to ask, you know, where does this originating consciousness come from, that the Ego is running its program on? And so, this is a whole other kettle of fish that philosophy has been pursuing for millennia.

One of the classical definitions of consciousness that I do really like is from a 19th century into the 20th century philosopher called Alfred North Whitehead. And he has a phrase, he called consciousness: “the awareness of awareness, or the apperception of pattern as such.”

So, I really like that. I mean, it’s very applicable to some of the psychedelic states when you’re just an awareness of awareness hanging there in the void or some alien vista, but you are aware that you are, and that is, you know, perhaps the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness.

Philosophy has also been arguing whether that consciousness is something which originates in the brain, or now I would say the three brains, or is it something that is localized in the body, that is generated by the mind-body? Or is it something that is received? And there’s some very cogent trains of thought on both sides.

I lean towards the “receiver of consciousness” model, essentially because there’s been a lot of studies done with people that have had injuries and brain damage and consciousness has rerouted itself, and the ability to have a signal and to be a conscious being is something is not necessarily anchored to the geography. The geography can reroute, and it can find ways around.

But there’s a big and really important distinction between the understanding of consciousness as a local phenomenon, which is generated within the body and the mind-body organism, which would then end with the body. The analogy from the 20th centuries is if you have a TV set and it’s receiving a signal, and you destroy the TV set, the signal is still being broadcast.

And that is one of the possibilities of consciousness itself, that it is being broadcast from a higher dimension or state of being. And in that sense it would be non-local – and non-local means it’s everywhere, it’s in everything. And this gets very close to a lot of the indigenous perceptions of the world of spirit, of consciousness, of presence, of beings that are infused with this gift of life that is in everything, in all states of matter, according to the filtration of their biology and how that consciousness can recognize itself.

So, there are lots of different models you know, around consciousness itself. It does get very close to aspects of quantum mechanics and these are all models. All of these models of science are models which are evolving and they’re not static, and they don’t know everything yet. In fact, there is a holistic drift and momentum to aggregate an understanding of who we are.

And you’ve got to realize that all of these modalities and everything I’ve just mentioned, they’re all filtered through this sense of Ego, right? All filtered through this sense of humanness of being-ness. And that sense of Ego is always changing, now days through cultural changes which are exosomatic or outside the body, evolutionary changes mediated through our technology. We’re also changing our ego identity through our understanding and our memes, not just our genes, and these models give us a language to grasp towards some central understanding.

And there have been centuries if not millennia of models and all of that is pretty Western. One of the other templates and models that I’d like to just bring up in initiating this idea of what is the Ego and what is the mind and what is consciousness and how are they related to each other, are some of the Eastern traditions.