Corrupted Truth

The following post is in response to a comment:

Richard@ Thank your very much for your well thought out comments. Even though I do a lot of writing (though not much posted lately) I don’t often get comments from intellectuals like myself, so it’s very exciting to me when I find out I’ve inspired someone. I’m thinking that this summer, I’ll take some time to change the format of my blog to attract more people– but I guess it just hasn’t been a priority since in all honesty, my main reason for writing is selfish- not to inspire others, but to inspire myself. But I think it’s time to change that, and you may see that change reflected if you keep updated with this site.

Your comment took me back- a combination of nostalgia and retrospect for me. This post was a milestone post for me (although it’s not tagged as such), and although it’s full of errors due to speculative off-the-top-of-the-head and incomplete logic, that was only because intuition is inherently unstable, being in some way spiritual in form, and something that has always existed, and that we are inspired by trying to understand, but quite beyond our control; the instability however is unfortunately caused by our imperfect perception of it, and our efforts to try to control intuition by understanding it, despite our imperfection.

By the above two paragraphs, you may have noticed how my perspectives have changed since the writing of that post. but to the point: You are very right about the Id not being the origin of pride. The Id is still very mysterious to me, because although in certain respects the Id, Ego, and SuperEgo are infinite in nature, the Id is perceptively the most infinite– perhaps its inherent simplicity prevents any possible illusion of control, and since control is that which limits (and in the form of the Ego), you could say that the Ego is the corrupted form of the Id, and that the SuperEgo is a further currupted form of that.

I don’t know what my take was on this when I wrote “Id versus Ego”, but for a little while, I assumed the following: Id=past, Ego=Present, SuperEgo=Future. As it turns out, that was wrong– or, at the very least, it’s now in conflict with my current understanding of things. As it stands now– Id=Present, Ego=Future, and SuperEgo=Past — everything flip-flopped. Part of what inspired the correction of this error was Aristotle’s “three souls”, which are what Freud’s conception of the Id, Ego, and SuperEgo were partly based off of in the first place. for a detailed explanation of this, see Facing Reality.

Based on your other comments, I think you’ll find my Pride post very interesting too, although it was written quite a while ago and is not as refined as my current thought, and I was not as well versed as I am now. But since it, like all my posts, are intuitive, I’m confident it will provide you with further inspiration.

To help me understand things like pride (which does not completely fall under logic or emotions in nature) I had to change my model, to one without God– or more specifically, the trinity. Don’t get me wrong, the trinity still applies, but it only exists within perception. I’ve recently determined that the Ego is the source of perception, and so regardless of whether or not, or how God exists (and what his nature really is, our perception is imperfect (the Ego itself is not imperfect– rather, “our” Ego, which is a mirror image of the infinite Ego [to once again quote the Bible, "Let Us make man in Our own image"] is imperfect)– God as we perceive him is under the domain of the Ego, albeit a major component thereof.

For me, this area is still sketchy and incomplete (as you might have noticed), so you could say that my conception of the Id, Ego, and SuperEgo would be somewhere between alpha and beta if they were software. Fortunately, my thoughts exists not to be correct, but to inspire. I strongly request that you also consider my writing as such, at least until I actually get a PhD in Philosophy or something of that caliber :P

But to go on what I do understand: Note that by the Ego I mean not God, but our perception thereof– that part of us that is focused on the future [which is the only part of time that is truly unknown, thus explaining why we must know God, and why the God we know is so preoccupied with the future.-- I would love to cite examples of the latter if you so request :-) ].

But Pride is neither of the Ego or of the Id. It is of the SuperEgo. Up till a few months ago, I assumed that emotions were a product of the Id, since Emotion and Desire are so closely related. If there are two main kinds of truth as I first found (logical and emotional), then this confusion can be resolved as such:

(1) The Ego is the corruption of the Logical Aspect of Id, and (2) The SuperEgo is the corruption of the Emotional Aspect of Id. This may be a hint that the Id itself is truth, and that this truth can only be expressed (or rather appreciated) when corrupted by limitation, and this produces split-image reflected in logical and emotional truth. Unfortunately, the price of appreciation, awareness, and/or understanding of something is corruption of it; that is what I believe to be the true message behind the story of the Fall of Man (to understand, mankind ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but corrupted himself, and the whole world with him, to attain it; to me this means that the price of knowledge is corruption.

As to whether pride is born of logical or emotional truth, it appears to me to be both neither and both. It is the bastard son of emotion and logic, and to complicates things, it neither serves or respects the wishes of either. It is of both logical and emotional nature, but creates a paradox by not producing anything to fulfill its nature. This I believe to be the result of being unable to bear the price paid, and responding by retreating into denial. I explained this in a remarkably (for me!) poetic (or at the very least, both emotional and logical) way in my post Agony. There are probably many inconsistencies and contradictions in that post, but the level of spiritual energy I feel when read it is so great it overwhelms me too much to go back and re-analyze it.

but to clarify: what helped me understand the relationship of pride to the SuperEgo, together with Aristotle’s conception of the three souls, was the realization that emotion was the product of socialization– that is, being with others– or, more accurately, the perception of being with others (to some extent, anime will do!). By isolating myself, I found myself losing almost all my emotion, and the line between reality and fantasy began to blur; I was also unable to cry, despite feeling so much pain.

By being with others (which I’ve forced myself to do by going to the Clearfield, Utah- Job Corps Center) I’m starting to regain those lost emotions and sentimentality, and am able to cry, albeit for now only very little. Faith also follows the same pattern– it was only after isolating myself for many months that I decided to renounce Christianity, and after starting to attend church again, for a while I thought I could be a believer again– I though I really could be a Christian again.

Faith, unlike Pride, is thus born only of emotional truth, and I believe there to be a 3rd component which is born only of Logical truth, although right now I can’t think of what it might be.

Hopefully this post, albeit very long, has answered your questions and served to further inspire you. But I have a hunch that although I probably answered your questions, with those answers came even more questions, as in my experience most philosophical thought seems to do.