IDEA 24
Identity or Tridentity?
The greatest truth is one that best approximates an immediate, overwhelming experience, like an inspiration from heaven, and has the longest range, like the light of a supernova piercing immeasurable distances by sheer force. (IIQ, page 22)
From the Wikipedia page entitled ‘Id, Ego, and Superego’: “In psychoanalytic theory, the id, ego, and superego are three distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus outlined in Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche. The three agents are theoretical constructs that Freud employed to describe the basic structure of mental life as it was encountered in psychoanalytic practice. Freud himself used the German terms das Es, Ich, and Über-Ich, which literally translate as “the it”, “I”, and “over-I”. The Latin terms id, ego and superego were chosen by his original translators and have remained in use.”
I consider this schema developed by Freud to be both useful and practical. It helps me identify my bodily desires as things that I can analyze and control, and my values as higher beings I subscribe to or seek to understand. And it places my ‘I’ or ego in the middle, as if I can choose between those two domains. (That is probably not an interpretation that Freud himself would allow, but great ideas have a way of leaping over the low conceptual fences built by their authors.)
This intellectual approach, however, is too abstract or remote for most people. They are looking for the lightning bolt or sudden illumination that faith, art, and living in nature can provide . . . and they are not wrong. For the truth achieved by breaking things apart is not the same as truth bestowed as a gestalt, which, according to the Wikipedia page for that term, is “information … perceived as wholes rather than disparate parts which are then processed summatively.”
Rather than coming as blank slates to the world and inscribing bits and pieces of it on ourselves to build up a picture of reality, we spiritual beings have a sense of unity from the start, and seek confirmation and validation of that sense in our environment.
I use the term ‘sense’ intentionally. With that initial breath of the Divine Ruh (Spirit) into these empty shells we call bodies, we are born with an urge and instinct for Unity. It is our ‘common’ sense. Dissonance, either in ourselves (e.g., cognitive dissonance) or in our surroundings (e.g., ugliness) disturbs or even distresses us. We reach out to others to see if they ‘get’ the same reality that is so obvious and comforting to us.
Alas! Our language is made of consecutive fragments, while our vision is simultaneous and whole. We speak, or write, or behave in certain ways, hoping for connection, but each person in our audience has his or her own gestalt, and is vibrating back to us, with similar motives, but on a different wavelength. Only rarely, when we find a community formed around a common faith and single purpose, do we rediscover that original harmony we heard with His First Word to us: “Be!”
Download the PDF version for free at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’ān – Mont Redmond complete version, or purchase a hard copy at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an: Redmond, Mont: 9781738842506: Books – Amazon.ca.Photo by Damon Hall on Pexels.com
