I’m not certain of anything except that I am in my becoming, and that although to be and to become are separate acts/actions, they can co-exist, and they do persist co-temporally/co-spatially in this I that I am whenever it is I am wherever, with whomever, however . . . I might possess that irreducibility we have talked of so fervently in our most impassioned pleas for honoring the individual.
I am irreducible as you are irreducible as he and she are irreducible; every human-being is irreducible. He or she is a sum greater than his or her parts. This must be true in our rhetoric, in our epistemology, maintained in our ethics for us to live a humane life in a humane society. I remain distinct categorically from what we mean by psychology, mentality or personality. In face of the non-tactile soul and the non-tactile mind, we might begin to understand the problems we face in determining I-ness, just what the Self is, it is only I in the end, that can determine me.
Each and every person is macrocosm to everything else in the universe. Just as the universe has an infinite number of relative centers; each one at a time being the center, so do each of us possess this universal centrality in ourselves.
Herein reside the best analogies for the human Self, which if we allow distinction from soul, is of a particular plurality, a many selves Self, if I am permitted to borrow from Milton without contemporary prejudices against traditional canonical authors to sway judgement. How is it that we have to insist on a hierarchy for two things that should not have been a dichotomy to begin with. We do create in America a dichotomy where other cultures understand duality. I don’t understand how mind has come to surpass soul in believability, yet it has. Ask anyone if they believe in soul, or what the soul is. Then ask if they believe mind exists. If someone were to say that they both exist, or that neither one exists, or that they are one and the same, or that they are contingent, mutual and reciprocal in all ways, I would understand better than I do that mind exists but soul does not.
This only points to the socio-cultural hegemony of psychology over religion or the philosophy of religion. But then, psychology is the premier social science of the State because it teaches them how to control people, stifle people, create “psychologically healthy people,” which has always amounted to a fully realizable socialized person as a good publican, completely indoctrinated into the values of the status quo. In fact, education is only ever about this indoctrination and not about teaching people how to think or to think for themselves. A good portion of sanity anywhere at any time has always amounted to a good portion of socialization. This is why most immigrants feel a little crazy in their attempts to assimilate in some ways to the adopted culture. And it is telling that mental health is called sanity, or sanitized, or clean thinking, a clean mind, not dirty or tainted by unacceptable ideas or manners or behaviors. We will accept the familiar psychopath, so long as there is a degree of social acceptance allowable, before we will accept the most rational man of an alien enculturation.
The Falling Leaf Review 