My mind, my identity, my spirit

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was in his time the foremost student of the mind. The practice of psychiatry owes much to this thinker for it utilizes the techniques which he developed to extract the essential knowledge of his patients' own condition from out of the deeper unconscious data base of memory engrams associated with their experiences. Freud defined a person's identity as an incorporation of three basic products of the mind. They are the ego, the superego, and the id. The superego is the monitor that oversees the conscious ego so that standards of conduct are observed which conform to the status quo while the id represents the innate survival mechanisms of man's baser natures and which works unconsciously to provide the superego its reason for being.

The closest that Freud ever came to examining the spiritual self was in the analysis of dreams. He thought that dreams were wish fulfilments. He taught that religious doctrines were illusory, "the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity". We understand now that his examinations of the psyche, especially where they relate to his dreams, were largely the projections of a mind in turmoil, which as his life progressed became increasingly more embroiled in a vain and futile attempt to understand itself. Whereas the development of a person's life follows the growth of all aspects of one's learning from study, experience and observation and therefore results in the progressive acquisition of knowledge and understanding, the progress of Freud's life did not follow that route and the understanding of his own life became more difficult the older he became.

The mind is representative of the sum of the energies that defines one's identity. One's identity is formed primarily by the genetic stamp provided by genealogy and experience. Identity and mind are separate in that the mind is intangible and susceptible to change, whereas identity tends to be established by the external influences. Effort and the expenditure of energy are required to change one's identity but one can always change one's mind on a whim. The mind and to a limited extent one's identity have no fixed temporal status. The containment that is our corporeal self provides the link to a temporal existence and establishes the relationship that the mind has to the body and that the body has to the environment. To summarize, identity is corporeal and mind is spiritual.

Understanding and knowledge utilize associations of memory and observation to form logical extrapolations and ultimately the understanding of a complex idea or concept can be stored and recalled as an engram that exists in memory. It is not always one's own limited resources that lead to that understanding. The inspired thinking and spontaneous revelation that often leads to understanding are quite often the result of psychic extraction. The existence of psychic potential is inherent in every individual as the extension of, or tap into, the universal sea of consciousness. Therefore memory potential has a shared distributed topology among all sentient beings. The individual's brain imposes the limitation on full access to this network out of prejudice and skepticism, however the complex mechanics of the brain are such that it is still also a hardwired receiver and transmitter and the psychic process is most often transparent. We wilfully and transparently program our brains to filter or reject information based on our own rationalizations and the brain is most cooperative in that regard.

Many people reject the concept of the psychic process, of the existence of the soul and of an afterlife and in so doing establish the belief structure that guides them throughout their lives. In this way we are what we believe ourselves to be and are limited to what we believe ourselves capable of.