All our ideas about people are essentially mythologies. A mother is a biological entity: organs, genetics, instincts, etc. However, our ideas about Mom are not of this nature. They are about remembered moments and abstract qualities: beauty, kindness, temperance, etc. Mom is (for most of us) a kind of Greek goddess-- a personifcation of those qualities.
The essence of human reality is that we live in a world of ideas, not of things. A "tree" is not the same as a tree when examined under a microscope. It includes ideas like roughness and smoothness, branching shapes, shade in summer, etc. A "desk" isn't just a planed board sitting on top of four legs: it is a working surface, associated with school and work; it is a member of the "furniture" class of ideas; it is an association with a memory of stubbed toes, or of having to clean dripping ice cream off of it.
We are so immersed in this complex web of ideas and memories that we take them as representative of an asbolute reality. But they aren't.
So now to the self. There are two selves. One is thee mythological good guy/smart guy/diamond-in-the-rough/struggling misunderstood soul, connected to memories and abstractions. The other is the biological entity.
The essence of human reality is that we live in a world of ideas, not of things. A "tree" is not the same as a tree when examined under a microscope. It includes ideas like roughness and smoothness, branching shapes, shade in summer, etc. A "desk" isn't just a planed board sitting on top of four legs: it is a working surface, associated with school and work; it is a member of the "furniture" class of ideas; it is an association with a memory of stubbed toes, or of having to clean dripping ice cream off of it.
We are so immersed in this complex web of ideas and memories that we take them as representative of an asbolute reality. But they aren't.
So now to the self. There are two selves. One is thee mythological good guy/smart guy/diamond-in-the-rough/struggling misunderstood soul, connected to memories and abstractions. The other is the biological entity.
