Carl Jung thought of the ego as the conscious mind as distinct from the personal unconscious. So the ego is our conscious awareness of our existence, the fact that we can say ‘I’m here, this is me, and I’m not you’. So it’s my conscious existence, and it organises our thoughts and our feelings, and uses memories that are not repressed. So that’s a helpful way perhaps of describing, understanding the ego. The research has been done, the scientific understanding of the brain in recent years after Jung, has suggested that there is a particular part of the brain that is responsible for this self-awareness. This is not the mind, it’s not the answer to the question of what is consciousness, but it’s a particular part of the brain that comes awake or the light gets turned on with the sense of ‘I am here, and I’m sitting in this chair, and I’m looking at a camera, and I’m hoping that this is getting on the internet, and I hope you’re listening’. So there’s that conscious awareness of ourself in any particular moment or place. So the fact that that could even be, as I understand it, identified it with a particular functional part of the brain is interesting, because it suggests that the brain one day will be turned off, maybe with dementia partially, and certainly when we die we become brain-dead.
Does that mean that the mind, consciousness ceases? Apparently not, although there’s still a very strong group who think, insist on the materialistic explanation that it is the brain that produces consciousness.
( Breakthrough by Laurence Freeman OSB )
