The Trinity of Self

I've been trying lately to wrap my mind around my... well, my mind. That's right: I'm trying to use my mind to understand my own mind, which opens up a lot of rather frightening existential doors. I've often been told that the mind is capable of understanding anything but itself, a proposition which I've resolutely tried to prove wrong, with varying results.

Just a word of warning to the unsuspecting reader, this post might journey pretty far afield into the hinterlands of my own disjointed, completely unprofessional psychowhatsit. So here we go.

Freud said that there are three parts of a person: the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. This idea is probably the most well-known and salient expression of the trinity of self-awareness that I'm going to be talking about in this blog post. Everyone is probably familiar with this concept, but if you're not, check out the wikipedia article real quick.

For a while now I've been developing my own theory of the human experience which has its roots in traditional psychology and philosophy, significantly the work of Sigmund Freud. In my conception, there are three parts to the human self, that part of a guy (or gal) that runs the body and the brain and has imagination and reason. These part are in constant struggle with each other. The Body, or the Id -- animalistic, natural, self-interested, jealous, crazy, horny. The Mind, or the Superego -- proud, wise, self-important, greedy, stubborn, paranoid, afraid. The Soul, or the Ego -- the balance, the heart, the center, the source of morality.

Okay, so admittedly this is getting a bit far away from Freud. He conceived the Superego as more of a controlling, moralizing force. In my conception, the Mind possesses a lot of bad traits. The Mind is a dominant force, obsessed with control and micromanaging. You could really switch the Superego and the Ego here because I conflate a lot of their traits, but just keep in mind that those are the basis for my ideas and nothing more.

The Mind is your greatest asset, and your greatest ally. Reason resides in the mind, and reason is what raises a man up from the level of a beast. Reason, and foresight. The mind is able to analyze patterns to predict the future, allowing humans to plan ahead. This planning leads to agriculture, to industry, to technology.

But the Mind necessarily pulls man away from his natural instincts. In raising him up from the level of animals, he loses his empathy.

The Body, the Id, is the opposing force. It represents everything the Mind is not. It is in tune with nature, and revels in the natural violence and chaos that comes with a complete lack of social order. It is also passionate, and instinctive. It is protective of loved ones, but also jealous when they turn their affections away.

The Body is refreshing to a person who lives entirely through his Mind, and vice versa. A human ultimately grows, and the Ego, the center, becomes stronger, out of experience.

Let's put it in video game terms: You have a player-character who has two jobs to take levels in. Each job can level up to a maximum of 50. The player-character gains stat-increases and skills from mastering each job. And the player-character retains these stats no matter which job it is currently gaining experience in.

So to extend this metaphor further, the player-character can never achieve its full potential unless and only unless it attains the maximum in both jobs. So the player-character's maximum level is 100, twice that of each individual job.

The player-character also benefits from the balance of skills. The two jobs are opposite: one is an attacker, one is a defender. Thus, the player-character leaves himself open to weaknesses if he does not achieve balance.

So in this metaphor, the player-character is the Soul, the attacker job is the Body, and the defender job is the Mind. The Mind plans; the Body acts; the Soul maintains balance.

For the sake of argument, let's say you accept my theory as true (or at least as a reasonable expression of human awareness). What does this knowledge of our psyche do for us? Can we reap any benefit from it?

The answer is an emphatic yes. By knowing that we have two selves, a actor and a planner, we can achieve balance between the two. The problem for most of us, myself included, is that we favor one side over the other. We assume, usually erroneously, that we have strength in one or the other, but not both.

This couldn't be further from the truth. We all tend to favor one side or the other. I plan obsessively: it's one of my greatest weaknesses. I stay up at night thinking about exactly what I'm going to do tomorrow, down to the hour. Incidentally, this is probably why I'm in law school.

But just because we favor one side does not mean that we lack the capacity to use the other. We all have the capacity to plan and the capacity to act. And what most of us fail to realize is that the "you", the core of yourself, is the Soul, not the Mind or the Body.

Somewhere, deep down below all of our conscious thoughts and actions, is the source of what humans call morality. We perceive some things as "good" and some as "bad." Maybe this is God. Maybe it's just a rational desire for organized society. Either way, most of us recognize some form of ethics, a moral code. This code is the balance between the Mind and the Body. This is the Soul, the arbiter between the chaos of the Body and the order of the Mind.

It's not for me to speculate on the metaphysical and post-life implications of this theory because ultimately we can't know and we'll never know what comes after life. The point of all this is that if we recognize this trinity of self, we are able to work to achieve balance. Through balance comes peace. Through peace comes happiness. And happiness, after all, is the universal goal.

(These ideas are my own, but at the same time they spring from the works of others. The most obvious thanks have to go to Sigmund Freud, but also to Aristotle and other Greeks for giving us the ideas of pathos, logos, and ethos, and also to the Legend of Zelda for the concept of the Triforce balancing Power, Wisdom, and Courage. Though these ideas are slightly different from my own, their contribution to this philosophy cannot be denied or diminished. Thanks to all of the wise men who came before me.)