Do you know your SELF (and the angels and devils on your shoulder)

Are you one of those who allow devils and angels to argue on your shoulders? Do you allow one of them to make up your mind?

Or are you no longer in this phase, but still use the metaphor when you try to explain the difference between right and wrong to toddlers.

Are you talking to yourself, and does she talks back to you?

Or are you one of those who hear many voices in your mind, driving you crazy?

Well, guess what? There are, indeed, characters living in all of us.

Sigmund Freud identified them as ID (a set of uncoordinated instinctual trends), Ego (the organized, realistic part), and SUPER-EGO (the critical and moralizing trend). After Freud many geniuses altered and enhanced these characters (functions of the mind). But in this hub I want to simplify them all into a model easy to understand. For this will at least explain the voices in our minds in such a way that we may come to terms with the never-ending battle between our realistic and idealistic thoughts.

In this elementary model we call the 'voices' Mind/Brain, Ego, Self-Image and Self. They live in a 4-level-apartment inside our bodies. The roof is where our heads are and the ground floor is where our hearts are. (Keep in mind that all psychological systems such as Ego/Self-image/Self are running in the brain. The 'heart', as we tend to call our center of emotions, react on our thoughts. With the heart we FEEL - and often literally painful - love, sadness, grieve, hate, all emotions, like we feel heat and cold with our skins.)

 Let’s zoom in on the characters. (Male readers are humbly requested to transform all female characters to male characters.)

This guy receptively gulps LIFE with all its offerings - like a sponge in water, absorbing fluid. He processes all KNOWLEDGE obtained through eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin and convert it into a substance called EDUCATION, which includes EXPERIENCE and WISDOM. He feeds this continuously to Self, the real you living on the bottom floor. Self, however, only take what she is able to consume. The rest remains in Mind where it blends with fresh offerings of Life.

Some Selfs have an anorexic or bulimic nature, which may affect Mind's receptive nature, but in this hub this phenomena is beside the point.

This guy is merely a robot with one function: To protect SELF. It has no thoughts of its own and no feelings. It does not communicate with Mind, Self, or Self-Image and can therefore not be intimidated by one of them. It develops only while a person participates actively in Life, taking changes, experiencing failures and successes. In other words, the ego’s of lazy, unproductive, inactive people are not able to develop. (Just look around and you’ll notice many 18-year-old ego’s in the bodies of people who are older than 18.)

Reacting ONLY on Self’s emotions, Ego programs itself in order to protect Self. Ego is a dangerous little creature, able to determine a person’s personality and able to force a person to behave in a certain way.

Emotion of Self (ES) force ego to determines personality mode (PM)

ES:Happy.....PM: Be-yourself

ES: Excited.....PM: Try-and-enjoy

ES: Insecure.....PM: Fake-it-till-you-make-it OR do-not-try-it

ES: Afraid.....PM: Fight-flee-or-fall

If Self is well-fed and mature, she will realise the strength of Ego. She’ll co-operate with Brain and initiate plans of action to develop Ego in such a way that it determines Personality in agreement with her self-image. While Self still depends on parents, she’ll notice that they are forcing her to achieve success and to accept failures with dignity. If she’s on her own, she’ll encourage Brain to grab the opportunities Life offers to self-motivated people via business sectors and other community services

Is the person Self would like to be in real life. This image can be a lady of integrity, a class-act, the perfect wife, the perfect mother, professional and successful in her career, religious or not-religious, spiritual or not spiritual, healthy, wealthy, sexy, a model of a woman, the president of her country... she can be anybody Self wants to be in real life.

Self, the builder of this Self-Image, have to keep reality in mind, inter alia her host, the Body. This body may be handicapped as a consequence of injury, illness or genetic codes. Self should build her image in agreement with her host, the Body.

If Self was not properly fed by Mind (who is, perhaps, not to blame because he was stuck in muddy circumstances), she will be immature and will create an image out of her range. By doing this, she will burden herself with obsessions, phobias and complexes.

This character is the real you, captured in a mortal body.

She is a mystery to others as well as to her own brain. Mind is constantly loosing her, looking for her, and when he finds her at last, he learns (to his surprise) that she matured for the next phase of her development.

She uses her host (Body) to display herself through deeds and appearance. But this could be a display of her partner, Self-Image. Personality, determined by Ego, is also deceitful.

Keeping in mind that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and every person has a unique interpretation of the truth, Self will never be able to prove her real identity. When she knows herself, and loves herself, and when she is really happy and contented, she will not try to prove herself. She will just be herself.

On the bottom floor of the 4-level-apartment inside her host, Self is a hardworking being, constantly building her Self-Image and constantly striving to become her Self-Image. In order to be happy and contented, she must become this image, or she must at least know she is well on her way to become this image.

If she is not happy, she instigates her ego to determine an unattractive and unappealing personality. Knowing that she behaved improperly will make her hate herself - an emotion that will force Ego to program itself negatively.

A negative ego will force Self to create the following Self-Image -

1. A doll to be played with, trampled on, chuck away.
2. A corpse to be buried before maggots start to feast on her.

WHO ARE YOU?

I demonstrate this concept @ http://hubpages.com/hub/Battle-of-the-voices-Ego-versus-Self