An imagined self...

His familiar ‘I’ is simply the sort of person a man imagines himself to be, an imagination which he changes from time to time during life.

All the other persons also exist besides ourself but like our own personality, they exist as thoughts.

Only when we or they find the truth behind personality do we or they attain an existence higher than that of a thought.

For the person to which we all cling so stubbornly is after all but a mere shadow thrown by the Overself, a pale relic of its transcendent self.

It may now become a little clearer why the egoistic approach to the world prevents us from
arriving at truth, and therefore why the philosophic discipline demands the reining‑in of the person.

For the birth of objects as ideas cannot be accounted for and must remain incomprehensible and mysterious so long as we persist in thinking that the world-experience is solely our own experience.

The egoist ignores the one World‑Mind within which his little mind is itself contained, fails to perceive that his is only a semi‑independent perception.

Human experience is the final residue of a process of inter‑action, a fabric conjointly woven with a common mind in which all human beings dwell and think and which dwells and thinks in them.

The world itself is the outcome of a combined cosmic and individual imagination.



-- The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter VI,
The Secret of the 'I', The Hidden Observer.
Paul Brunton