0393 Let me tell a story about how the ego [responsible for, acting in the Name of…] Self came to be.

Before the first singularity, hand talk combined the material and the immaterial into word-gestures. The presence of the body of the speaker mattered. The talker’s body integrated into the message.

0394 Before the first singularity, ego and Self were indistinguishable.  How could word-gestures image and point to either one?

A living person and a dead corpse are distinguishable.  Yet, they look exactly alike. What is the difference?  One breathes. The other does not.

I can word-gesture “breath”.  This word-gesture produces an implicit abstraction. It produces a judgment.  A judgment is a relation between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’.

0395 ‘What is’ is body-corpse. ‘What ought to be’ is living-ness. The relation is ‘breathe’.

0396 After the first singularity, speech-alone word-sounds explicitly abstracted elements of this judgment.

The active soul (like breath) animates the body.

0397 This can be formulated as a dyad in content-level actuality, using Suarez’s model of mind-dependent being.

0398 The active soul accounts for the living body.

When I encounter a living body, my efficient intellect projects a being that accounts for ‘what I encounter’. The active soul is that accounting being. The contiguity between accounting and encountered beings is ‘one animates the other’.

0399 An active soul emerges from and situates a passive soul. The passive soul contains what is required to encounter a living body.

0400 Now the question becomes: Whose living body?

In hand (and hand-speech) talk, the answer was obvious. The talking person had to be living, otherwise he (or she) would not word-gesture. Hand talk indexes the living body of the talker.

In speech-alone talk, words are purely symbolic. They exist as systems of differences. They do not contain iconic and indexal qualities. There is a difference between my living body and the living bodies of those I talk about. So, it seems there should be two pairs of terms, one for me and one for others.

0401 Since I have a body, I must have an active soul.

I experience my active soul in the living-ness of my body.  I also experience my active soul as it emerges from and situates my ability to encounter other things, including other people.

0402 This is how my active soul and my body situate (and emerge from) the possibilities inherent in my passive soul.

0403 After the first singularity, the builder gods constructed civilizations in small valleys of the Iranian region.  They worked with good, but limited resources.

The lion phase of Yaltabaoth joined the immaterial with the material. It put spark into matter. The princes and the priests were like the active soul. The building projects, the maintenance of fields, the raids against competitors, and so on were like the body. The fires of Yaltabaoth inflamed the passive souls of all.

Then, the princes and the priests turned on one another. Competitors successfully raided the palaces and temples. The snake phase of Yaltabaoth focused on the material. It presumed the immaterial would go on as before.

How could it?

The fires of the temple no longer warmed passive souls.

Everyone started worrying, praying for Yaltabaoth to rekindle his fire.

0404 So, the field separating the immaterial and the material developed.

This separation is a hallmark of Gnosticism.

0405 In this force field, the active soul divides into the ego and the Self. The ego is responsible for the body. The ego is free to act in the Name of the Body.

0406 But, what is the Name of the Body?

Of course, it must be the Self. The Self experiences the body. The Self senses the livingness of the body.

0407 Here is how the active soul (animates) body distorts in the material-immaterial force field.

0408 The ego attends to material concerns. The Self is the immaterial Livingness of the Body.

0409 But what is the Livingness of the Body?

The Livingness of the Body is the source of a word-gesture. The Self is the talking person before the first singularity.

0410 However, the Lebenswelt that we evolved in is completely gone. We are trapped in our current Lebenswelt.

Therefore, the Self cannot, in principle, simply be Itself.

0411 In the Lebenswelt that I evolved in, I did not need to know my Self.

My Self was the one talking. My arms and hands gestured holistic words. There were no active or passive souls. There were no explicit abstractions. There was only the breath, the living-ness of my body.

I word-gesture, “Breathe.”

Everyone knows my meaning, presence and message.

I feel my body alive.