(© RKP, 1960)The I-concept is not a necessary evil; it is necessary but it is not an evil.
Every living thing must have the sensation of itself, just as every 'thing', animate or inanimate, from nebula to atom, must have a centre, without which it would disintegrate. This has been pointed out.
The spanner in the works is not the I-concept which, unconditioned, is REAL, but the aggregation of affective impulses which gather round it and form a purely imaginary entity, built up from memories, which appears as an impersonation.
That is the inexistent thing, the notion that must be subjected to dis-aggregation, which must be pulled to pieces, resolved into its vaporous component elements and reduced to a state of dissolution. Notions, however aggregated, do not constitute a thing or an entity. Zeros (nothing), added or multiplied, never become anything but zero. A structure composed of a million notions could never be anything but a notion itself, and the only reality it could ever have would be the I-reality whose conditioned aspect, the I-concept, allowed the dream notions to appear.
Note: It might be objected that in seeming to attribute to animals, insects, reptiles, birds, and even inanimate objects, an I-concept I am exceeding my commission, since the concept as such cannot exist in their aspect of Mind.
In the case of non-human creatures the term might rather be 'I-percept', though the personal sense may be entirely unconscious. Since all creatures and objects are themselves just concepts it is only a question of the degree of evolution of the notion of self which is to be attributed to them.
