One we recognize a very simple fact, many things become clear: conscious selfhood is scalar.

Each of us, however, participates in this scalarity at a fixed and finite scale, as an individual.

It is possible to develop awareness of the differences between types of relationships of selfhood.

Three radically different intelligible relationships: 1) individual self and forms of selfhood that contain and include it (that is, transcend it), 2) individual self and fellow self, 3) individual self and object.

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Our tendency is to truncate being at the first scale of self where we find stability and coherence. We identify with that self and treat it as ultimate. Whatever stands outside the horizons of that self are stripped of alterity and transposed inside the terms of that self.

This is an easy mistake to make. The peculiarity of conscious being is its ability to round off and seal its horizons, to make a complete and tidy picture of a world with unnervingly open borders. We do this through interpretation, both conscious and unconscious, constructed and inherited.

There are good reasons to fear opening out one’s horizons. You will manifestly no longer be who you were. There is a very real kind of dying in it. Your world will be supplanted by a new world that is impossible to see prior to seeing it.

This truncation of selfhood can happen to individuals, and it can happen to groups, even to entire nations. It is worse in collectives, because collectives appear to transcend individuality, and of course, collectives can easily reach agree among themselves that they possess ultimate (or objective) truth. Accordingly, the very worst idols who have ever lived were groups, many of whom have called themselves Christian, but in truth are the diametric dead-opposite.

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Hermes, the messenger god was the god of many apparently unconnected things.

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Heidegger coined the term “the They”.

For Heidegger, the They is the indistinct collective being that stands outside the boundaries of one’s own Dasein.

The Nazis were a collective Dasein, composed of individuals who identified with “something higher” than an individual. On this basis they felt morally exalted. The Nazi saw the entire non-Aryan world as the They.

It is no accident the Nazis hated the Jews, the tradition who discovered interhuman transcendence in profound vulnerability, whose religion gradually transfigured around this insight. With Christ, the more sublime Jew, the Jews as a collective self turned out toward a radically non-they Gentile world and called it Thou.

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Each of us, as an “individual” (the misnomer or misnomers), is essentially a sphere of conscious being.

This sphere, despite the folk belief of our time, is not your brain. It is much larger than your own head.  The sphere encloses your own body and every thing and every person and every fact you’ve ever known. It encloses the history of humankind, everything of the future you can conceive. It reaches to the edge of space on every side.

Each of us is crowned with a universe-sized halo.

This is how things seem to us from our own eyes, and we are not wrong. However, we are not right enough.