Empirical “I”: The empirical “I” is nothing but a shifting tissue of images and tendencies; when the ego of an individual eight years old is compared with the ego of the same individual at eighty years of age one may well ask oneself where the real “I” is. And if a man could live for a thousand years, what would remain of that which was his “I” in the first century of his life? [GTUFS: TreasuresB, The Question of Illusion]
We live at the same time in the body, the head and the heart, so that we may sometimes ask ourselves where the genuine ‘I’ is situated; in fact, the ego, properly speaking, the empirical ‘I’, has its sensory seat in the brain, but it gravitates towards the body and tends to identify itself with it, while the heart is symbolically the seat of the Self, of which we may be conscious or ignorant, but which is our true existential, intellectual, and so universal center. [GTUFS: GnosisDW, The Ternary Aspect of the Human Microcosm]