Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it really interesting that psychedelic drug users frame their experiences in Freudian terms, using terms like 'ego' and its struggle against other entities within the mind.
What's so really interesting about it? Well, what other term would be so readily understood by people? Also, I guess with LSD/mushrooms there's usually a lot going on , and you can either go with it or try to resist. Going with it is advisable, but it can get scary - e.g. horrific death/maggot/slime-based imagery. You have to trust in the experience, which is so huge the self disappears. I guess a similar thing happe…
Exactly the right question. Language is clumsy and imperfect. For many hard science topics and simple descriptions, it is precise. But for everything else, prominent thinkers among us have built a collective mythos as a society constructed of these abstractions and models. We can only use the models that others have ready access to, being participants in society, even if they are imperfect to describe the phenomenon, to communicate effectively. To take it ad absurdum, we can say that reinventing a whole new language for each conversation partner based on the most efficient way to transmit concepts would just be too clumsy for timescales on which humans operate.
> quickly learnt just to be a tool for the music
Case in point: this is a meme that recurs when talking about creative pursuits, and it's a useful and succinct way to think about and discuss this phenomenon. It's clear though that there are powerful mental processes that simply never bubble up to the level of conscious awareness, because to allow such would slow down the process too much to be useful. The artist acts as if "my mind is empty" even though the most important word is not "empty" but rather "my": that is, the ego sees nothing happening and runs on the basis that its experience is truth, when a rational examination disproves that assumption readily.