magus incognito was one of the names of william walker atkinson. he was in business and law and had a complete mental and physical breakdown out east and moved to chicago in 1900 to join the new thought movement.

some psychologists call attention to the fact that many children experience a feeling of something akin to terror when they first reach the sense of "i" or individuality. some writers have testified to having felt a strange sense of aloneness and detachment from all other things, when this sense of individuality first burst upon them in early childhood. in some cases the fuller dawn of self-consciousness is accompanied by a newly developed bashfulness, shyness, or that more or less morbid state known by the common name "self-conscious." with the faculty of introspection, there often comes the tendency to employ the same too freely, and thus to become morbid on the one hand, or else foolishly egotistical and vain on the other hand.
...many find themselves entangled in a mass of mental states which one thinks is himself, or inextricably bound up with himself, and the struggle between the awakening ego and its confining sheaths is very painful in some cases. and this becomes more painful as the individual advances in self-consciousness and nears the end at which he is to find deliverance. man eats of the tree of knowledge and begins to suffer and is driven out of the garden of eden of the child consciousness in which the individual has lived like the birds, concerning not himself with the affairs of his higher nature. man pays dearly for the gift of self-consciousness- yet it is worth it all, for finally he reaches heights of higher consciousness and is delivered from his burden. (back with the birds.)[-ed.]

magnus incognito