monart

Ayn Rand lived long enough to discover and present an immense system of thought as that guide you seek. If Stephen lives to a hundred, he may write a magnum opus to also help you further along.

This is brilliant, innovative, and inspiring. It stimulates wonder and reads like metaphysical poetry. I'm fully engaged and in resonance with it as I marvel at it.

For a brilliant, innovative synopsis of all Existence, see the new These Hours of Resonant Existence by Stephen Boydstun. It reads like metaphysical poetry.

These Hours of Resonant Existence

SL,
There is a widespread good in people of wanting to know the truth. Aristotle thought that even ALL people desire to know (the truth). One widespread thing people want to know today, as thousands of years ago, is what becomes of one's inner self and that self of one's loved ones when we die. Is it really just the absolute end as it might appear from the successive states of the deceased body, or is there future life, perhaps one brighter or darker than the earthly life (and for some an opportunity to sell post-death prizes and penalties for power and money in earthly life)? Decline the fake insurance policy of Pascal's Wager. Prize the truth come what may.
As for widespread desire for protection against dangers, the main danger is not from interpersonal conflicts, but from nature. Getting to the discoveries and developments that can rescue one or one's loved ones from this or that particular occasion of bodily catastrophic failure (mostly from disease or old-age cascades) is not helped by prayers and blaming death on human moral failings, but by rational investigations into nature. I mention this vast sort of danger due to Objectivist-types' widespread knee-jerk salience of dangers from interpersonal conflicts as first concern among dangers and politics as top aim.
There are plenty of religious people with whom I form political alliances. More importantly, religious friends and family and I (I purely naturalist, atheist) love each other very much. Those are choices open based on common values, including the value of truth, even as one keeps straight what are one's differences on what is true and how to get it.
Nietzsche became so popular in the culture of Germany in the 1890's and up to WWI that there were some theologians serving up bowls of unity between Nietzsche and Christian religion in Germany. When I was first in college ('66–'71), there was Christian Atheism of Altizer.* More recently and probably more durably, there is The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007).

Here's a cover from another Anthem printing:
 

Ayn Rand’s novella ANTHEM, published in 1938 and revised in a 1946 edition, is set in a fictitious collectivist community, one smaller and simpler than Kira’s historical setting in WE THE LIVING. Rand’s ANTHEM is presented as a journal kept by her protagonist whose name is Equality 7-2521. He records that he dares to choose, in the secrecy of his own mind, work he hopes to do when leaving the Home of the Students. He loves the Science of Things. He hopes he will be selected to be a scholar, but the authorities appoint him to be a street sweeper.
The technology of his isolated community is very primitive in comparison to an earlier lost civilization (ours). His people have candles, but not electricity. He discovers a subway tunnel from the ancient civilization, and he begins to experiment with electricity in secret at night. In his own community, each refers to himself as “we”. Of his secret work at night, he thinks: “We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it” (1946, 23). In his love of the science of things, he is similar to Kira, and to Howard Roark and to John Galt, the principal protagonists of Rand’s later fiction. He is similar to Kira also in her “wanting to learn a work I like only because I like it,” and he is similar to her in standing against society made collectivist.
Comes a moment to Equality 7-2521: “This moment is a sacrament which calls us and dedicates our body to the service of some unknown duty we shall know. Old laws are dead. Old tablets have been broken [by me]. A clean, unwritten slate is now lying before our hands [my hands]. Our fingers are to write” (1938, 125–26). The talk of breaking old tablets is an echo of Nietzsche’s  “On Old and New Tablets” (Z III). However, the moral principles Equality 7-2521 would replace are the ones he had known in his one and only society, not the ones of wider world and history. He is not on the brink of writing principles entirely different from ones known in the ancient times, the times of the reader. His task of moral philosophy is not the task of the God of Moses nor the task of radical and continual transvaluation and self-overcoming that Zarathustra gives to human creators.
Rand wrote ANTHEM (1938) in the summer of 1937. In her manuscript for ANTHEM, she continually tries to suit ideas of Nietzsche to her story, then scratches them out (Milgram 2005; Mayhew 2005). Naturally, I wonder if she was not also, in some of those same strokes of the pen, writing down ideas of Nietzsche that she had seen attractive as truth, or at least promising as truth, then rejecting them as inadequate to her own grasp of the truth. Writing one’s ideas down and reading them helps one think better.
Near the end of the fable ANTHEM, our true searcher Equality 7-2521 announces:
“And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men have come into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.
“This god, this one word: ‘I’.” (1946, 90)
In his community of origin, Equality 7-2521 had wanted to know the meaning of things, the meaning of existence. He had wanted to know the secrets of nature, and he had come to suspect there is some important secret of human existence unknown to all. After fleeing his collectivist society, he becomes alone the live-long day. He comes upon an uninhabited fine house and learns from its books many wonders of the advanced science of the ancient civilization. He discovers the word “I”. That is, he discovers that word and attains the concept “I” distinctly and firmly set.
He no longer writes “we” or “we alone” or “we alone only” in his journal to refer to himself. A new chapter begins. He writes: “I am. I think. I will” (1946, 86).
With this fundamental discovery, Equality 7-2521 has become a Prometheus, whose name he takes for his own. He continues:
“What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.
“I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning.” (1946, 86)
There is one word “which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. / The sacred word: EGO” (1946, 98).
That last quotation is the close of the story. At the time this story was written (1937), there were no atomic weapons, no nuclear arsenals, and I think it was an ordinary assumption among people not Christian that human kind would continue effectively forever on the earth. Consider too that ANTHEM is a poetic work, and in poetic expression, as in dreams, conjured images condense multiple associations. In the case of poetic expression, the suggested associations are set up by the wider text. To write that the word “ego” and that which it names cannot be eradicated from the earth might be playing on multiple meanings of “earth”. One meaning is the third planet from the sun; another is the dwelling place of mortal men, as distinct from mythological realms of immortal beings; another is the collection of human inhabitants on the planet. Rand’s uses of “earth” with talk of ego in ANTHEM can rightly carry those three meanings simultaneously. I think the most salient of these meanings in Rand’s use here is the second one. She is not only making a statement about the endurance of ego among all possible societies (the third meaning). She is most saliently making a statement about ego in relation to all the earth, to all the abode of human existence.
At the core of ANTHEM, her manifesto of individualism, Rand sets a foundational sequence of thoughts: “I am. I think. I will.” Although Rand lists “will” as third in her 1938 foundational sequence, third in sequence of philosophical reflection; she awards “I will” some preeminence over “I am,” which she characterizes as self of truth, and over “I think,” which she characterizes as protector of self (1938, 128–29). Of words, “only three are holy: ‘I will it’” (129). Further:
“Where I go, there does my will go before me. My will, which chooses, and orders, and creates. My will, the master which knows no masters. . . . My will, which is the thin flame, still and holy, in the shrine of my body, my body which is but the shrine of my will.” (129)
This opposes 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, which would have the body of a righteous individual be temple of the Holy Spirit and would deny self-ownership of one’s body, which has been bought by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Prometheus’ line “Where I go, there does my will go before me” says I go only where I will, but expresses it in echo and in substitution of various King James biblical passages saying God is with one and goes before one to subvert threats or create lights in one’s path. Moses says to Joshua: “And the Lord, he IT IS that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee” (Deut. 31:8). Additional parallels (anti-parallels) between ANTHEM and the Bible are observed in Simental 2013, 100–105.
I do not think that the preeminence of “will” in Rand 1938 is a tuning to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. It looks to be, rather, a bannering of liberty.
In her 1946 edit of ANTHEM, Rand posed ego as stay of the earth not because ego is earth’s heart, spirit, and glory, but because ego is the earth’s heart, meaning, and glory. In ATLAS SHRUGGED, Rand would leave off all talk of man or ego as stay, heart, or meaning of the earth. But in her 1946 rendition of ANTHEM, “meaning” opens a new possible interpretation of its closing line. Without a meaning maker, there is not meaning in the world. It is similar to the situation with truth and fact. Without holders of truth, there is fact in the world, but truth is absent. This is actually more than a parallel. Meaning could be taken as a blend of truth and value. With no holders of truth or value in the world, meaning is absent from the world. With no truth, value, or meaning in the world, the world as human abode does not exist.
That angle suggests an enhancement to the sense of “earth” as the human abode in the original proclamation. Ego brings heart and spirit to the character of the human abode. Ego brings spirit-life. Ego brings into the world what preciousness, what value, there is in the world. Without spirit-life that comes with human being, the world as human abode does not exist.
Earth in the sense of the dwelling place of mortal man is not the only sense of “earth” suggested in Rand’s statement that “ego” is “the word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the spirit [or meaning] and the glory.” Rand drew a picture in ANTHEM, and again in FOUNTAINHEAD, in which individual human being in his or her desiring, thinking, willing self is the final end of the earth in all its components, in all its minerals, seas, and forms of life. This teleological order of things is not portrayed as being there with the earth devoid of man, but as there with man upon the earth, making it his own. Beyond that, the further suggestion that the earth in the plain full sense depends on human ego is a discomfiting line of thought and one to be deflected. That problematic further suggestion in the closing line of ANTHEM points to an inadequacy of Rand’s philosophical foundation put forth in that work. However adequate for the internal context of that fiction, that foundation is inadequate to full philosophy for human life in the actual world, ours today, fully real. “I am” is not necessary to all fact even though it is necessary to all truth. A foundational philosophy aiming to uphold realism and objectivity must take its most basic truths from most basic facts, and “I am” does not fit that bill. “Existence exists,” Rand’s axiom for her mature philosophy (1957), is the better base and necessity.
Early Rand and her Kira stood solidly for objectivity, which is attacked in the Red student speech. Rand’s protagonist in ANTHEM is given these lines: “All things come to my judgment, and I weigh all things, and I seal upon them my ‘Yes’ or my ‘No’. Thus is truth born. Such is the root of all Truth and the leaf, such is the fount of all Truth and the ocean, such is the base of all Truth and the summit. I am the beginning of all Truth. I am its end.” (1938, 128)
This sounds subjectivist, like the ancient God-sayings it echoes and would replace. It might seem that Rand was climbing down, between 1936 and 1938, into the Nietzschean cavern of subjectivity or at least was stepping down into the Kantian ravine. I think, rather, she is only affirming in this passage that all judgment of truth is individual and that all truth we render from the world is for our own final value. Those lines in ANTHEM (in 1938; excised in ’46) are preceded by these: “It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world.” Something is seen, and with the subject, it is rendered beautiful. Something is heard, and with the subject, it is rendered song of existence. Something is given, and with its recognition, it is rendered truth.
Rand does not create a superhuman for the meaning of the earth. Does her Prometheus create a meaning of the earth? His namesake does not invent fire.
Rand’s protagonist unlocks a type of human that finds the meaning of human existence; not in super-terrestrial personages and their affairs, but in complete human individuals on earth. “I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!” (1946, 87).
ANTHEM does not teach humans to create (or to beget) the meaning of the earth, but to discover it. “This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give . . . . We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky” (1946, 84). I really do not see Rand setting up some sort of Fichtean or Nietzschean perspective on the relation of ego and world. She is saying that whatever goals there are in inanimate and animate earth, they reach their final end in their crowning glory: the individual human knower of joy and living; the individual judge of truth; the individual will free over his or her ends; in a word “ego”. Notice that at this stage of Rand’s development only sentient living processes, specifically, human ones, can be ends not for the sake of something else. And these final ends are human, not superhuman.
In actual development, we begin to use the personal pronouns “I, me” at age two. Knowing one’s proper name and knowing how to use first-person pronouns does not yet include realization of the deep fact “I am an I” or “I am me” or, as Dolf Kohnstamm 2007 puts it, “I am I”. At age two one can construct scenarios with dolls or other figures representing individual persons. One can make up dialogues, not only participate in them. The ability to converse with oneself as if between two characters is a plausible step necessary for coming to the insight “I am I”, where the first “I” is self as patient, actor, and controller, and the second “I” is self as in contrast to any other self (Kohnstamm 2007, 164, 174). Thinking “I am I” importantly includes thinking the identity of those two characters. Rand’s Prometheus accomplishes the same recognition as part of the thought expressed by his newly found word “I” whose meaning is explicated as his unique and uniquely possessed body, shrine of his unique spirit, and explicated by his triplet “I am, I think, I will.”
It will be recalled that Equality 7-2521 had been seeking some word and concept that had been excised from his society. People there are missing the personal pronouns “I” and “me” and the possessives “my” and “mine.” Each refers to himself or herself by proper name or as “we” and refers to another individual by proper name or as “they” (or as ”you” taken as plural).
The discovery of “I” by Equality 7-2521 is an episode of exhilarating liberation and profound fulfillment, though also overwhelming sorrow for mankind in its state of not knowing “I”. Given the spontaneous, untutored character of the “I am I” episodes in real persons displayed in Kohnstamm’s book, one might wonder whether the absence of the pronoun “I” in the fictional society that was Equality 7-2521’s cradle is really possible. Probably not, though it is a neat ploy to Rand’s purpose of showing the importance, the preciousness of man the individual, as against the collective. For thoughts of Kohnstamm on “I am I” in a couple of actual collectivist societies, see his pages 175–80.
Equality 7-2521’s native society is without mirrors. Were we to bring one into their village, they would soon comprehend themselves in it, just as Equality 7-2521 does later in the story, seeing his face in water, and just as each of us did before age two. Earliest comprehension of mirrors and one’s body in them does not entail the comprehension “I am I” (Kohnstamm 2007, chap. 4). Similarly it is in the journey of Equality 7-2521. He has not yet roundly and profoundly grasped “I” and “I am I” when first seeing his reflected face.
Equality and his fellows had been trained to deflect awareness from the self and direct attention to the group by saying “we” where we should say “I”. Forbidding the word “I” with its meaning attained in the understanding “I am I” would be idle without currents of the forbidden within subjects under the law. Such currents are on show to the reader in the person of Equality 7-2521. I suggest, however, actually, “we” in the indoctrinated sense of a joint singular life and will and thought of the collective can only have meaning to one who has gotten “I am I.” The author of the fictional adventure knew the reader would come equipped with that grasp.
 
References
Kohnstamm, D. 2007. I AM I - SUDDEN FLASHES OF SELF-AWARENESS IN CHILDHOOD. Athena.
Mayhew, R. 2005. ANTHEM: ’38 & ’46. In Mayhew, ed., 2005.
Mayhew, R., editor, 2005. ESSAYS ON AYN RAND’S Anthem. Lexington.
Milgram, S. 2005. ANTHEM in Manuscript: Finding the Words. In Mayhew, ed., 2005.
Rand, A. 1938. ANTHEM. Cassell.
——. 1946. ANTHEM. Pamphleteers.
Simental, M.J. 2013. The Gospel According to Ayn Rand. THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES 13(2):96-106.

In this photo are the lights in Colorado Springs and Pueblo and in the mountains---a bit of our human world lost in the world inherited by Rand's Equality 7-2521. One very beautiful aspect of Rand's story I did not touch on was the love story developed all along the way. There is also a very important philosophical point in this work---a viewpoint carried forward into Rand's mature philosophy---I did not mention. I think that particular stance of hers a profound mistake. I'll try to return to this thread and address that error after the fundamental paper for my own Rand-related philosophy has been published this summer, which framework includes the fix of this error.

Ayn Rand once gave some really good advice that went something like this: "The most important thing you can do to help the poor is to avoid becoming poor yourself." I add: The most important thing you can do to stop destructive evil in the world is to not be destructive of yourself, such as by telling lies, using non-prescribed psychoactive narcotics (even if legal), possibly causing damage to your mind such as paranoia and delusions of Galt-level accomplishments made by yourself, mysteriously unheralded, in physics and engineering. From all you have described to us on your personal front and pleaded for us to accept, it looks most likely that if you "will be completely out of all resources", it will be at root due to your own compromised mind and behavior, whether you yourself caused that damage or it happened by the course of nature. If you die "within the next two weeks" it will not be because of evil of someone else. I hope you will still be alive in two weeks and not so out of resources that you no longer can communicate in this medium if you wish.
A sister of mine committed suicide a few years ago (a wife, mother, and grandmother), and from what I know of her physical miseries for which she could get no further help, it was a well-and-long-considered sensible suicide. I don't think she did it just so her loved ones would be pained. I do not know your health potentials, but that is surely the arena in which you need help and protection, assuming you are not just BS-ing the site in a show of fake feelings and mental states (which I doubt). I hope you are not in such a boxed-in and painful health situation as my sister evidently was. Be suspicious of any inclination you have towards suicide. Nature is going to end each life soon enough.
A year ago, a nephew of mine died of alcoholism. It destroyed his organs. He was 52. It had started as a young man, when he had been in the Navy. He knew he was an addict, but refused to let the appropriate professionals try to help him. I hope you are not on a destructive course along those lines, with some sort of long addiction. If so, please get medical help, and realize you can not make the return to health by yourself.
I experienced paranoia myself for a couple of days. I was in a safe place, a hospital I'd come to for what turned out to be symptoms from a bladder blockage. All my regular medicines I take each day to stay alive could not get released from my body and caused malfunctions in my brain. The neurological condition is known as Metabolic Encephalopathy. When I later saw my neurologist, he could predict all the various mental malfunctions that had ensued. I mention the paranoia part because I know first-hand that while you are in it, you do not know you are in it. You just keep putting every bit in every episode of life into a vast plot against yourself and things you treasure. But if there is for you periodic waning of it, get yourself some help, protecting yourself from yourself.
Don't be ashamed of mental derailments. The appropriate model of human perfection is not a perfect crystal, but perfect health, which can be lost and possibly regained. Resilience and recoveries are virtues. I was in a mental hospital myself as a young man, due to my suicidal responses to my existential situation. I began to read The Fountainhead there, and my doctor encouraged me to finish it, which I did. And I lived another six decades (so far, so good) without such problems again, and I achieved difficult things in love and work and in personal projects that, though difficult, were more modest than and more suited to my abilities than stellar physics breakthroughs. (I loved physics and, with engineering education also, I have been able to put what I learned to good use in philosophical reflections.) And I have been happy.
Here's hoping.
–S

No, one cannot, but can one, over time, become the other? Many (most?) Objectivists were formerly Christians (and Jews). Are there any Christians who were formerly Objectivists? Not all Christians are the same, each varying in their rationality and in their potentiality for becoming Objectivists. The more deeply rooted their Christianity, the less their potential.
Unlike the Rand-friendly "new Christian intellectuals" referenced in the originating post, most Christians who encounter Ayn Rand's work malign and reject her value. The popular speaker and author Jordan Peterson is an example of the latter.
A Jungian psychologist and pragmatist Christian, Jordan Peterson, posing as an individualist, says he "acts as if God exists" and who writes in his book, 12 Rules for Life: “the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. . . . [Life] has more to do with develop­ing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.” He also has said in his YouTube videos that, “Happiness is for stupid people at amusement parks.” For Peterson, Jesus is the “transcendent” exemplar of morality, who should be emulated in a life of suffering and sacrifice. Consistent with all this is his asserting, in more YouTube videos, that he does not “regard Ayn Rand as a great mind…not sufficiently sophisticated”, although he “enjoyed” reading her “superficial” novel, Atlas Shrugged. His participation on a discussion panel with speakers from the Ayn Rand Institute made no difference in his continual dismissal of Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

Contrast this with the aforementioned Rand-friendly Christians who aspire to become rational egoists in reverence to their "Galt-like" God. Are these egoistic Christians more or less dangerous than those like Peterson?

No, one cannot, but can one, over time, become the other? Many (most?) Objectivists were formerly Christians (and Jews). Are there any Christians who were formerly Objectivists? Not all Christians are the same, each varying in their rationality and in their potentiality for becoming Objectivists. The more deeply rooted their Christianity, the less their potential.
Unlike the Rand-friendly "new Christian intellectuals" referenced in the originating post, most Christians who encounter Ayn Rand's work malign and reject her value. The popular speaker and author Jordan Peterson is an example of the latter.
A Jungian psychologist and pragmatist Christian, Jordan Peterson, posing as an individualist, says he "acts as if God exists" and who writes in his book, 12 Rules for Life: “the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. . . . [Life] has more to do with develop­ing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.” He also has said in his YouTube videos that, “Happiness is for stupid people at amusement parks.” For Peterson, Jesus is the “transcendent” exemplar of morality, who should be emulated in a life of suffering and sacrifice. Consistent with all this is his asserting, in more YouTube videos, that he does not “regard Ayn Rand as a great mind…not sufficiently sophisticated”, although he “enjoyed” reading her “superficial” novel, Atlas Shrugged. His participation on a discussion panel with speakers from the Ayn Rand Institute made no difference in his continual dismissal of Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

Contrast this with the aforementioned Rand-friendly Christians who aspire to become rational egoists in reverence to their "Galt-like" God. Are these egoistic Christians more or less dangerous than those like Peterson?

What specific help do you seek? A bodyguard? Money? More belief in and publicity for your plight? I sympathize with you in your condition and will help in ways that I can.
I'm also mindful of, and defend myself where I can, against the dangers from communists, socialist, fascists, anarchists, welfare-statists, environmentalists, . . . from Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist, Jews, even most atheists, . . . and from numerous other overt and covert enemies of Objectivism, who use the government or form secret organizations to further their agendas and stop those who oppose them. I'm on guard with you against them all. So, you may be outnumbered, but you're not alone.

I remarked in 2009:
 

No. Specific *moral*/rational sanction. Are you for some reason at odds with the moral concept of not providing moral sanction to the explicitly evil? If so, are you suggesting that one should compromise or excuse evil, both of which are explicitly evil ideas. 

Calling "sanction" occasions of failing to recognize evil and take actions to oppose it is incorrect English, a smearing out of the term sanction.

Ayn Rand's noble romanticism, as she says in her Introduction to The Fountainhead, reclaims the emotions of reverence for the sacred back from traditional theistic religions' monopoly on them. Is this Objectivist romance for real ideals what attracts some Christians/theists to Ayn Rand's work, despite their Christianity/theism?
Christianity's "transcendent reality" is God, and human earthly affairs are mundane. Galt's triumphs are "transcendent" in that they are heroic realizations of his highest ideals, the exalted becoming of his rational productive being. To be inspired by this noble, uplifting romance of Galt, is to "breathe in" and be energized by that "spirit".

This is incorrect and a very dangerous idea many have taken away from reading Rand. (A related incorrect take-away, which Rand later, correctly, denounced and clarified, is the idea that evil is impotent.) Evil is not always dependent on a sanction, and when it is, sanction from most anyone will do. Sanction from the (forum-shopped) witch doctor is common. Navalny did not sanction the evil of Putin, and he was brutalized and murdered by Putin all the same. Realistically, sanction from the victim is generally not a worthy sanction to the evil doer. To the evil doer, the sanction of the victim is generally as irrelevant as the sanction, were such possible, of a rat or insect.
(Aside: Stalin fooled people into the "sanction" of not realizing that he was the reason they were forced onto a train to Siberia. They wrote him letters thinking that if he knew what was happening he would intervene.)
Ayn Rand introduced the idea of the sanction of the victim and the dependence of evil on it in a situation in which evil was an ongoing parasitism on the victim. I'd leave validity of the idea to that sort of situation, nothing broader.
One bad idea some readers take away from Atlas Shrugged is that they and their philosophical comrades are the Atlases holding up the world as in the book (kind of an iffy metaphor of the book, really, because of our modern conception of gravity) and that everyone else is significantly a parasite on them. No, our philosophical circle is not in that role. There are other real people who are in that role in this the real world.

Rand's sets the self in her first presentation of her mature philosophy thusly: "Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists" (emphases added). This talk of one possessing consciousness is just in the vernacular that the reader can readily get the meaning of sticking simply with common usage. Before this passage in the speech, Rand has been talking already of men living by the mind and of sacrifice and self-esteem. Additionally, this whole speech is set against the immediately preceding scene in which the young government man Tony dies in the arms of Rearden, and they have spoken of the absoluteness of that bullet wound and Rand has illustrated the absoluteness of life and death of a person, mind and body.
Self can be an emergent property looking across animal phyla. Encephalization of a nervous system, such as in a snail, need not entail existence of a self, even though the organism has a (fixed) behavioral value hierarchy. Damasio has found neurological quarters and interconnections for different levels of the human self (The Feeling of What Happens). Much is known about the development of the human brain in ontogeny, and experts might tell us when self-consciousness is added to primary consciousness. However, none of those emergences are about emergence of consciousness or consciouness-related self from neurological process, and I don't know if emergence would be the right relationship between neurological processes we possess and those selves.
To your first option, we could say that self used to include all those things would be very handwaving, but that it is true enough, and Rand assents, that human self is the whole mind-body organism. I don't think your following OR, taken as exclusive would be right. I leave open for now, at my stage of information, whether the relation of consciousness and consciousness-related self stand to their underlying neural process in a relation of emergence, and if they do so stand, I don't see that as in conflict with your first option. Rand's talk of consciousness is never a sort of reified abstraction, but part of some animal biology.

Ayn Rand's noble romanticism, as she says in her Introduction to The Fountainhead, reclaims the emotions of reverence for the sacred back from traditional theistic religions' monopoly on them. Is this Objectivist romance for real ideals what attracts some Christians/theists to Ayn Rand's work, despite their Christianity/theism?
Christianity's "transcendent reality" is God, and human earthly affairs are mundane. Galt's triumphs are "transcendent" in that they are heroic realizations of his highest ideals, the exalted becoming of his rational productive being. To be inspired by this noble, uplifting romance of Galt, is to "breathe in" and be energized by that "spirit".

And to be more specific I have spent a lifetime becoming the ideal man,  I'm not going to hide from lunatics and criminals but have them all brought to justice and insure that this can never happen to another individual in at least the United States again at first and then the entire world.  Evil only has power via the sanction one gives it, and I will offer it no sanction and will defeat it and those involved in this mass Evil, not hide from lunatic criminals. 

I think the essential in most religions could be characterized as a faith in a transcendental aspect of reality. A faith in the possibility of overcoming the seeming paradoxes in the gross physical environment of life on earth. 
The life and death of Christ, the perceptual aspects of a human being and the strive to offer an explanation or meaning for how non material aspects , ie 'love' or 'will' , can or do affect one's 'lived experience'. Why be 'good', what are the results of 'being good' , whence the good ?

I used "emergent" because I was reponding to Monart who had used "emergent." It seems sensible enough to sometimes use that rather than "caused," as when saying that the fluid state of matter emerged from a collection of certain molecules in a certain situation of temperature and pressure. Saying that "air is caused by the molecules composing it" is weird. And "air and its lack of resistance to shearing stress is caused by the molecules composing air and their collisions with each other" is also a weird way of talking. Shearing stresses are not something applicable to a molecule so far as I know. It is something that emerges at a macro level such as in our bones (hopefully with good resistance to shearing stresses) or in a breath of air. 
Additionally, causal relations in the story of how I came about are immediate and dynamical in my individual ontogeny in which evolution has provided the engineering-type structures in which such organized developmental processes can proceed. (Not only the background evolutionarily yielded structure is required, of course, but also  a continuing sameness [within tolerances] of the environment in which the type of organism can survive.) So for thinking about causation and emergences of processes in the individual organism, it seems most important to be focused on individual development, not preceding evolution, while keeping evolution as important background of the present dynamics arena in which this is causing that and/or this is emerging from that.
For the determinism worth having in a debate over free will vs. determinism, the determinism has to be a pre-determinism. To which the question "how far back is such and such in the present predetermined?" is sensible, and answers get more ridiculous the farther back the predeterminism is asserted, due to the circumstance that in the real physical, natural world there are a myriad of independent causal streams intersecting each other, continually resetting "initial" conditions and boundary conditions. All of that applies as well to emergences as it does to causation so far as I can see. Also, in stating Rand's mildly circular definition of the Law of Causality (that is, What is the Law of Causality, in applying identity to action?) using the phrase "caused and determined" in her definition (in "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made"), one should, I suggest, not take the "determined" to mean necessarily determinism, but a broader concept determinate. More like: "caused and delivered as determinate." That way both the results of the mind-independent course of nature and the results of free will engineering things can be brought under a Law of Causality.

Without reifying the abstracted "self", and acknowledging the current unknowns about the evolutionary or neurological emergence of self-consciousness, one can observe extrospectively the emergence of the self in a child's growth from infancy to adolescence and beyond. And, one can also observe introspectively, the "emergence" or growth of one's own, continually maturing, increasingly distinctive self, as one engages productively with the world in a noble, purposeful way.

A comparison of Reality as "Existence Exists" and God as "Being qua Being" may help in understanding how some Christians (and theists in general) would become Objectivsts and how they could recover from their previous Christianity. I estimate that many if not most Objectivists are recovering Christians/theists. Tara Smith and Ben Bayer, of the Ayn Rand Institute, have stated that they, too, are/were recovering Catholics. (I, myself, haven't been a Christian or theist, but was born in a Daoist-Buddhist culture.) Another helpful examination is the esthetic comparison between John Galt and Jesus Christ.
(I've read your excerpts of "Existence, We" and am curious but will have to wait until I have access to it. Thanks.)

Do Christians really think that self-interest is immoral? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. They couldn't even live beyond a week thinking something so blatantly irrational/immoral. If they actually "believed" such a irrational thing they would all hold their breath,  not eat, not drink water, do absolutely not and just die.

The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct?
The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith.
The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality.
These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith.
If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings).
Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians.
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There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct.
Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too.
Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons.
But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?