In Do We Survive the Major Transformations of Our Lives?, I wrote:
In Rewriting the Soul, the philosopher Ian Hacking had speculated that the multiple personality phenomenon is a largely learned strategy of segregating painful memories. Is our sense of a particular individuality tied that strictly to specific memories? But our memories would not seem so separate from a specific physical body, with a specific set of organs and specific sets of genes that are activated or de-activated as needed by that body.
Our memories can be localized according to a study discussed in this short podcast from Scientific American: Doorway to Blame for Room Amnesia. Our memories can reside in a physical place, in a manner of speaking. I’ve read before of research indicating that memories can also reside in a mental or emotional or physiological state, including the state of inebriation. This doesn’t argue against the unity of the human mind nor against the unity of memory seen as knowledge any more than the existence of separate physical locations, such as the surface of Mars and that of Earth, argues against the unity of the universe. But it complicates matters in a potentially interesting way and opens room — no pun intended — for speculations which could be tested though I suspect that a neurobiologist would hypothesize that the ways in which we create realms of memory are substantially the same whether the realms are defined in terms of emotional states or physical locations.
Our knowledge of even our immediate environments is contextual because we are finite creatures with limited perceptual and mental powers, powers which are under formation. It would seem that we have to learn the proper relationships between different environments, not surprisingly — would our ancestors have survived if they assumed their meadow-knowledge was the same as their forest-knowledge? Moving from one of those environments to another was akin to moving from one universe to another.
There are hints in all of this that we modern human beings are leading lives fundamentally at odds with the goal of unity which is essential to healthy personhood. We have lives which are segregated into realms of work and regular life and weekend entertainment and summer vacation. We act as if deliberately preventing the development of the unity necessary for a true, morally-ordered personhood.
Yes, we human organisms move between different realms though they be realms of a world, even an entire Creation, which has the properties of unity, coherence, and completeness. Animals, including some noble and morally well-ordered in their limited way, live in realms, sometimes spending essentially their entire life in but one realm. Human beings who would be images of God, who would share the life of that God, have to have a greater ambition. We have to intend to become unified creatures of a sort we would regard as true persons, imitations of God, as we could see Him in His incarnate Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
To intend isn’t to hold some vague and fuzzy idea about what I’d like to happen. To intend is to step forward into the future, moving in a specific direction so that I might move toward a goal, might develop into a certain sort of human being.
If you would be a morally well-ordered person, then journey towards that goal. Do what you can to avoid leading the life of distraction which is offered to us in the marketplaces of our age. Learn to read decent and worthwhile books or to make good music, perhaps the music of your Japanese grandmother or perhaps that of the great composers of Western Civilization. Learn how to garden with skill and respect for the land and what it can grow. Learn how to hunt or fish, not with ATVs and speedboats. Learn how to machine useful products, perhaps customizing the design of your daughter’s next bicycle. Learn how to walk while paying attention so that you can spot a hawk or eagle at a distance by his way of soaring and hovering, going so long without a flap of his wings.
Learn how to be a morally well-ordered person as you move through life and you will eventually see that your kitchen is part of the same house as your living-room. More than that, you should learn that the woods which begin a few blocks away are part of the same environment as your house and yard. Come to know in your heart and mind and soul that the American government and people aren’t exceptional but rather part of the same stream of history as our past governments and ancestors in the United States and those in Ireland and in Portugal and in Honduras. Our leaders can be brothers of Alfred the Great or brothers of Bismarck or brothers of Robespierre or brothers of the Medici pirates and gangster-bankers.
Begin to see and feel that unity and coherence and completeness which makes this universe a world, a morally purposeful story being told by God. Then you can begin also to reflect that unity and coherence and completeness and to be a morally well-ordered human organism, an approximation — maybe a good one — to an image of God.