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Me 203

Or, suppose that the Queen of England is on a royal visit and that she
happens to stop where I am standing, shake my hand, and chat with me.
Very likely, I will identify strongly in Mercy strategy with this incident.
For weeks I will probably tell everyone that “I talked with the Queen,” and
I will cut out all the articles in the paper about the event and place them in
my scrapbook. By identifying with this isolated experience I have made it
part of me; I have pulled it into my internal world of Mercy thought.
However, what will my physical body say about this definition of me?
Five minutes after the event, it will be going one way while the physical
body of the Queen will be traveling another. In fact, it is likely that our
paths will never cross again. Therefore, as far as my body is concerned,
this incident really has very little to do with me.
Let me see if I can illustrate the conflict between these two ways of
defining me with the help of an analogy. We could compare the Mercy
internal world to a room with furniture in it. Suppose that I am in my living
room, and I decide to identify with the illusion that I am really in my
bedroom. What will happen? I will continually bump into the furniture and
hurt myself as the external world tries to convince me that I am actually in
the living room and not in the bedroom.

There are two ways of defining me:

 Mercy thought may identify with emotional experiences.

 My physical body and environment can bring experiences to mind.

 These two forms of identity generally conflict with one another.

I suggest that this illustrates clearly the two conflicting concepts of me.
All the experiences associated with my physical body build up a set of
„furniture‟ within my internal Mercy world. This „furniture‟ is fairly solid.
It became that way as I learned to cope with the limitations and the feelings
of my physical body. On the other hand, with Mercy identification I can
take any experience at random and stick it into the „room.‟ I can pretend
that the sofa is a bed, that the empty space in the middle of the room is
occupied by a table, or that the ugly chair in the corner does not exist.
However, if I try to move around, then I find that I keep bashing my shins
against the furniture. In other words, if I attempt to identify with
experiences which do not match up to my physical abilities, then I will
keep coming up against the limitations of my physical body—either I do
not have the requisite knowledge and skills, or I look wrong, or I am in the
wrong place, or I live at the wrong time.