Me 225This may sound like a good solution to the conflict between me and my
physical body, and looking at today‟s society, it does appear to be a fairly
common one. However, I suggest that it is actually a form of apartheid
which divides the world and its inhabitants into fixed moral classes. Like
apartheid, its biggest deficiency is that it lacks the element of time. The
person who finds himself in jail ends up being labeled permanently as a
second-class citizen, just like the black under apartheid. Likewise,
quarantining good to special days in special places with special clothes
means, by definition, that good is permanently disabled from affecting
those in need of it.
These „solutions‟ have another problem. They produce a morality
which is very dependent upon times and places. This is because the label of
„good‟ and „bad‟ hinges mainly upon when and where an experience or
action occurs and not so much upon any inherent qualities in the
experience or action itself. In other words, the concept of generality is also
lost. For instance, a good „upright‟ family man may find his sexual
standards changing completely when he visits the brothels in Bangkok, or
Mr. Joe Average may turn super-spiritual and speak in sanctimonious tones
whenever he „worships God‟ at church.
Neurology and Self-Image
We have looked at me and self-image from the viewpoint of
personality. I emphasized that my sense of me is originally based in the
physical object of my body. If we look at the brain, we find that the same
portion which handles object recognition is also responsible for providing
the basis for self-image.
Evidence from neurology indicates that the interaction between the
automatic parts of Perceiver and Mercy strategy, in the back of the right
hemisphere, provides the mental pieces out of which both me and the
image of my world are constructed. If this area of the brain is damaged,
then the mind can lose the ability to access and integrate these various
fragments of identity. For instance, cases have occurred in which patients
with right parietal-temporal damage believed that they could literally be in
two places at the same time, and saw no contradiction in this.^2 In other
words, they had lost the mental ability to form a unified self-image.