The Two Me’s 243people that salvation is achieved when I am sufficiently motivated by the
vision of self-annihilation and self-denial to make a leap away from the
bondage of the me of the child. But, if the result of abandoning self-image
is the annihilation of self, then obviously nothing is left on the other side
for me except an endless plummet through clouds of emptiness, or in
Hindu terms, the selflessness of Nirvana. As far as I personally am
concerned, though, I like solid ground, and I find the concept of eternal
tumbling through nothingness to be totally unnerving. If that is the cure,
then give me the sickness.
So how can I know that the mental vision which I see hovering in the
clouds actually corresponds to something which is really out there? Let us
see if we can use a little common sense to come up with an answer. In fact,
why not build our solution out of common sense, since we know that this is
one thing that is firmly rooted in the real world.
Have you ever considered the fact that every invention and modern
convenience started out as the figment of someone‟s imagination? Some
individual standing on the edge of the me imposed upon him by his culture
saw a vision in the clouds of uncertainty of how things could be and took
the risk of leaping after that image of the possible. What turned his vision
into reality? I suggest that it was Perceiver belief based in common sense.
Let me explain. Perceiver facts, I said, describe connections between
individual Mercy experiences. That is how common sense forms; Perceiver
thought notices which Mercy experiences go together in a repeatable way
and draws conclusions.
In common sense, the Perceiver observer may be awake, but it is still
passive. It is observing carefully, but it is still only observing. Suppose,
though, that Perceiver strategy becomes active and decides to believe in
some fact and to pull it into the internal world of Perceiver thought. This
Perceiver belief will reconnect Mercy experiences. The new Perceiver
connection will regroup the experiences within Mercy thought; it will
arrange them in different ways—by sorting them into differing groups. The
result is that in my head, within the imaginationA of the Mercy internal
world, I will see an object which does not exist in the real world. The
experiences may come from out there, but the connections between these
experiences are new.
We could think of this process as working with a building set such as
Lego. Mercy memories are like Lego blocks—fragments of experience.
Culture assembles these pieces in various ways. Therefore, as I go through
life, Mercy thought is continually encountering Lego „cars,‟ „buildings,‟
A Imagination is driven by the mental „pump‟ of Exhorter, Contributor, and
Facilitator strategies. In the right hemisphere, this circuit is seeded by
Mercy experiences, and forms the basis for creativity and planning.