Everyone feels they consist of two parts. For most people the division is: mind and body; to the religious it is the schism separating their spiritual and secular sides. To others, it is simply a preference they have that they be perceived to be a specific type of person as opposed to its alternative, (to appear sophisticated rather than lowbrow; knowledgeable not ignorant). But the neural instincts of the few who long for the understanding drives their view of this binary sensation into a singular configuration.
THE BIG EXPLANATION:
“I wasn’t MYSELF when I thought/said/did that!”
Who then, exactly, WERE you?!
All men, when they speak of themselves, in so doing, reinforce the feeling that they are two entities. With all confessions, self-condemnations and excuse moi’s, the speaker in essence is proclaiming that he is not the same person who did the deed, or said the words, to which he now refers.
A man says: “I am as shocked as anyone by what happened; I do not know why I hit my wife; it is not at all like me.” By these words he is stating that he – the person making the present statement – is clearly not the same person who struck the blow, and his act of being able to so discuss it is obvious proof of the fact.
Every time a person says, (and thinks), “I am this sort of person,” or “I am that type of person,” they unwittingly shore up the foundation of the sensation that they, and everyone else who accepts their explanations, consist of two distinct constituents. One, (the present thinker/ speaker), who is intelligent, upstanding and all-around acceptable, and another part of himself, (his personality traits, characteristics, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies), which are not currently manifest, or simultaneous with the part of him now speaking, and which is a part of him, commonly in need of being explained, if not excused.
J.