discontinuous fragments

We are a thoroughly shell-shocked species.

 Though we have not all suffered abuse as children, 

we have all endured experiences that we perceived as terrifying, 

and that utterly exhausted our tender attempts to comprehend and cope

....as a result of our histories, and of our inborn disposition to become dissociative

 when our minds need protection, moderately dissociative awareness

 is the normal mental status of all adult human beings. 

 What we conceive of as an unbroken thread of consciousness is,

 instead, quite often a train of discontinuous fragments. 

Our awareness is divided.

 And much more commonly than we know, 

even our personalities are fragmented-disorganized

 team efforts trying to cope with past-rather than the sane,

 unified wholes we anticipate in ourselves and in other people.

~ Martha Stout

from The Myth of Sanity

art by picasso

a chaos of forms

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And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all geniuses must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves… A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self twofold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being unity, is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of stages and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as a eating or breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a onefold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us share the delusion.

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~ Hermann Hesse

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