Wholeness and Single-Authorial Voice

“The oneness of life is a truth that can be fully realized only when a false notion of a separate self – whose destiny you consider apart from the whole – is forever annihilated.” - Bruce Lee

This separate self can be our estrangement from past versions of ourselves, dissociation from the present and living self, estrangement from our responsibility to our future self, or even watching our lives in the third person, like a character in a movie. Every version and part of our selves is engaged in our destiny; making room for every moment, color or impression of our self gives us a sense of wholeness. There’s an interesting notion I came across, that of a 'single-authorial voice'. When a writer gives voice to different characters in a novel, or even to the setting in which the story is written, while each of these participants in the novel is distinct from the other, they all share the signature of a single authorial voice. Similarly, ‘I’ observes the unity of concepts within themselves, the different rational, emotive, and spirited voices that compose who we are as well. There’s one voice authoring our internal lives despite the collection of multiple intermingling voices. ‘I’ allows consciousness to occupy a seat outside of its parts, observant to their unity. This means that when we’re ordering our internal lives based on clear guiding principles and values, there no longer is a need for a hierarchy between our appetitive, emotive, imaginative, and rational faculties, instead, each of our soul’s faculties is in conversation as a participant in this peculiar ‘I’ 's acts of introspective self-conciousness, the loving glue and mediator that holds our parts together.

You guys ever see that movie with Eddie Murphy where he litetarlly is an alien ship that's navigated by a smaller but biological Eddie who was the captain of the big Eddie star ship? Anyways he oversaw a city of action figure sized people living, breathing communing in bigger Eddie. Living their personal and collective lives when they're not too busy maintaning the big Eddie starship, loading the shipping bay, taking care of the dilithium chambers for the warpdrive, serving cocktails at the ship's lounge. All these inhabitants fulfilled their role in getting big Ed down to Earth, New York. Moving as a team in coordinating Eddie around the Bronx when he meets that kid with the baseball and gets tight with the kid's single mom. Does that ring a bell? I can't catch its name. Anyways my point is, if you had a city of inhabitants populating your soul, desires, memories, intuitions, duties of love and moral goodness, old and pulsating wounds, how would you run this city? If you were little Ed trying to coordinate your crew when navigating big Ed around the bigger Apple, communicating with others and getting ourselves out of some crazy mess or another, how would you run your starship? Is there order and cohesion in your city or conflict and dissaray. Does the engineering section have beef with command or the loading dock people? Is the city open to dialogue, understanding and inneraccord or does it struggle to converse among its inhabitants without lighting the torches and grabbing the pitchforks? Do you treat this city like a vault and little Ed as a bank thief planning a heist every time you want to get an action out into the world? Are all the inhabitants the same, homogenous carbon copies of the next crewmember on the ship? That seems like it could be uniformly harmonious, all inhabitants orbiting every wish of little Ed's. It would also be boring. Otherwise is each crew mate their own unique, individuated being living in a melting pot of a ship filled with all sorts of potential? What are the principles and values that you run this ship on? Who or what do you care about? That answer determines the directions you move towards and the choices you make or deny yourself altogether? Is each inhabitant equal in the eyes of your principles as the self-regulating rules of your inner autonomy? Are all these crewmates subject to your duties of care, your duty to the moral good, and to your own conceptual or rational standards? Is your city an unmediated tyranny? Is it loving? Free? Maybe even a mafia house that enforces blind loyalty to the ideal of the self? A democracy perhaps? Is it run with the collective interests of each of our soul's inhabitants or parts in heart? Is the population beside's itself and would rather wonder about the stars outside their windows than spend their time idolizing the big Ed ship they've been maintaining for years now and are over the hype? Do the little people in big Ed move towards the same ends, towards something bigger than big Ed altogether? A world to explore, navigate, love, help if they can, or maybe towards the Light at the end of big Ed's road, whispers of that light at the important cross roads and moments along the way. MEET DAVE!! IT'S CALLED MEET DAVE.