In his 1941 essay England Your England George Orwell wrote: “What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”
This consideration of the strange nature of identity reflects a profound mystery at the centre of what it means to be a self. To imagine yourself at any time in the past, or indeed in the future, is to find the strange sense of thinking about someone you were and are no longer. Even yourself yesterday or five minutes ago is a person gone leaving only you, here, now.
We can have a variety of experiences that reveal the strangeness of our own relationships with ourselves. Anyone who has been through severe periods of depression can tell you about the sense of something absent in the feeling of being you, a sluggish feeling of a disconnect within your own self-perception. Yet likewise peak experience such as psychedelic drugs can give a sublime feeling of ego-death in which the boundaries of self feel entirely absent, and yet somehow you are as alive as you’ve ever been. For example atheist philosopher Sam Harris said after an experience taking psilocybin “the fact that there are landscapes of mind this vast lurking on the other side of a…
