HOW MANY LIVES DO WE LEAD?

MY HEAD IS FULL OF MEMORIES that I cannot trust. At odd moments, entire episodes of my life are recalled to mind--or are they? I can't be sure if these memories are things that really happened to me, things I dreamed, or just something that the scrambled neurons of my brain hurriedly assembled in answer to some nebulous request.

SOME CLAIM THAT WE EXIST in a life of shifting reality...that reality may rewrite itself from time to time, changing certain details, and yet do so imperfectly--so that we still remember the way things were before the change.

CAN WE BE SURE IT IS NOT SO?

WHILE HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS I found myself recalling events from my childhood I hadn't thought of in years. But how accurate are those memories? Our mind often fills in gaps--we think someone's name is "Bill" when it's actually "Bob"--so why should we trust the gauzy memories put forth by our brains?

OUR EVERY SECOND is experienced first-hand. The information enters our brain. Is it stored? All of it? How solidly is it stored? These are questions that we cannot yet answer.

IF WE CANNOT BE SURE OF OUR MEMORIES then what else can we be sure of? If our mind can alter the first-hand experiential record, how do we know that it is not likewise altering that record at the moment of experience?

HOW DO WE KNOW that we all see the color 'green' in the same way? Perhaps my green is your lavendar; is there any way to tell, given that we have a rigid system established? I see grass and I say it's green; but the hue I see may be something very different. We might try and gauge it by association--if I say that 'green' is very close to 'red' then perhaps I am 'wrong'. But what if my mind has formed the appropriate links of association according to socialization and education? I might understand the color spectrum in a different way than you do, and as a result this could not be determined by simple Q&A.

HOW CAN WE TRUST OURSELVES?

THE QUESTION OF FAITH is rarely applied to ourselves, to what we experience. We have all agreed to perceive the world in the same way, in terms of our descriptions. Certain individuals can be clearly identified as 'color-blind' and have recognizable differences in the way they perceive the world. Yet perhaps their problem is not in detecting certain colors; perhaps their problem is that the common-consensus associations don't function for them the way they do for the rest of us. In other words, perhaps we all see things quite differently, but our common language of description hides this from almost everyone.

WHAT IS CERTAIN if nothing is concrete? Once I dreamed that Raisa Gorbachev had been assassinated, receiving a bullet meant for her husband. It wasn't until later in the next day that I realized it was a dream, and not reality. This has happened to me several times. If I can't tell dreams from reality--or at least television--then what good are my memories? What good is recorded history? What good is the jury process, if experience is cloaked in variance?

DO YOU HAVE FAITH in your mind?

ARE WE ALL SCHIZOPHRENIC?