Borderlines of Identity

About the Book

In a multi-layered approach, Borderlines of Identity is a work of exploration that owes its birth to the author’s disturbing curiosity about individuality and the taken-for-granted differences and similarities of the common things of everyday experience. In a wide ranging sweep, going from conjoint twins and Oregon’s giant fungus to games with randomness, drug-induced identity disorders and evidence of prior lives it continually asks the question, “what is it that makes a thing what it is?” What makes a unit, distinguishes a unique individual, and allows us to feel that central sense of self, separate and different from all the others who populate our world? Do we find the identity of a thing or person by breaking it down into component parts or do we simply give it a definition and distinguish it from other things by marking off its boundaries? To refine, refresh and partially answer these questions, research-backed objective data are presented here and complemented with subjective experience, particularly those experiences evoked by and expressed in poetry, music and art. While this book is not designed to come up with “the answer” to the perennial questions of identity and, by implication, the nature of reality, it effectively blazes a trail which can take the reader to the brink of his or her own discovery of personalized perception and participation in the riddle of existence. My own intention for writing this book will be fulfilled if a curious seeker comes upon these pages and finds here a beam of light, perhaps with enough illumination to see that what is being sought is that which is doing the seeking.

About the Author