If those two had separate heads to clash together I would. They make it sound so black and white, so limited to duality. Once the cosmic verbiage starts, disappearing up one’s own navel is almost inevitable.

The bottom line is that whatever Rowney Marshal’s public persona becomes, this is not a dialogue, it’s simply a couple of voices in the chorus, suddenly in danger of having to understudy the main role, without coaching or a script.

I have had lots of titles and retraining over the years. Keeping the peace between RM and BK requires many bridging characters, although for clarity of purpose, I prefer to think of us as Job Descriptions, although ordering the mental traffic is more like being a MC in a piccadilly of a circus, rather than a MD in an hierarchically structured firm. I have tried to argue for as few personalisations as I can get away with, and many characters remain only briefly as fictionalisations, keeping the bulk of the mental workforce professionals.

I have had names over the years, being a persistently-necessary complex. An elementary part of me started off as ‘God’, when I had quite a loud voice delivering commandments and a still small one that whispered constantly of failure to avoid original sin becoming. Faith failing instead, I got sublimated to avoid the pitfalls of repression (energising, demonising, obsessing) and dubbed ‘The Objective Observer’, which even I knew was not a job description, but a mission statement based on aims and objectives that were at best aspirational and never achievable. These days I’m not even the Minute Taker, more the producer of the occasional narrative highlights of too many histories to count.

And of course, that ‘I’ is only a pseudonym. But that’s part of the sanity ecology. If you don’t call all the personalities and characters ‘I’ and allow them all regulated and limited access to the vocal chords or written word, the body feels dissociated and as if it’s an actor in its’ own life, never real, always at one remove, and with no core ownership of the selfhood concept.

There are plenty of selves to choose from in a lifetime. Many only come into being by enacting a role until it becomes automatic and others are roles that can be set aside after exiting that particular stage. If the stage is inside your imagination, the multiverse is the only limit. So, I am happy to allow time to BK, RM, the one who communicates with animals, not to mention the one who met the elves and a host of more obviously  competent functionalities. The worst thing any of us can think of is the monotony of an internal monologue.

 So,  to keep the debate healthy and competitively diverse, investing ideas, traits, talents, characteristics etc with personality maintains an evolving neural ecosystem, empowered by the passion for survival every bounded self carries. A meta-‘I’ is unnecessary in a collectively autocatalytic emergent set, because if you think you’re God you’re really in trouble, since inevitably you’re making God in your own, temporally and spatially and species limited, image.

But a manager of all the nonsense this method of living throws up, that’s a role everyone needs --- ego, ergo sum.