We think of ourselves as a unified whole when in fact, if we give serious attention to our inner life, we find that what we take as our person is made up of many disparate affections and thoughts that often lack any real coherence. The issue with seeing ourselves as a unified personality/whole is that we can tend to dismiss or not even recognise what doesn’t affirm the image we carry of ourselves. For example, we take ourselves as a unified whole when we see ourselves as a church, and if I’m in the belief that “I am a church” then I will be blind to those things in me that are outside the church. But if we see that what we take as a whole is actually a world with many lands and peoples (spirits/thoughts and affections) we will see that in our mental world there are many lands made up of many different thoughts and affections of many different qualities, some inside the Church and some outside the Church

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