Christianity presupposes that sinful humans flee from close scrutiny of their inner lives. In the earliest example of shame, Adam and Eve attempt to hide their nakedness from their creator once they acquire knowledge of good and evil. Caan fled after killing his brother, believing that he could hide his sin. Shame may be natural and most people have secrets that they tell no one. But there is also in us, I believe, a desire to disclose, to confess, to be exposed that is greater than the desire to hide. Humans want, perhaps even need, to confess all to another. This urge is not driven by a desire for absolution, although it has been exploited for that purpose. It is rather a fundamental need to be known by another. We are, in the end, the only witnesses to the totality of our lives. There is a constant yearning to have that perspective validated by another.

From St. Augustine’s Confessionsto today’s reality television shows, people choose to subject themselves to public scrutiny. There are also the private rites of psychological analysis and sacramental confession. Dostoevsky brilliantly existentialized the phenomenon in Crime and Punishment and in The Brothers Karamazov. But the question remains, why do we do it? It seems particularly irrational when to confess brings punishment or scorn.

But this need to reveal is not limited to the negative. In fact, the confessional phenomenon is but a sub-species of a more general condition. We want to be known. It is a deep-seated, fundamental reaction to our latent fear of solipsism. The awareness that we are always and utterly alone eats at us, breeds emptiness and anxiety, carves away a hole that cannot be filled by the ghostly internal dialogue that we know as consciousness. This desire to be known, is at the root of much of the strange behavior of human existence. It is intertwined with sexual desire. Within the sexual act there exists a physical complement to the psychical phenomenon of separation. But the connection that obtains physically cannot effect a similar connection between the identities of the individuals. We are doomed to be separated from the other, both physically and consciously. (This idea is best described by Aristophenes in Plato’s Symposium in his account of our androgynous ancestors, split down the middle by the angry gods, never to be perfectly reunited).

Then there is our human need of gods, or a god-like observer of all, a perfect witness to every moment, thought and intention that we have had. Without this, we perceive our very identities are in danger of moment-by-moment annihilation. Our past becomes a fragmentary road, its paving stones destroyed by the limitations of our own memory. Without my gods, who will remember me?

We desire a witness to this existence. Without that witness, we struggle to define meaning. But this need for a witness is more fundamental than the desire for meaning. Without a witness, there can be no meaning, except that which we make for ourselves. No wonder we are in anguish. The weight of being both actor and witness to the act, the inadequacy of memory, the lack of clarity inherent in our analysis of both motive and act–all conspire to increase our isolation.

The past two nights I fell asleep thinking about the difference between real sense data and imagined sense data. There is a world of difference between seeing the color red and imagining the color red. I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me before, but the distinction is remarkable.

I thought about memories. What are the actual properties of memory? The more I thought about it, the more elusive these properties became. If I close my eyes and recall a particularly vivid memory, I find now that I am at a loss to describe what it is I am actually experiencing (right now). It isn’t visual. It is not as if I am watching “with my mind’s eye” a movie clip of the memory. There are no tactical sensations in my body. A particular memory from childhood that is distinct becomes a third-person description of an event. It can’t have been experienced this way.

Memory recall of this kind seems most analogous to visual sense experience, but the analogy breaks down upon close inspection. There is nothing mysterious to me about the fact that we have memory. What is mysterious is the phenomenon of recalling memories, or re-experiencing them.

Buddhist teaching identifies six senses. There are the usual five senses by which we experience the outside world plus one for introspection. Perhaps meditation intensifies the strangeness of this “sixth sense.”