I’ve just started this section on memory. He gives it as the foundation to being a self. What I have been exploring recently is the possibility that consciousness itself precedes memory,indeed that memory can be thought of as a content of consciousness. A memory is extremely personal; it is our individual narrative. Normally we think of the self with his story, his narrative, possesses consciousness. Sam Harris has been saying that such a conception of the self is an illusion which will be dissolved if consciousness is directed towards that self; it won’t be found. So A qualitative difference between memory or narrative and consciousness is that the former is personal and the latter is impersonal. If it even make sense talking this way the goal of meditation seems to be to lose a personal sense of memory or history and the illusion of a bound autonomous self. Is James moving in an opposite direction, substituting an improved illusion for an inferior one?
