I experienced an episode of transient global amnesia. For about five hours, I was “lost.” I became confused and asked questions, I repeated myself often—but afterward, and still now, I had no memory of it. Those hours are gone, not tucked away in some corner of recall, but apparently erased. I only know what happened because Jane and others told me. To them, I was there, but not myself; present but absent. To me, it is a blank.
When I was lucid again, then at the hospital, I asked the neurologist about it. He told me: the brain is an organ, the self—the soul—is something different. His words struck me. I have been thinking about them ever since.
The Soul and the Brain
The brain is physical, biological, electrochemical. It ages, it heals, it sometimes misfires. But the self—let’s call it the soul or spirit—seems to belong to another order of reality. Not separate from the brain, but not reducible to it either. When the brain misfires, as mine did, the soul itself seems to falter—shadowy, in retreat. Not gone, not extinguished, but obscured. This is where both physicalists and spiritualists miss something. The physicalist denies the soul altogether, the spiritualist denies the body. Yet embodied experience tells another story: brain and soul are intimately entwined. When one stumbles, the other shudders.
Christian tradition has often spoken of the soul inhabiting a body, as if the two were entirely separate. Yet that dualistic picture—of an immortal soul temporarily lodged in mortal flesh—doesn’t quite explain my experience. For in those hours, my soul was not absent, like a bird flown from its cage. I was still present, still embodied, still relating to others. What was missing was the vital connection between memory, consciousness, and self-awareness.
Hindu thought suggests something different: the atman, the individual self, is in essence one with Brahman, the universal spirit. If that is true, perhaps what happened to me was not so much a loss as a return—my little self dissolving for a few hours into the greater whole, like a ripple flattening back into the sea. From this perspective, nothing essential was lost at all.
Carl Jung, too, might have had something to say. For him, the self is more than the ego. The unconscious—personal and collective—carries us in ways the rational mind cannot fathom. Perhaps, in those hours my ego, the organizing narrator of my life, was suspended, leaving me adrift in deeper waters of psyche.
The Narrative Self and Its Fragility
And that brings me to the idea of the narrative self. Philosophers and psychologists remind us that we construct who we are through the stories we tell about our experiences. Memory is the thread that stitches those stories into a coherent whole.
But what happens when memory fails? When the thread snaps?
Here is the conundrum. If the narrative self is all there is of the self, then when the narrative falters—as it did for me—then the self collapses. The story ceases, and with it the storyteller. I was, for those hours, not the “me” that others recognize.
Yet surely the self is more than narrative. I was still alive. Still interacting, however strangely. Still woven into the fabric of relationship. Others carried my story when I could not. Jane bore witness to my selfhood when my memory could not sustain it.
Perhaps the self is narrative—and more. Narrative gives us continuity and meaning, but underneath it there is something deeper, a ground of being that does not depend on memory. In Christian terms, the soul that is sustained by G*d. In Hindu terms, the atman resting in Brahman. In Jung’s terms, the larger Self carrying the fragile ego.
A Hopeful Mystery
It was a humbling experience. It is also strangely hopeful to be reminded that I am more than memory, more than brain function, more than the fragile continuity of autobiographical story. Something of me endured, even in the blank spaces.
Normality, it seems to me, whether of a functional kitchen or a functional brain is illusory. What matters is not clinging to the normal but finding groundedness in the abnormal—whether it is a broken kitchen or a broken memory. Perhaps the true self is not lost at all, even when it feels like it. Perhaps it rests in something larger than memory, waiting to re-emerge.
I have a follow-up with the neurologist in a week or so. We’ll likely talk philosophy again.
+Ab. Andy