Existential unity of being

An individual normally has a sense of his or her presence in the world as a real, live, whole, and in a temporal sense, continuous person. As such, he or she can live out into the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole and continuous. In ordinary circumstances, the individual then experiences his own being as differentiated from the rest of the world so clearly that his identity and autonomy are never in question, being seen as having an inner consistency, substantiality, genuineness and worth and as being spatially coextensive with the body.

Such a basically ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life (social, ethical, spiritual, biological), from a firm central sense of his own and other people's reality and identity. It is often difficult for a person with such a sense of his integral selfhood and personal identity (of the permanency of things, of the reliability of natural processes, of the substantiality of others) to transpose himself into the world of an individual whose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating certainties such as an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness.