Hi starstream,
in my view, both is true: You are one person, here and now. AND there are aspects of you out there, being also persons. But all these "parts" belong to something greater.
There is another thing: In some cases, one human can consist of parts that are in such struggle that it comes to personality problems. To integrate these parts in one person is a real precious achievement.
After all, you will stay you as "I" as long as you want, with changes of experiences/memories, like you are the same "I" now as when you were child, but also you now have more experiences (and some you may have forgotten) and in this regard you are different.

You've seen the "Personalities" thread?

Spooky

Hi Cosmic Ambitions,
I think it is important to view a person not as a solid stone kind of thing. Everyone knows one can struggle with oneself without dividing in two persons (like a smoker who "wants" to stop smoking but continues). This is a normal thing. But sometimes something in the "personal situation" of a person, which is so to say a more liquid-gel thing, can get crystallized and annoying and it seems not to fit anymore with the rest of the personal situation. This can lead to repel this solid part of the own personality, which of course is problematic because it's not only something appearing foreign, but also something from this person, so then this person comes into great trouble, might feel something like shattered, which of course is very painful. To integrate, or to stay in the picture, to dissolve the crystallated, hard, annoying part again into the liquid gel of the personal situation is an art I hope psychotherapists are able to perform.
The pity with conventional "hard" medicine is mostly the lack of time generally, and the lack of time spent on exploring the patient's person and personal situation in specific.
If a disorder might be considered as genetic predisposed, this may be true. It of course must not be an excuse for just giving pills to the patient and that was it, and further, it would not touch the spiritual side of the issue, because genetic factors in the physical and spiritual tasks and problems could be aligned, if not must be aligned.

Sidenote: I've heard, in a specific period of time, the diagnosis "multiple personality disorder" occured inflationly. It turned out, the patients were set under drugs and were talked into this disorder in a professional suggestive way. It illustrates what power therapists can have.

Spooky

Thanks spooky2 & dave, I found those posts extremely useful...

Hey dave, I can't fully remember the exact way that the Buddhists illustrated our mutual relationship to the "Godhead", but I think that it was on similar lines as to what you have so cleverly and imaginatively "analogized"... I can't remember, but I think that their explanation involved elephants and turtles of some sort. (Correct me if I'm wrong, because the memory is fleeting.)

It's amazing to me... the infinite/constantly evolving/growing vastness of potentialities that exist for the totality of creation for all of time and infinitely beyond... I see this "box" that we are all taught to "look outside of" as actually being a sort of tangible substance. However, the "box" that I have grown to see has blurry edges, no surface, and is forever growing. This "box" stretches and winds into and out of the undefinable reaches of all of realities for all of time...

Now we can *flip* it around and say... "I think I think *inside* of the box!"

PUL,
Cosmic_Ambitions

P.S. Thanks again spooky2 for diving in so thoroughly into the question/thought that I had posed, I found a lot of useful knowledge in what you had posted..