At least some of the time, it seems like something to you to be you. Your experience, that is, often has a savor: sweet, sour, agonizing, boring, anticipatory, regretful, sated, delighted … and so on. This, I expect, we share with other animals. Their experience too, at least some of the time, has a taste or a feel, though the range of such seemings is, for them, probably more limited. I doubt that your cat or your goldfish can be nostalgically regretful or delighted at the misfortune of another, for instance.
We humans can do something that (probably) no other animal can: we can be spectators of ourselves having experiences, aware of ourselves as experiencers of this or that, the audience at our own inner and very private theater. Sometimes, we comment on this fact about ourselves: “If my thought-dreams could be seen/They’d probably put my head inside a guillotine” is, among other things, a comment on the importance of keeping the theater private.
What should Christians think about the inner theater? That it is an artifact of the fall, and that in heaven, when we know as we are known, it will cease. This also means that now, here below, we should not foster it or cling to it. The liturgy’s function is, in part, gradually to bring down the curtain upon it. To be a spectator at your inner theater is to enter a private inner world and to delight in being there; the world toward which we move has no privacy. In it, in the life of the world to come, we are transparent to ourselves and to others and most especially to the Lord. Anticipations of this here below are rare but real: we pass through them as a fish does through water.
