Introduction

The central executive Self, the free agent intellect that chooses the good and the true, is the treasure to which St. Paul refers. It is a treasure that can be lost unless the religious path is taken. I have argued that religious practices help to build up a centralized executive Self by reducing the discrepancy between an ideal Self and the current Self. I want to show in this chapter that a process I call “decentering” implements the discrepancy reduction process and helps to construct a centralized, ideal executive Self. It does so by periodically taking the current Self “offline,” out of working memory, for repair and construction and then linking it back with an ideal possible Self commanding a greater range of computational and cognitive resources. By offline I simply mean removed from working memory and placed into a suppositional, logical space (a mental space, familiar to anyone who has imagined possibilities for themselves). It is a conscious form of imaginative mental processing that does not occur in working memory.