Veneer

Your outward self, which is shallow, and may hide desires, longings, reactions, that are quite different, and of a rougher or coarser quality. If peeled away, the veneer might also reveal what is under the surface, previously unconscious fears or wonders in you.

It is obvious that we have different layers or levels of experience within us.  As our present brain evolved it developed four separate ‘brains’ or levels, each with its own memory, motor and other functions (David J Mahoney, 1991). Each new level, as it developed, elaborated on and extended the function of the preceding levels. So, from the spinal cord the hindbrain and midbrain developed. The first level of brain that developed beyond the spinal cord has been called the Reptilian Brain. This is because what we carry within our human brain is still found in reptiles. This ‘brain’ often encompasses several parts of the physical brain.  MacLean’s definition says that the base brain is the Reptilian. The next level he called the Mammalian or Monkey Brain, and the third is called the Neomammalian or Human Brain. These levels of the brain work like “three interconnected biological computers, each with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory”.

So what you are aware of as yourself is only a tiny thing, a veneer behind which is much older and powerful levels of awareness. So we ‘put on a front’ and behind it we are often very different. See Brain levels – Dimensions of Human Experience