A Strong Unifying Cultural Image, Why?
Sharing Spatial Features
The MetaSelf model has the potential to bridge cultural differences because, both in its general spatial ideas and when it is illustrated as a viewer and box-frame in a room, it shares spatial features with all human bodies. Few things in human nature rival the regularity of the bodily contrasts between top and bottom, front and back, left and right. These contrasts are natural foundations for a number of meaningful contrasts that comprise our multifarious idea of the self.
Our bodily orientation to gravity is normally upright, so that making an exception to this rule becomes a powerful figurative way to convey information. "Upset" is used as an adjective to mean that some normal state of mind has been disturbed; as a noun, upset means that expectations have been defeated -- the top team was defeated by the underdog. "Topsy turvy" and "turning things on their heads" are ways to talk about big changes or mistaken beliefs.
The front/back contrast is similarly powerful. "Getting something backwards" means a mistake or a bad misunderstanding. "Doing a 180" and "making a U turn" are locomotion metaphors for changing one's mind. Consider, also, "backtrack" and "I need to back up a minute and explain..." "Going behind someone's back" is a mark of deceit.
A reversal of the left/right contrast is sometimes expressed as "putting the shoe on the wrong foot." However, the similarity of left and right--our bilateral symetry--makes for a weaker contrast than that between head and foot, chest and rear. In any case, we must exercise care, since some cultures do not use the left/right contrast at all. They instead orient all directions to the points of the compass or to features of the landscape, with which everyone in that culture is familiar: "Use the hammer to the south of you" or "seaward of you."
Despite this kind of exception, the structural axes of our bodies are concretely present in the world and can be demonstrated, making them suitable ground on which to build a model of the human self that might straddle different cultures as world communication brings us closer and closer.
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