I

“I wonder what you mean when you use the word I. I have been very interested in this problem for a long, long time; and I’ve come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word…is a hallucination.”

-Alan Watts

What does it mean to say the word, “I”? What does it mean when I refer to myself as “I” or “me?” To say “myself” implies I am something singular and sovereign, something whole. I carry this sense of self passing through life but who, or what, am I? Permanent or temporary, I must be something, right? I suspect my being to be an assembled product of things much larger than I can apprehend. Any hope of finding answers must come by evaluating this experience that fosters a sense of self; this experience that has been called reality. Where to begin in navigating what it is I call myself?

I breathe in…and breathe out. My heart beats to feed a pulse, my very lifeline. I am alive. I gaze outwards at shapes, colors, and definition, all of which inspire further questions. I seem to be absolutely aware of this experience. Beneath this awareness lies a vehicle, a biological machine comprised of grouped bodily systems. My awareness is powered by a structure called a body.

Is this body mine?

Is this what I look like?

Is this me?

This validates my notion of being something, and yet, I can’t defeat the opposing idea that this is somehow not the figure I quest after when determining what I ultimately am. This body appears to have its own agenda and that is to support me. Where did this body come from? The result of an incomprehensible evolutionary process, this body grows from ancient roots. This body is an extension of chaos; a manifestation kept alive by perpetual expansion and the modern end to an existential bridge spanning billions of years. Within Earth’s primordial nursery collided fire and water to make the chemical pool in which all biological life was created. Chain reactions inside those chemical pools formed amino acids, which then coalesced into proteins for those proteins to form the first Earthly cells. This was just the beginning.

These cells, as the most basic unit of living organisms, began to divide, detonating the atomic bomb of life. That first cell divided into two cells. Those two divided into four, and this pattern continued without end. Innumerable cells dividing exponentially over billions of years and we get my current form as it exists today. I appear just as my cells express themselves, the presentation of their genetic instruction. Since my cells are a collection of individual units, this provides the platform for how I can be a seemingly separate living being. One step closer to understanding what I am, but many layers compose my modern construct of being.

Observing other forms of life, I come to find my appearance does not match that of all organisms. I am mobile and terrestrial, with obvious sensory organs. I am covered in skin that shrouds all my more vital organ systems. I reproduce through sexual intercourse, eat and excrete solid matter, and my wandering impacts the changing of the environment. My cells have been instructed to express themselves as an animal, a form that comes in two versions: male and female. Both versions have a similar frame with contrasting details to mirror the opposite gender, instituting a noticeable dichotomy in roles, behaviors, and appearances. My male edition is physically dominant, possessing greater muscular content and larger body size, with more inclination to lead and protect the community as a whole. My female edition is the more psychologically dominant, having a much greater emotional investment in fostering offspring, along with a wider pelvis for birthing and breasts for delivering milk to those offspring. As it takes more than a single participant to procreate, this drives me to be a social and community orchestrated creature. I am a mammal.

Not all mammals are the same. Certain aspects of my body, each performing a specific function, also broadcast a specific piece of information about me. I have two arms and two legs connected symmetrically to a torso, aligned with a head at one end and buttocks at the other. My center of gravity lies housed in my shoulders in the male, and my waist in the female. I have hair and nails, see in color vision, hear with auditory instruments called ears, and skillfully cling to objects with a nimble hand. Like that of chimpanzees or gorillas, my body is an ape body and I am a member of the primate family. My primate layer governs the social systems I am attached to, my mating preferences, my intelligence capabilities, and what my diet consists of. Being a primate describes my versatility for adapting to the environment.

The ways I am able to use my body are determined by my primate origins, yet this body comes equipped in ways that make me stand out. Instead of leaning down on knuckles or traveling on four legs, my skeleton is aligned vertically so that I stand upright. I am bipedal and predominantly hairless, with more pronounced facial features. My brain is bigger and more complex than my fellow ape relatives. I am certainly an animal, a mammal, and a primate, but I must still be something more distinct. Sophisticated cognition grants me intricate emotion, logic and reason, and symbolic language for communicating. Advanced enough to pose the question of “What am I?” my very essence is notably dissimilar to any other organism. I am a human being.

This human embodiment is full of contradictions. My animal side gives me instincts: drives to eat, sleep, and mate. My human side gives me empathy, morality, and subjectivity. Being human means I manipulate the environment in unprecedented ways. Connected to my body is a cosmos called the mind, and within my mind is the power to generate images of hypothetical worlds and turn them into reality. My human mind hungers to consume knowledge. It is relentless in its quest to understand, define, and quantify the world around it. This mind works with logic and rationale, allies that seem to ironically work against me in my existential quest. How interesting I have a something called a mind, a curious construct packaged together to help me make sense of the world. Through the mind I transcend my animal layers.

Is that the real me, merely a figure that utilizes the force of thought to reshape the world? This must mean the things I do are me. No, the things I do cannot be me for I am never doing the same thing all the time. The things I do can only represent me as extensions of my mind. I am within the mind, but I am not the mind. The mind is the realm I inhabit, my own internal world unified with the external world around me. What I call me, the non-physical entity occupying my physical presence, is branded by a host of empirical characteristics. More than a mammal, a primate, or just a human, I am a person. More than a body, more than a mind, I am somebody. I have a name, a personality, an individual identity. I have parents with a family background. I have a nationality, an ethnicity, and a gender. I have an ego.

And still, I cannot see this ego. I cannot hold it in my hand. I cannot interpret it in any physical, concrete way. This ego identity consists of a name and personal traits that I have come to learn over time. It is a collection of labels other people have given me. My sense of self is a masquerade, for who I consider myself to be is not real. The name I go by is but a persistent thought and who I am is a consistent narrative I have told myself. My ego identity is an elaborately composed myth I maintain. It is a figment of my imagination; a testament to the power of my mind. I am not my ego, I am the awareness behind the mind and the ego structure.

I experience reality through an ego, a sense of individuality, because it is necessary for me to do so to survive. When I consider who I think I am to be but an illusion, a transient mask I wear to see myself as separate from others and separate from the environment, what I come to realize is my bona fide individuality is false. My self feels isolated, but I am never separate from mind, body, or environment. I am constantly weighed down to Earth by gravitation. My body assimilates food through digestion and my lungs process oxygen through respiration. I am fundamentally, inexplicably connected to all that exists. I am a fractal on an endless continuum.

I am a biological, carbon-based cellular organism; I am a mammal and a primate, a human being with an ego and self-awareness. There are endless layers to my identity because I am not limited to my body, my mind, or the idea of who I think I am. My self is not bound to biological forms and formations of the mind. What I am is beyond comprehension and unrestricted by time and space. I am a celestial vessel, a microcosmic encapsulation of all manifestation. I am one of infinite forms life takes, under the veil of what it is like to be mortal and finite, so it may become aware of itself, learn about itself, and change itself. I am a conduit through which all of creation sees itself.

I am genetic information, materialized as trillions of dividing cells that come from the combination of my parents’ cells. The cells of my parents come from their parents’, and their cells from their parents’. And so, this pattern continues all the way back to the first living organisms; from the very first cell to ever divide. I am that first cell to ever divide. I am the first reptilian creature to rise ashore from the aquatic womb. I am the fish, I am the tree, I am the bird. I am the river and the sun, the mother and the child. I am all form and the absence of form. Amidst the faces of destruction and extinction, I remain and I evolve. My absolute self has never stopped existing, for it timelessly changes and can never perish. Today I believe I am a human, but I was once a trilobite, and a dinosaur, and a single-celled organism. I will continue forever because I am not confined to who and what I think I am today.

I am that which was never born and can never die.

I am all that there is and all that will ever be.

I am infinite. I am eternal.

I am.

I.

ToddDeVault.com