I am

What am I? If I had to tell you about myself, I would try the following: I would think, I am… and let my mind complete the sentence. Nothing happens. I wade deeper and deeper into the pool, trying to grab on to anything at all, but the water runs through my fingers. I give up on intuition and switch to logical thought: I am a scientist, I am a man, and so on, listing off things that I know to be true. Somehow, though, these also run through my fingers. The sense of pride and meaning that usually follows the assertion of identity never arrives. I can easily imagine situations in which these are no longer true, yet whatever I call I remains. This is terribly disorienting.

So I latch onto something else: I try to identify with the lack of identity. I have no ego. I am spiritually advanced. I am free. This gives me a little stability and peace of mind. Of course I felt disoriented; that’s normal part of being highly advanced (like I am). And then I have a somewhat frustrating experience (let’s say, a difficult conversation at work, or an awkward interaction at a party) and get upset about it. This happens a few times, but I get better at managing the discomfort and ignoring the implications. I’m very advanced and capable, after all. Until one fateful day—catastrophe. A couple different aspects of life conspire against me, and I melt down. When I come to, I’m surrounded by the ruins of my life. The piles of crumbling debris are evidence enough that I’m neither free from suffering nor lacking an ego. All things considered, I’m probably not that advanced either.

It’s tempting, in that void, to try to piece the shards back together into a coherent whole; but I’ve done that many times before, and I’m exhausted. So this time I don’t even try. I leave the ruins—those monuments to nothing—where they lie.

Dismantling identity (intentionally or otherwise) has a lot of interesting effects. For example, emotions are now more like objects in my perception than essential parts of myself. Coming up with a response to how do you feel about…? is a lot like checking the color of a traffic light. It’s obvious that I’m not meaningfully in control of my feelings; I’m just the messenger. And abandoning the responsibility for managing emotions allows them to become properly complex, to interact and grow into structures that are terrifying and paradoxical and utterly free. I see in myself not only the polite narratives permitted in modern society but the great, raw forces, products of a billion years of writhing flesh, that wrote the arcs of history. It is only in humble submission to those forces that I can finally appreciate their beauty.

It seems to me that this process of self-investigation, once initiated, is inexorable. It will drill through all the wiring and sewage and plastic of modern life until it finds the bedrock of experience. Habits, anxieties, ambitions, and false desires droop and fall away like necrotic flesh. Memories blur and fade. At the end is a mind scoured clean of all that it is not; a mind worth being.