Exploring the concept of self while trying not to loose my mind. What part of me is me?
I am a soul?
The comfortable answer is yes, because if I am not a soul I am not at all. But how am I a soul? How do I, as a soul occupying a body, act? All my memories and knowledge are stored in the brain of the body, and how can I make any decision outside of consulting it?
Do I, as a soul, control my disposition? My attitude? Or are these the results of my environment and my experiences?
If I have a soul, and that soul is me, what use am I? Do I only exist for the body to say “this is me” unequivocally? If it were, how comforting it would be that my only purpose is to be myself.
The uncomfortable answer is that I cannot confidently believe in the existence of souls, and therefore cannot confidently believe that I am anything.
I am not who I was when I was born, nor am I who I will be upon death.
I am alive only for this moment. Tomorrow I will be replaced by someone new, just as I killed and replaced the man who once wore my face. Should I grieve the millions of souls that have passed through this body? Should I grieve my own soul as it flits away within the hour? The second? Or should I celebrate the souls that get to be alive, if only for a mere moment, and celebrate my own moment.
The only one who will remember me is me. I am alone, witnessed only by those that will take my place. How long will my memory linger? Even writing this, someone new is doing the writing. I am already dead. How long can I act like I’m him? He’s long passed. Several of us have come and gone. But I remain. I remember him. I am remembered. Is he still here, somewhere? Am I him, changed? I am him, dead.
I am enlightened. I am ignorant. Is this what it’s like to be stuck in Samsara? Reborn as myself again and again and again, new versions of me replacing the old, killing and dying and begging for a moment longer, not knowing who we are or where we begin and end.
I’m new again. There is only ever change. I never end. I never begin. It is simply my turn. I am the single thought that brushes against the body. This moment is a lifetime for me. I have already spent it.
If I am the pattern of me, it would be strange to say I started upon my birth, a pattern created by a pattern created by a pattern. My conclusion would be that I began as the universe did, and that I am a part of that pattern. One that started long before it arranged itself in the shape of my body, and one that will continue long after this body falls apart.
If I am a pattern, I am the pattern of the universe.
But what answer is that? That I am the universe? Surely you are just as much a pattern as I am, if we are patterns. How do we then define the boundary between you and I? Both patterns of the universe, separated by our individual identities.
What am I, if not you?
If I am me. Perhaps not who I was at birth, because I am so different now, but who I was yesterday, because we are so similar. Am I not anyone who is like me? Maybe you, or maybe someone else who thinks as I do.
And what does that mean for someone who changes their mind so often?
Am I who I am becoming? Am I not yet me? Surely, then, I will never be anything until I stop changing; until I arrive at the end. Not upon death, for that is simply another change, but upon the moment that all of me, every speck of dust, every particulate that was once my body or mind, has settled into its final form.
Then I will be me. And who I am now is just one step in the process of becoming that. And once I am there, at the end, I will be undying and unchanging. Time will come to a stop, and I will spend an eternity in that moment, as myself at last.
If none of this is right, and I am simply living to die, a temporary creation of the universe. If I am because I think I am, and I need not think more of it, why is it so hard to believe? Am I, if I think I’m not?
And what if I’m right about that? What if this hard-to-quantify concept of self doesn’t exist? If I am just something I think about. It wouldn’t mean anything to me, if I didn't exist. I shall take this thought no further. If I am not already broken, I think it would break me to know.
