“We are not the same person we were a moment ago, nor does anything in the universe maintain itself for even an instant.” – Smith, Rodney. Lessons from the Dying (p. 197). Wisdom Publications.
We have the idea that we are the ‘same’ person in some way. Recently I spent an hour with a man who needed to talk about his life.
What struck me, as he discussed his difficult relationships, and his inner reactivity, was that he indiscriminately used the pronoun ‘I’ to cover a multitude of mind-states, as though somehow it was all the same ‘I.’ In what way can the word ‘I’ be said to refer to the same ‘I,’ and in what way not?
I think what is marvellous is that there are moments of lucidity, in which the ‘I’ word is… well, not exactly irrelevant… but that it doesn’t carry its usual baggage – its pretension to give self-representations an air of permanence. These are moments when ‘I’ points to the implicit person; when this person (who I am, as a living, interdependent event) has no conscious representation, and no need of one.
At these times, if I say “I,” it could be from a number of viewpoints. I (the implicit person) could say “I and the Kosmos are one.” That’s one valid use of the ‘I’ word, at that moment. Or, “I am the universe.” These uses denote how I feel my presence to be. Similarly, I could say, “I am hungry.” This refers to the person I am, for whom I have, at that moment, no image, but whose condition (hungry) I know (via a bodily knowing).
In my understanding, the person of my self exists implicitly (and obviously interdependently), even when I am not identified with anything. So, in a state of luminous openness – when confident that I am nothing, I am everything, and that I am a unique person – at that time, I can say, “I am hungry.” That’s a sane and valid use of ‘I’ – to designate the person speaking, who is implicitly present.
How do I know this is healthy? Upon the realisation that this way of speaking was available to me, all kinds of healthy states of mind and body ensued upon this understanding. A peaceful abiding, even in the midst of life’s physical difficulties became possible.
I can say “I went to the movies last night.” And, again, I am saying something about the implicit person that I am. The movie has left its imprints, perhaps. This use of ‘I’ is free to use concepts, but will not get used by them; won’t get limited by them. Living organises the concepts, not the concepts organise the living.
But, sometimes, I am not so conscious; and I might say “I hate that movie.” Then, in another unconscious moment, “I hate myself when I hate something like a movie.” What happening here?
The implicit person whom I am, whom I can never find directly, is divided against himself. Upon mindful investigation I might realise that both these ‘I’ states are a part of my self-representation system – they are separate sub-personalities. They are explicit. The ‘I’-use is not pointing back to the implicit sense of the person whom I interdependently am, but to a fixed and much more limited conception of myself. That is, the dynamic patterns of energy of the always implicit person are this time organised by concepts.
This is what struck me as so painful about the conversation with this man. He was attempting to name all these different mind-states as all pointing back to some explicit self, which he called ‘I,’ as though it existed actually, and as though it were the same person each time.
As a result, identified with this or that momentary configuration of body, speech and mind, he got bounced around from configuration to configuration, with no underlying unifying presence.
The suffering as a result of the identification was big, but if I made any little attempt to differentiate the different ‘I’-dentities (Stephen Wolinsky’s term), he acknowledged what I said, for a brief moment, and – bingo! – went back to the same mode of being.
I got the impression that being able to name an explicit continuity (of images) was satisfying, even if it was the satisfaction of a fragmented pseudo-‘I.’