Me and I

Me has things. I is.

This distinction has been circling somewhere at the edge of my understanding for a long time, but only now am I beginning to recognize how thoroughly life has been teaching it to me.

Life has taught me surrender through extremes. I believe we all encounter this teaching in our own way, although the forms it takes may be completely different. What seems important is not simply that we lose things, but that at some point we begin to understand why loss keeps appearing as a teacher.

I have lost my family, temporarily. I have lost friends, careers, jobs, my mental health, my physical health, possessions, homes, identities and versions of myself I thought I would remain forever. Some of these I have lost more than once.

And something is beginning to dawn on me.

What if this has not been life taking me away from myself, but I AM consciousness directing me toward the part of myself that cannot be taken away?

The True Self. The I.

There have also been times when I have been guided to give things away before life had to take them from me. My hair. My belongings. My clothes. My home. I have resisted some of these movements too. Me likes to hold on. It creates continuity through what it can recognize as mine: my body, my appearance, my people, my place, my history, my plans.

Yet I am beginning to think there is a gentler form of surrender available. Sometimes it is kinder to give something away, even reluctantly, when we know deeply that its time has come, than to cling to it until Life, God, the Self, whatever name we give that greater intelligence, finally tears it from our hands because there is something beyond it that we still need to see.

Slowly, I am learning.

Me, the little self, is a difficult authority to follow when what I seek is a deeper understanding of what I am. Me is always looking through the colored lenses of personality. It has beliefs, memories, preferences, wounds, desires, fears, attachments and expectations. It cannot see the whole picture because seeing the whole picture is not its function.

This does not make Me wrong.

In fact, I think that is where my understanding is changing.

For a while, spiritual realization can easily become another attempt to escape the character. If I am not my thoughts, not my body, not my history, not my possessions, then perhaps I should somehow become less human, less particular, less attached to having needs and desires at all.

But I don’t think that is where this leads.

Me has a function. I has a function.

Me experiences. Me desires. Me needs. Me touches, chooses, hurts, hungers, loves, reacts, learns and lives through a body. Me is particular. It is the individual expression through which life gets to encounter itself from this exact point of view.

I does something entirely different.

I is.

I has nothing, and therefore nothing can ultimately be taken from it. It does not need to manufacture an identity or defend its existence. It is the director behind the character, the projector rather than the image on the screen. It creates without needing to become what it creates. And from this level, there is nothing to fix.

This changes the question of free will for me.

How much can a character in a movie actually decide about the direction of the film?

When Me tries to create reality entirely by itself, its freedom is inevitably conditioned. Its choices arise through everything it has accumulated: beliefs, desires, fears, needs, conditioning and all the lessons it is still moving through. It calls this free will, but much of the time it is choosing from within a structure it cannot even see.

And yet this limitation is not a failure. It may be precisely the gift of Me.

Because Me is how the infinite becomes particular.

Through desire, need, embodiment, relationship, preference and consequence, something about the nature of existence becomes knowable through experience rather than concept.

I does not need to destroy Me in order to be free.

Maybe the invitation is to learn how to inhabit both.

To let I do what I does: be, create, see, trust.

And to let Me do what Me does: desire, need, experience, choose, inhabit a body and live a particular human life.

Then surrender no longer means erasing the person. It means releasing the impossible burden we have placed upon the person to know the entire story.

Me does not have to know where the film is going.

It only has to become intimate enough with I to recognize the direction when it comes.

And maybe this is what all those losses have slowly been teaching me. Not that I am meant to have nothing, love nothing or belong nowhere, but that I cannot build my deepest identity from anything that can disappear.

I can have all of it.

I can love all of it.

I can participate completely in this strange, embodied, individual life.

But beneath everything Me can gain and everything Me can lose, I Am.