101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

of you that
AREN’T “I”
Let’s pretend for a moment that we pulled apart all of your organs
and laid them on a table.
Feel your heartbeat; imagine it outside of you. You would not look
at your heart and think: “That is me.” You think: “That is my heart.”
Now feel your breath. Feel it in tandem with your heartbeat, neither
of which you are often conscious of, both of which are in constant
motion. You do not say, “I am my breath.” You say: “I am breathing.”
Think about your liver. And your kidneys. Think about your bones
and your blood. Think about your legs and your fingers and your hair
and your brain. You see them objectively. They’re just parts. They’re
ultimately (mostly) removable and replaceable and they’re all entirely
temporary. You don’t think of them and see “I.” You think of them and
you see things. If you pulled them apart, they’d just be compilations
of cells. You don’t see them and think: “That’s me!” You think: “Those
are mine.”
Why is it any different when we compile and attach them?
There is a concentration of energy, of heavy presentness, in your
chest and throat and maybe a little in your head. It is centered. You
don’t feel yourself in your legs. You don’t have emotions in your
arms. It’s at the core.
In that same space coexist the organs we don’t identify with and
the energy we do. If we removed the latter, what would be left? What
would be there? What exists when you don’t?
Have you ever sat in that? Have you ever sat with that? Have you
ever felt each part of your body and realized the parts are not “I?”
Have you ever felt the presentness that is somehow livened when
attached? Have you ever identified the difference between what you
call yours and what you call yourself?

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Knowing who you are is grounding; it gives you a sense of
trajectory. But when we assign words and meanings to what we
know we like and value and want, we create attachments. We then
strive to keep things within the parameters of which we’ve already
accepted. Out of that, we create failure. We create suffering over
self. We begin to believe that a static idea can represent a dynamic,
evolving being. The ways we don’t live up to the ideas in our minds
become our greatest grievances.
I think sometimes we get attached to the structures because we
don’t like the contents. We’re more invested in how we’re perceived
than who we are, in the idea of what the title means than the day-to-
day work of the job, in the “do you promise to love me forever?” than
the actual day-to-day loving. This is to say: We’re more comforted by
ideas of what things are as opposed to what they really are. We like
to think of ourselves as bodies because that doesn’t leave us with
the open-ended “what else.”
But what if the “what else” isn’t the end-thought, but the beginning?
What if awareness of it frees us of so many things, quells so many
thoughts, balms so many aches? What if healing yourself is not
fixing an attitude, not changing an opinion, not altering an aesthetic,
but shifting a presence, an awareness, an energy?
In this case, fixing the parts does not heal the whole.
The only thing that changes you and your life is the awareness of
the parts that are not “I.” It is the whole, it is where you end up, it is
where you began, it is the one thing, the only thing, that shifts, and
raises, and facilitates the spark of awareness that made you
question the elements of its vessel.
I’m not really asking you to consider the theories. I’m just asking
whether or not you feel it.

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