It is not quite as simple and straightforward as I made out yesterday. In addition to the observing by the I there is an inner monologue that never really stops. Every datum of experience, physical factors like an itch, or a belch, mental factors like a stray echo of a memory, a feeling, an emotion, each provokes an internal comment. It is almost as though the experience is not registered as an experience until it is commented upon. The comment then becomes the initiator of a train of thought drawing the I with it and away from simple objective observation. As the meditation progresses the periods of simple looking become longer and the inner comments come less regularly, but they never entirely disappear.
I can see now where Benjamin Whorf got his idea that thinking requires language. “Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.” The trick, I imagine, is to master the ability to disengage the I from the monologue, allowing the monologue to weave its pattern in the background, while focusing on the experience of breathing in the foreground. It is at this time that the question of ‘self’ comes to the fore. Who is thinking? Who is observing? It is noticed that in the thinking mode there is not just one self. Each train of thought, each memory, feeling and mood seems to call out a slightly different self, sometimes a very different self. These selves are not coterminous with the I-self of the observer. The I-self is simply the observer, detached from these various selves, just observing ‘Now I am breathing in. Now I am breathing out.’ Who then is the I-self? There are various definitions of the social self from Zen to James, Mead etc. According to Mead
the self, conditioned by its social relations inherited from the past at the Me pole, must unify them all with a free creative act of emergent synthesis in the present at the I pole. It is this bipolar nature of selfhood wherein the emergent I in the present always responds to the socialised Me from the past which constitutes the asymmetrical, irreversible and cumulative nature of time’s arrow as a creative advance into novelty.
As a description of the self as an ongoing process this is fine but it does not really answer ‘Who is the I-self, the observer?’ All the other selves, the me-selves, to use Mead’s words, are the emergent synthesis in a particular present of a me constituted by social relations inherited from the past. But the I-self in meditation has detached itself from these. While he is aware of them in the background, as an observer, in the present foreground he is simply aware. What he is aware of does not constitute him, as awareness of social relations in the past helps constitute the me-self. In fact his awareness hovers on the brink of a void (sunyata) What is observed does not give rise to the observer. On the contrary, it is the observer who brings into (his?) existence the observed. To say, in Whitehead’s words, that the I-self, is “an act of emergent synthesis whereby each occasion of experience includes all previous actual occasions as elements in its own constitution” might help explain the origin of the I-self but it does not say who it is.
The question ‘Who?’ can only be answered in relational terms. Normally it is enough to say he is the son, husband, father, employee of… etc. But there are two occasions when this is not enough. One is when facing death. At this moment one faces the cessation of ones existence. All the past and present relations which constitute the present me now mean nothing because there is no future. This is a defining moment. In the next instant the relationships which make me who I am will end. Who am I now as I face this closure?
The other is during meditation when the I-self faces the Void. This Void is not different from that faced at death. The other day I said that meditation can lead to an awareness of oneness, of union with all that is. This is a not uncommon experience. But I think the experience of the void is more fundamental. Everything that is is relative, contingent, empty, as the Buddhists say. All that is has emerged from the fullness of the Void. This is a paradox that I want to comprehend. Here lies the answer to ‘Who am I?’