It takes a little while to settle into meditation, even first thing in the morning before the day has begun to bring its problems and its distractions. One has to switch off the auto-pilot which got one out of bed and down the stairs and settled for meditation and become aware of exactly what one is doing – posture, breathing, directing thoughts, forming the intention. Then all the attention focused on breathing – on the breath as it comes in, on the pause, on the breath as it goes out, pause, etc. Pretty soon thoughts arise; back to attention on the breathing; a different thought; and so it goes on. Sometimes the thoughts are ideas, concepts. A new way of looking at something strikes me, a sudden insight, and I want to pursue it. This is very interesting. It could lead somewhere. Back to concentrating on breathing. This is not the time. I will come back and think about it later.Someone moves about upstairs. I should let it go, treat it as a noise just like the other inconsequential noises that occur all the time, but I cannot. I am no longer the ‘I/me’ who began to meditate but am now the father. This ‘I/me’ is inextricably involved in this relationship which the noise caused by my son getting up evokes and cannot just ‘let it go’. This ‘I/me’ is, in part, shaped and formed by this relationship, is the relationship. Another noise upstairs, wife getting up, and the husband ‘I/me’ appears. According to Mead the ‘I’ is the subjective self and the various ‘me’s’ are the social selves which arise out of the social context in which the ‘I’ finds itself at each moment. My experience is that it is not as simple as this. Each relationship is bipolar with an ‘I’ and a ‘me’, a subjective and an objective, aspect. ‘Wife’ noises call out the ‘I/husband’ who is immediately caught up in thoughts to do with that relationship. ‘Son’ noises call out the ‘I/father’. Both of these ‘I’s’ can coexist easily side by side. They are robust, formed by intimate personal relationships. In meditation, therefore, when the ‘I/husband’ is beset by thoughts worries, or anxieties it is not enough to say, ‘I must drop these thoughts and get back to focusing on breathing.’ Because the ‘I’ thinking is the ‘I/husband’ and not the ‘I’ who originally began the meditation, nor the subject the meditation is seeking to discover.We are back to anatta (no self) again. The experience of dealing with distractions in meditation is of alternating between these different ‘I’s’, those born of personal relationships and those born of fantasies and day-dreams. These latter can be just as real at times as the former. Behind all these ‘I/me’s’ there is, I hesitate to say another ‘I’, there is a subject. There is an awareness which transcends the subjective awareness of all the various ‘I/me’s’. The discovery of this awareness is the point of meditation.Where does God fit into all this? At present I am simply trying to speak from my experience. I don’t want to make any assumptions based on faith, or Scripture, or theology. It is not that these may not be valid – I hope that what I have always believed and have come to work out for myself is not wrong – but because they are assumptions. They are based on the experiences of others, often in the distant past, or on the assumptions and conclusions of others. Their claim to validity, as opposed to all the claims of all the other religions and philosophies, is open to argument, to say the least. Such arguments are often sterile and circular. The history of Christianity is littered with theological disputes which have led to factionalism, bitterness and even mass murder. So I do not know from my present experience that my beliefs and assumptions are true.Nor do I want to argue from my own memories of religious experiences in the past which, at the time, were profound. They gave an insight and an understanding which I could not otherwise have come to possess. But they are not my present experience and I cannot replicate them now. I know that it is generally accepted, though not by Forman*, that these experiences are transient and passive, but I think this is only partly true, or else it is true of particular kinds of experience only. I think one can, and should, try to understand what it is to be human and, I am assuming, this will inevitably lead to an experience of God. I am not being a Pelagianist here, not even of the ‘semi’ kind. The God of those who condemned Pelagius was believed to be wholly other and utterly transcendent. I have had no experience of this God – by definition such experience would be impossible – but I have experienced One who was wholly other but was also intimior mei meo, as Augustine puts it. Odin makes it very clear that for both Zen Buddhists and for people like Mead and Buber the human self is a nexus of relationships – with the mind, with the body, with others, with nature and, ultimately, with God. So in coming to know myself I will also come to know God.*Forman: WHAT DOES MYSTICISM HAVE TO TEACH US ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS?, http://www.imprint.co.uk/Forman.html