What is "me"?

I established that there is a cascade of different realities, but I did that always in a kind of dichotomy of outside and inside, world and me. But what exactly is this me? What differentiates me from the tree I am looking at? It cannot be my body, because that is also just a cloud of sensory data, reduced to intelligible models and interpreted as conscious experience. I feel my muscles arching after a long walk through the forest, I don’t experience damage to my muscle cells. My body is as outside as the rest of reality. It is a conscious experience and part of my world model.

So what then constitutes me? I have the feeling that this is again part of the mystical, that which generates experience. Somehow there is an experience of an awareness of self that emerges from that dichotomy, a conscious experience of me. All experiences are guided by that one feeling, making it the arbiter of the inner and outer world, of me and the rest. It is the focal point through which I experience the world.

But that me is not stable, it is not objective like experience, the ultimate subject, at least when I believe that I can unwind myself through meditations and leave me with nothing but experience itself. I surely tried it but failed so far to reach that state. But I believe it is possible in principle because I know that losing oneself in a book, movie or some all-consuming task is possible. In those situations I for example just experience the content of a great book, getting immersed in it while losing track of time, surroundings, and myself.

Me is therefore a feeling born out of the opposition of two worlds: the inner and outer. Me is fleeting at times.


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