Where do I begin?

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,

Before I knew thy face or name ;

So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame

Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.

Still when, to where thou wert, I came,

Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.

But since my soul, whose child love is,

Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,

More subtle than the parent is

Love must not be, but take a body too ;

And therefore what thou wert, and who,

I bid Love ask, and now That it assume thy body, I allow,

And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow...

AIR AND ANGELS. by John Donne

Once it grasps that an outer world exists, the self begins to discover where he leaves off and where the other begins. At first it seems obvious. It is his skin, his flesh, that is the outer limit of himself. It is his blood which flows when his flesh is gored, it is he who feels the pain. Beneath his skin, inside his skin, is where his personhood resides. It is his body which is himself.

Gradually, however, an awareness grows that it is not his body which is himself, it is his mind, his consciousness, the awareness itself which is his self. In many ways, his body is also the outer world. This becomes more obvious as we get older and infirmities develop. Then the body becomes an enemy, or at least a beast of burden that must be coddled and fed for it to do the work required of it.

Conversely, he learns very early that he cannot live in isolation. His sense of self requires an awareness of who he is, and that cannot be conceived of without reference to his family, his community, his ancestry, his language, his religious beliefs. This psychic armature he builds around his sense of self is analogous to the physical structure of his body. What he is depends on his physical structure. Who he is depends on his psychic structure, but the boundary keeps shifting. Follow that reasoning far enough, as many have, and, which may be the truth, there is no boundary. For me to be depends on the universe being exactly what it is. Are all distinctions illusory, then?

It is his physical self coupled with his psychic self that is the face he presents to the world.

But if he thinks about it even more deeply, he recognizes that both his physical self and his psychic self are merely shells. A deeper level of selfhood exists which stands above both of these manifestations. That deeper sensibility is the voice that arbitrates, approving or disapproving whatever may seek entry into this protected space.

The origin of this voice is not so easily traced. The materialistically minded defer to the physical structures. The religiously minded invoke a supernatural explanation. These are fairly standard divisions of human mentality. But that still begs the question of why some of us are drawn to one school of thought and others to a different one. One man is drawn to the inner life, another is fond of the objects of the world. It isn't a matter of sitting down at age four with your parents and being asked to choose. We grow into our dispositions as surely as we grow into adolescence, and without being asked for our preferences. Only a few of us systematically ransack our inner motivations, even fewer turn them into schools of philosophy. A few of those, such as David Hume, of Hume's Fork fame, go so far in one direction that they categorically and vehemently deny the validity of the other. But very few materialists would deny the existence of an inner life, and very few idealists would deny the existence of objective reality.

Most members of humankind unconsciously use these unexamined motivations to blithely adopt a set of principles to guide them through life. But although they don't often think about these principles, the deepest of passions can be aroused when they are challenged, and the most abject despondency when they are undermined.

The question remains, why do we wish to believe one thing over another? What is this voice that says yea or nay at every moment of our existence? What is the source of that desire? I can't answer that ultimate question. The only certainty I feel (and it's one of those yea or nay feelings) is the one that says that it is my subjective will that acts on objective reality. Objective reality is passive. It just is, and cares nothing about me or my aspirations. It is indifferent. But I am not indifferent, either about myself or about the objective world. I want to live but that's not sufficient. I want happiness, satisfaction, purpose, validation. And for that I must seek to exert force upon objective reality, I want to shape it, mould it into something it would not be if it weren't for me. Many of these mouldings have to do with my physical well-being, but that is never enough. I may love the natural world, bird song, sunsets, green meadows, but it only makes me want to furnish my life with things I especially like. I want to colour my walls with that burnished glow of sunset, I want to carve a chair from the strong, beautiful wood of the oak tree, I want to make my own songs, I want to situate my house so I can see the mountain in the distance from my porch.

Again, where is the dividing point between me and the world? And while the objective world is readily apparent to my senses, and the many and subtle ways in which I am connected and intertwined with the entire universe, it is not apparent at all to what sort of a universe my inner vision is directed. But it has not escaped my notice that ever since Galileo first invented the telescope our range of perception has broadened to the point where we can almost see as far as the beginning of creation. And yet, already some scientists theorize that more universes exist beyond the one we now see. Perhaps future scientists will figure out a way of 'seeing' them, too. Similarly, our ability to see at the smallest scales has improved exponentially since Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope. First, unseen living things, the microbes, then the structures inside the cell, then molecules and now it is possible to 'see' an atom. The atom was thought to be the indivisible building block of matter until it was shown to consist of still smaller particles, and even those smaller particles are made up of even smaller particles- though 'particle' may not be the proper word. In other words, no matter how far we learn to see outward there is always something farther away, and no matter how closely we scrutinize matter, there always seems to be something smaller.

But so far (in modern times) we haven't devoted anywhere near as much effort to discovering what it is that lives in the deepest parts of our awareness. What is it in me that is aware, and how does it work?