Our perception of being I
We are limited Is
Among the spiritual experiences that we can live there is our perception of ourselves as “I”. It is like being in a room where we cannot let anyone else enter. This room is our “I”. A feeling about our I is freedom: I can decide what to think of and what to do with my “I”. For example, I can choose to think of a number and nobody can know that number, no one can penetrate into my thoughts. Even if a machine can find it out, it will never be able to think of it with the same feeling of mine, it will never be able to completely reproduce in itself all aspects involved in my experience of thinking of that number.
In this situation we can consider some problems. One concerns impotence: there are things, both inside and outside me, on which my freedom cannot be exercised. It is a limited freedom. A second problem concerns indecision: I have some freedom in my I, but how can I use it, what will guide me? It’s like having a blank sheet of paper and not knowing what to write.
A third problem is our inability to be certain that this freedom really exists. Let’s suppose that my freedom does not exist. Then all my thoughts are determined by other factors. This means that my feeling of freedom, its concept that I formed in my understanding, my awareness of it, even the question itself if freedom exists or not, could be mental phenomena created in my mind by factors that have determined it. This means that we have no way of knowing if freedom exists, since this very question might be nothing but a phenomenon produced in us by other factors. In this context, perceiving our I and perceiving freedom are related: if my feeling of freedom is exposed to the suspicion of being merely the product of deterministic mechanisms, it follows that believing that we can consciously think of our I at our will, that is choosing when to do it, is illusory. If my freedom to think of the existence of my I when I choose to do it is illusory, it means that everything that has to do with my suspicion (or my hope) of being a different I, irreducible to the sensation that I have about other Is, is illusory, or at least is exposed to this insuperable doubt. This means that I cannot even tell myself that I have a certain perception of diversity of my I, different from the others as it is exclusively mine and then onject of a perception that only I can have about it.
All this is nothing but defeat of comprehension, that favors a shift towards a relationship with it set not as understanding, but as spiritual experience. It is a defeat similar to that of the understanding of God and of the world. From this point of view, any restriction of our freedom can be interpreted as an expression of the universal evil, as a limit that the non-human of the universe imposes to my humanity. On the opposite side, our “I” may be reckoned as a non-metaphysical plan of humanity in a process of permanent investigation and experimentation. In other words, it is better to consider the self no more and no less than an aspect of the progress that life has given us and as one of the dynamic spiritual experiences that are a result of this progress.
These limits of our subjective way of feeling “I” can be a context that favours experiences of love, rather than egoism and competition, where we can adopt ways of modest, respectful, growing relatioships, against the way of powerful, objective, metaphysical understanding of our “I”, or of the “I” of the other people.
