To ‘I’ or not to ‘I’, that is the question…

 Sometimes I have a sense of ‘I’, of being an individual in a world with other individuals and separate objects and there’s a nice, linear sense of time. It’s usually (but not always) like that when I’m doing things like shopping, talking to people about day-to-day stuff, banging nails into pieces of wood and so on.

And then there are the times when there is no sense of ‘I’ or ‘me’, or ‘you’ or ‘we’ and time stops, or more accurately, there is no time – perhaps when completely absorbed in something, or when stopped by something beautiful, or by simply sitting quietly.

Some say that one is better than the other. There are spiritual teachers who say that the way to awaken is to realise the ‘no I’ and that being in the ‘I’ means that you are asleep or unenlightened. Whereas other people say that the ’I’ is real and the state of ‘no I’ may be a feature of a mental health condition and give it labels such as dissociation.

Well how about seeing both as real and valid, and that both are fine? Maybe sometimes one is a good way to be in the world and sometimes the other. Don’t feel bad, or mad or inferior because you are in one or the other. If you are always in one of these ways of being in the world, that’s fine, and if you move between the two then that’s fine too. It’s all just grist for the mill as Ram Dass used to say… 

… and part of the joy of hanami, or viewing cherry blossoms in Japan, is its very transience.