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Not I
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I used to work for a big insurance company that required us to wear employee I.D.s with our pictures on them. One day I lost my card and got a call from the security desk telling me someone had turned it in. When I went to retrieve it, I saw my card sitting on the counter. I started to pick it up, but the security guard stopped me. “Not so fast,” she said. “I’ll need to see a photo I.D.” I knew better than to laugh but still tried reasoning with her. “You already have a photo I.D.,” I said. “You can see it’s me.” She frowned. “I'll need another form of identification,” she said firmly. I dutifully produced my driver’s license and watched as she carefully compared photographs without once glancing up at the real me.
We can easily see in this incident the essential absurdity of relying on images to authenticate a flesh-and-blood person. Yet, if anything, our sense of personal identity rests on an internalized self image that is even less tangible than the laminated card issued by the department of motor vehicles.
We start out believing the self to be the bedrock of our existence. We have only to utter the magic “I,” and the whole world obligingly rearranges itself around “me” – or so we would like to think. Descartes laid the entire foundation of Western philosophy on the first-person singular: “I think, therefore I am.” It was undeniably a clever bit of logic. But all he really demonstrated is that our sense of a self rests on nothing more tangible than a thought.
And so it does. If we stop thinking and become fully absorbed in the moment, the self disappears. There is only simple awareness unbounded by any thought, awareness outside of time or space or any other artifact of mind. This awareness is who I really am, although the question would never arise, nor is it answerable. Who am I? Everything and nothing, an entire world contained within that which I am but nothing that can truly be captured in a photo I.D.
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