Looking for Your "Self"

Field Notes on Mortality — #8

Photo by Gabi Scott on Unsplash

What if the question I've been asking about death has always had a missing piece?

Try something with me for a second.

Sit down. Close your eyes. Slow your breath down until you feel truly relaxed. And then try to find yourself.

Not your thoughts. Not your thoughts. Not the feeling in your hands or the rise and fall of your chest. You. The thing that’s supposedly in there, doing the experiencing. The thing that woke up this morning and will go to sleep tonight. The thing with a name. A job title. A list of opinions about things that matter and things that don’t. The thing that has a favorite album and a complicated relationship with their father and a specific way they take their coffee. The thing that knows exactly how they’d react in a crisis and has a whole story about why they are the way they are. The thing that gets offended sometimes and doesn’t always know why. The thing that loves certain people so much it’s hard to think about losing them. The thing that has regrets and plans and a general sense of what kind of person they are.

Where are you?

I’ve been doing this for a while now. Sitting with that question in a very literal and physical way. And what I keep finding is that the answer is harder to locate than I expect. The space feels much different than I imagine my body to be. The edges get uncertain. If I tried to describe what I look like from the inside to a sketch artist, what came out would be some kind of crazy cartoon caricature.

And sometimes, when I'm deep in meditation, the body just fades. Not like floating above it. More like the edges disappear. Like it stops feeling like a container.

I read a book a while back called On Having No Head by D.E. Harding. The title sounds absurd until you actually try what he’s describing. Looking for the thing that’s doing the looking. It’s one of those ideas that sounds like a riddle until you sit with it and then, well… it still feels like a riddle. But if you sit long enough, you realize it’s pointing at something genuinely strange about the nature of experience. You can find your hands. You can find your feet. But the thing that’s finding them? It’s so much less clear.

Why am I bringing this up now? This is a project about death, isn’t it?

It is. I started this project out of a question that I felt was always at the forefront of my mind: What do you think happens when we die?

But there were other questions sitting there too. Who am I? What am I? Where am I?

These feel very different than the question about death. They’re not. They’re the same question asked from different ends. It seems nearly impossible to me to sit with the question of what happens when we die without eventually arriving at: wait, what is the thing that’s dying? What is this experience I’m so afraid of losing? What is consciousness? What is self? What is the “me” that can’t comprehend not existing?

I’ve been exploring all of these ideas for years. Through meditation. Through reading. Through these conversations. And the honest answer is that I’ve probably always had a much clearer idea about what I think happens when I die than I do about what’s happening right now, inside this experience of being alive.

Which is genuinely strange, when I think about it. Death is something none of us fully experience until we are gone. Consciousness is something we’re all living inside of, every moment of every day. And yet the mystery of what we actually are feels bigger and harder to hold than the mystery of what happens when we stop.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the experiment. When I close my eyes and go looking for myself and come up mostly empty, the feeling that follows isn’t panic. It isn’t dread. It’s curiosity.

If I’m not “in here” the way I assume I am, then where am I? What does that mean about my experience as a human? What does it mean about life? And eventually, inevitably, what does it mean about death?

It just opens the door. Wider than it was before.

I started this project because avoiding the conversation about death wasn’t working. The fear wasn’t going away on its own. I figured if I could get comfortable with the conversation, maybe I could get comfortable with my own mortality.

What I didn’t expect was that sitting with the question would eventually expose a hole in it.

What do you think happens when we die? It sounds complete. But it isn’t. Because buried inside it is an assumption we almost never examine. That we know what the “we” is. That the “I” in “what happens when I die” is a settled thing. Defined. Understood.

And here’s where it gets interesting to me.

If I genuinely don’t know what the “I” is, if that’s actually uncertain, actually mysterious, actually harder to locate than I assumed, then shouldn’t I be at least as uncertain about what happens to it after this life?

If I’m so certain that nothing happens next, that it’s just over, fade to black, that this is all just synapses firing and a body moving until it stops, then the self should be pretty easy to locate. It should be right there. Obvious. Biological.

But if I close my eyes and can’t find myself, if the edges are that uncertain, if the space is that strange, then maybe I'm not as certain about my beliefs around death as I thought I was.

This reflection comes from episode #52 - Finding Peace With Death by Letting Go of Who You Think You Are and you can listen here. It’s part of an ongoing project called When We Die Talks, which explores death, loss, and how we live with uncertainty through anonymous conversations.