‘You’ don’t exist
When you tell your friend that you will be at the restaurant at 3 pm and you reach there half hour late and you do not have a very valid explanation except that you got stuck in traffic, then your friend lowers his expectation implicitly about your keeping time.
When you tell your friend that you like to have a Coffee every time you go to a restaurant, then your friend knows that you are a coffee lover or even a coffee addict.
When it is raining heavily and your TV signals are weak, and you are desperate to see the Cricket match and you go over to your mobile, pay a subscription fee and turn on a OTT to watch it, then we can infer that you will go that extra mile to do what you want to do.
These are all just examples of how our brain can infer things from the people you interact with or with yourself. Our brain is constantly learning and adjusting the weights about the News you read on politics, the events that are unfolding around you every moment to update a model of the world you are in.
Did you ask it to do it ? The answer is No.
They just happen all the time involuntarily just like the heart beat happening inside of you.
Then who are you ? Where are you in this whole thing? Out of the billion possibilities that exist every moment for you in this complex unfolding of events in the cells, in the surroundings, in the world, there is no such thing as the real You.
You often with your attention and memory freeze a snapshot of this complex creation at a given moment to create what you and everyone calls as You.
Like the example where you are a Coffee addict, that’s a frame frozen in time, in memory that can be accessed to say that the You is a Coffee addict. If you take away the memory, You cease to exist in your world. If other’s memory about you as a Coffee addict are taken away, then that You cease to exist in other’s world.
At the current moment there is no You that can exist. What you call as You is always a piece of memory.
The real You is the ‘Attention’ you gave to this passing movie scenes in front of you if you imagine the world around you as a scene from a movie. The Attention is what commits a frozen frame of this movie into memory. You are nothing but all the pieces you paid attention to in this life committed to memory.
But what makes you pay attention to something and leave out the rest ?
That is based on your memory. A child has very less memory of things and most of it is short term memory. So it pays attention only to the things in front of it. As we grow into adults, our memory becomes deeper and wider. We store a large amount of stuff all the way from childhood. So our span of attention is very wide and often we find it very hard to pay attention on one thing.
All of this long term memory and the short term memory makes you automatically pick one of several choices available to you at any moment. For example, when you decide to read up something for your project, if your aunt calls and asks for an urgent favor, your world splits between these two possibilities. Based on a complicated computation you may choose your aunt’s request to be done even though the project is at stake because of some long term memory of you being treated nicely by her when you were a child.
What appears like a free will of your Self making this choice among a countless number of choices at a given moment is truly an automatic, involuntary computation that throws up the choices and picks one of them based on your memory.
The sense of Self or the I is an illusion. It does not exist in reality. So truly what you think as You is a wired mess belonging to a larger wired mess. So why am I even typing this ? Why am I even asking this question ? I think I am doing it. But in reality, it is the attention in this wired mess that is being paid on to a long term memory to write this piece.
