Me, me, and Compassion
Written by Steven London, April 22nd, 2021
Every morning I wake up, and after a brief moment of confusion, as the haze lifts, I find myself back in my body, in my room, with my thoughts, my memories, and some sense of what lies in store for me today. This occurs whether I have awoken from a dream state or deeper sleep in which I am, to all intents and purposes, fully unconscious. And it has been like this for as long as I can remember. I have never woken up in someone else’s body or my body but with someone else’s memories. The closest I have got to breaking this pattern is to sleep in different places night after night - sometimes in hotels or hostels, other times in people’s homes, or in a tent - to remove any sense of routine or continuity from one day to the next. The moment of confusion is prolonged, intensified even, but sooner or later, the haze lifts once more.
Currently around thirty three years old, I have no physical or mental health problems (to my knowledge), no spiritual or religious beliefs and would consider myself to be on the rational side of the spectrum; or at least, perhaps, more accutely aware of my irrational tendencies and where they crop up, might be a better way to put it. And yet I find the fact that I am inescapably me, utterly strange. It is not the fact that upon first becoming self-aware I could not be anything but me. This I can grasp. It does not baffle me that I don’t find I am me one day and the president of Angola the next. What is perplexing is that I was ever me in the first place. Why am I not someone else? Why did I not inhabit the body of another being?
I cannot put a marker on when I first felt a sense of me-ness. This is hardly surprising; there would have been a gradual development of my sense of self over my early childhood coincident with memory formation, language acquisition, and other such capabilities. But there is definitely a period of time I cannot account for in which I must take photographic evidence along with other, older people’s word for it that I was at some point a baby. So again I ask, why did my conscious awakening take place here in this body? Why do I not inhabit some other body somewhere else? And most importantly, when consciousness for me ends with my death, will I wake up as something else?
To be very clear, I am not suggesting that I think it could be the Me writing this who would wake up in another body, in another time, in another place. As far as I can tell though, the only thing preventing me (not Me, but me this arbitrary conscious experiencer) from inhabiting another conscious experiential point of view is my continuing existence. Experience tells me if I keep living, I’ll keep on as me. But if I stop existing, despite having no belief in an afterlife, I am far from certain that that will be the end of me being conscious somewhere. To reiterate, it won’t be Me, and I will have no recollection of ever having been Me or any other life form, in the same way that right now I have no spooky sense that I am the reincarnation of Henry VIII. It is merely the fact that this has occurred once (I have awakened to this conscious experience here, Me), and it appears to have happened to other people and animals around me, especially those also claiming to be conscious. It has happened repeatedly over time to many people and there is nothing to suggest it won’t happen again. On the contrary, it is extremely likely it will continue to happen, unless there is an apocalypse which obliterates all life. People are born, they develop a sense of self unique to them which, though malleable, is continuous and inescapable, and then they die.
Some might draw a line under the fact that, since it would not be the same person sharing two conscious lives, it is not worth thinking about. It is an unnecessarily complicated way of referring to two independent lives, even if the conscious experience is clearly separated in time by the death of the first life into the birth of the next - as the Buddhist idea of rebirth might explain it. Others, might say it is a silly question to ask; to ask why am I not you, or him, or her, or that, might sound childlike - a pointless unanswerable question. But if you really sit and ponder this question deeply, taking it as seriously as any question you have ever considered: the fact you (just not the You you identify as) might awaken as an infant in a war torn state like Yemen, or as a chick in an intensive battery farm, or indeed any potential deprived conscious state you care to imagine, is a sobering and terrifying thought. If arguments for compassion do not persuade you, or if the plight of others is something simply not on your radar as a cause for concern, then perhaps contemplating the possibility of waking up in one of these bodies when you eventually leave yours might make you begin to think twice about how you spend this life.