What happens when ‘enlightenment’ happens? Well, some or all of the false self dies. Apparently this can happen immediately (as it did here) or slowly (as reported elsewhere).

I, you, me, we… Credits Pixabay

The loss of the false self also results in the loss of the false ‘I’ that it called itself. This produces a problem of narration.

Really, post-‘enlightenment’ the ‘I’ word does not point to anything much — there’s no concrete ‘I’. This is no loss, as one day perhaps the reader may find out for their self.

When writing from this place, using the ‘I’ word feels false. Of course it’s not completely false: as long as the body is alive there’s something to point at as ‘I’, but the salience of the original false ‘I’ is absent.

There’s the temptation to write in impersonal speech and tense, but this gets very clumsy.

There’s another problem with the ‘I’ at every level – in reality it’s not personal at all, but that’s dealt with elsewhere in the material.

So for simplicity the ‘I’ word will be used as a referent for the author in a conventional way, but it will become clear that it is necessary at times to identify clearly the nature of the ‘I’ and what it’s pointing to.

‘I’ will attempt to clarify what use is being made at what point, but it may take some time, study and insight for it to become transparently clear…