Life is change and to be truly alive means to be repeatedly transforming ourselves.
– Michael Meade
Yes, I feel I have lived many lifetimes in this life.
It feels odd to say that it was me. Of course, it was, in a conventional sense. And in a more real sense, that person in the past – whether it was decades ago, yesterday, or a second ago – was another person.
He was also another person in that he now only exists as a mental representation and traces in the world like other people’s memories, photos, documents, and so on. In contrast, the person who is here now is also here in the other sense fields.
Life is a process and this person is part of that much greater process. He is a local and temporary expression of the unfolding process of the universe and existence. He is an eddy in a stream.
Even more essentially, change is here now.
The only reason I have an idea of change is because my mind compares mental representations. It compares mental representations of the past, including the very recent past, with mental representations it calls “now”. (Which just passed since the mental representations are always a little behind.) Without this comparison, there would be no sense of change.
Also, by noticing what’s here, I get, at a visceral level, that all content of experience is change and a process. Nothing is static. Nothing is ever the same.
So can I be any of it? Can I be anything within this changing content of experience? Can I fundamentally be this human self? Or any ideas of an I, me, doer, observer, or anything else?
If not, what am I more fundamentally?
(I find I am what it all happens within and as. I am what a thought may call consciousness, which forms itself into any and all experiences. It forms itself into its own always changing, always new content.)
Image by me and Midjourney