Existence Before Self-Consciousness

All of us when we came into the world, when you came into the world, you came into the world without without an identity, right? Without a sort of defined sense of self. It's one of the things that we all notice when we look at infants or very very young children, the transparency sort of that we see in their eyes. this sort of unguardedness, right? Um I think we can see that we can intuit it some and we also intuit a kind of a kind of innocence and not only the innocence that comes through not experiencing a lot of life, you know, not having gone through a lot of the difficulties and challenges of life, but but it an even deeper in a kind of something that's essential. You know, that's why often when you look into the eyes of a really young child or a baby, um you're it's almost like you're their eyes are these portals into into something quite extraordinary, quite profound. And and people feel that, you know, they may not be able to articulate it exactly. They may even not have any clear sense of what they're feeling when they do that. But I think all of you have probably had that kind of experience. And and so we all the imagine that when you come into the world, you're really young. You you haven't developed any self-consciousness, right? You know, you have no ability to differentiate yourself apart from your environment. It's just sort of a a one big, you know, experience of being, you might say, undifferentiated experience of being. But if you contemplate for a moment well before we contemplate that and then upon that arises this this exper this sense of being someone we can let's call that self-consciousness. So that self-consciousness starts to rise around two or three years old in a very rudimentary sense but a sense of being able to recognize yourself and realize that you as a as a human being are different from the world and the objects around you. Right? The very first arising of self-consciousness, which is also what comes with that is the arising of of a rudimentary sense of separation. Although it's it's not the se sense of separation that you're probably going to experience later in life as that kind of solidifies more and that self-consciousness, you know, grows and gets stronger and and more acute. Um but upon a sort of nonself-conscious state when you're very very young arises this this sense of self-consciousness right and and then that goes it develops and then it has so many problems as we all know right most of the most of the 90% % probably 95% of so many of our sufferings and confusions and sorrows have to do with this sense of being a sort of me in relationship with the immensity of life as well as just in relationship to the next thing or person or event that you experience. And in that relationship is is some sense of separation right? But if we remember, contemplate for a moment that when you came into the world before you had a sense of self-consciousness, you existed. You absolutely existed. You didn't exist as a self. You didn't exist as an idea. You didn't really have a clear, you know, sense of yourself at all. But you existed. You existed totally completely even though it was without self-consciousness, without a sense of I am. the sense hadn't been born in you yet and yet you were. So just take a moment. What were you then? What were you before you had before that sense of I am that sense of being someone came upon you? Because remember that you did exist then. Not the you that you might think of now, you know, that you identify with your name and your history and and then the narrative that we create around our life history. Um, of course none of that was there, but whatever you were or are essentially was was absolutely present before you had any kind of self-consciousness, any kind of self-awareness. No parent looks at their child or their infant and thinks that they're somehow incomplete even though they don't have a self yet. They can't even lift their head for a number of weeks after birth. I mean so much is not developed. And yet no parent thinks that this is in some way an incomplete being even as a six-month-old or a two-month-old or a newborn feels absolutely complete. And so when we look at that and we and contemplate that for a moment and remember that upon that state of being whatever whatever that was upon that was arose this this sense of me or the sense of I am I am you know first of was your name and then it was the identification went to your body and then the ident the I am identification went to more abstract things like your your thoughts or your preferences or your ideas or your beliefs. The sense of the sense of identity became started out as something quite concrete like literally with your body but then it became very abstracted and it tends to become more abstracted as as you grow. And yet all that arose, all that self-consciousness arose from you, arose out of you, right? Which means that whatever you essentially are is that from which all the sense of self-consciousness arose. And this is what we tend to lose sight of. We essentially or