Who am I?

By Shahanara Begum

My elbow used to be a dinosaur, my toenail, an ancient king, my blood was the flowing river and my stomach is the bread that I ate yesterday. A whole star had to die for me to be born and that was just the beginning. My whole body is just a collection of elements of previous living beings. Even this whole body is not the one I was born with, each atom has been replaced many times over. I will hold this consciousness for a limited number of years and then I too will become fodder for other living things.

Am I the bacteria that live in my gut? Am I the oxygen that I suck into my lungs? What of the nitrogen that is part of me for a few seconds? Am I the electricity that pumps my heart? Am I the cavernous spaces in the countless atoms that make my physical body? I am nothing more than an advanced simulator in my brain. A leap of evolution, an advanced survival mechanism to a fast changing environment of our hominid ancestors when the tropical rainforests became savannahs. I am no more than the thoughts, feelings and imaginations in my pre-frontal cortex.

The world I see is of my own making and imaginations, a reflection of light on the lense of my eyes, a vibration of my ear drums, the odours I perceive with my nose, the sensations on my skin and tongue. These are all electrical signals in my brain. No other living being sees, touches, tastes, smells or hears exactly as I do because what I see is only a simulation of what my brain shows me. We like to confuse our brains with optical illusions not realising that this whole world is an illusion that our brain has created for us. My sense of self is just a collection of memories, an advanced model of a video recorder. Memories of incidents which I only perceived happened in a certain way because of my previous memories and perceived experiences.

I am no more than a selection of subjective memories yet I feel such entitlement to this planet. A planet which gave me my very life and keeps me alive. In fact a whole army of cells are busily working this very moment to keep this body alive and this thought simulator powered up. It is a symbiotic relationship, these cells keep this body alive in order to live, when this relationship gets out of balance, suffering and death is a certainty. We see this in cancer when cells do not act as they should and diseases of affluence when the collection of thoughts does not act as they should. Only the collection of thoughts will feel the loss of life of this body; very acutely, the cells will not feel a thing. Yet the collection of thoughts works the hardest to destroy this body whilst the collection of cells works the hardest to keep this body alive. Perhaps this leap of evolution was in the wrong direction? Certainly nothing has done more destruction than these collections of thoughts. We are all living in our very own Matrix, is it time to take the red pill?

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