The "I"

 

Question:-

We know the "I" which is the perceiver of our perceptions e.g. sight, taste, hardness, softness, but I can also perceive this "I" too. Who is seeing this "I" beside "I".

Comment:-

The answer to your question is complicated.

Firstly, as has been stated before, man is made of body, mind and soul. Quran 32:9 tells us that man was made of earth and the spirit of Allah was put into him. This gave him the faculties of mind.

The real "I" is the Spirit.

When it enters the body and takes form it becomes the personal soul. That is also "I".

The body is also "I"

The mind is also "I".

The combination of all these is also "I".

In the mind there develops an idea of self known as the "Ego". This idea consists of a number of illusions that depend on desires and wishful thinking and are centred around that which is common and relatively permanent to all experience, namely one's body and one's name. This too, is called "I".

So you have to distinguish between these and when you say "I" you must know which of them you mean and are identified with. When you are identified with the Spirit, then you are in a state of Surrender, Islam. In general, we behave mechanically or automatically instead of consciously. We are driven by external forces or by habits. The higher "I" is not involved. See Quran 16:75.

You can think of this as four concentric circles, one within the other. There is a journey to be made from the outside to the inner deeper circle. Or conversely from another point of view, from the small "I" to the greater "I".

Apart from this the ordinary mind is disintegrated because our consciousness is narrow. So we are multiple personalities and each manifests itself under different circumstances. See Quran 39:29. We have one kind of behaviour and opinion etc. when working at our profession, another within the family, another with friends, and still another with strangers and when on holiday and so on. Some of these "selves" or "complexes" overlap and some are mutually exclusive. Some are greater and more powerful than others. Some contain others as sub-divisions. One can have inner conversations when one self speaks to another. Hallucinations occur when one "self" sees the other as someone else existing outside - the image is projected. Obsessions and compulsions are experienced when that other "self" exerts a controlling force. The phenomena of "Possession" probably refers to this, specially when a complex is induced through accidental or deliberate mental conditioning, regimentation techniques or hypnotic techniques. Some people are more prone to suggestibility, fascination or hypnotised than others owing to strong desires, needs or fears owing to insecurity, inadequacy feelings or deprivation of love and respect that makes them cling to imagined sources of power.

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