We have now taken several different pronouns out for a spin. While each is different in character, they all share a common shortcoming.

The real problem with pronouns is that they're nouns.

As soon as a noun is readily available to describe you, you'll think of yourself as some kind of thing. An object or entity or being. You are not "a" being. You are be-ing: a process, not an object - many processes, actually. You are happenings happening, in great variety, endlessly interweaving.

I've always appreciated rivers as reminders that things aren't things. If you stand on the bank of a river and point at it, what are you pointing at? It's certainly not the same kind of "thing" as, say, a hunk of scrap metal or a billiard ball. Could it be a thing flowing through another thing - water through a channel? Let's check it out.

Depending on which river you're observing, is that really even water? Whatever is flowing is generally some watery concoction of mud and minerals and microorganisms. This flowing is continuously refreshed - feeding into the channel, soaking through it, overflowing it, evaporating out of it, stagnating along it, hosting entire flow-y ecosystems within it, and being routed away from it through more channels and conduits. The form of the channel itself is altered by the water, eroded and carved out and built up by sediment carried downstream. Flow and channel are ceaselessly, dynamically shaping each other. You can try to imagine a snapshot of the river in its totality - long, winding, and branching, with many vague beginning points and some watery, merge-y ending. But the river is made of motion. You can't capture a pattern of movement by trying to hold it still. You're not pointing at a thing. You're pointing at a context in which happening keeps happening.

The problem with a noun like 'river', is that it replaces an endless, dynamic happening with a motionless thing, or at least it does that within your working model of reality. Mental concepts always over-simplify the complexity of experience. One of our best tricks for reducing down ever-shifting experiences, so they fit within concepts, is to pretend that they're not experiences. Instead, we imagine they're things. We thingify. The word 'river' thingifies, and in doing so, it leaves out almost everything that makes rivers rivery.

You are river-like. You're a context within which happening keeps happening. The linguistic structure of pronouns, unfortunately, leaves out most of the youness by which you happen to happen. By repeating personal pronouns to yourself, over and over, you thingify your self. This makes it easy to forget your true, river-like nature.

The acquisition of language occurs at the same time as we form a self concept and develop a working model of reality. Those three structures all reinforce one another. Messing with language helps shake up unexamined assumptions about the nature of self and world. Making the step from noun-centered understanding to verb-centered understanding brings different dimensions of experience into awareness.

Many of the mysteries of existence become revealed when we recognize how many things aren't things, but happenings. You've been person-ing and body-ing and mind-ing all along. To deepen this kind of awareness, let's make one more foray into self-ing language. Then we'll see if we can drop the words altogether.

There are three parts to this exercise. The first is analogous to what you did in the previous pronoun contemplations - a change to your internal monologue, this time dropping the nouns. Just to see how far these language adjustments can go, the second and third parts drop the verbs as well.

1. De-noun-cing

In the previous pronoun practices, you replaced "I" with alternative nouns - "it" or "life" or whatever else you experimented with. In this one, you're going to remove pronouns entirely. No things. Only happening.

To get going, try repeating the same process we've already been using with new pronouns. Sit quietly and allow some internal monologue about everything that's occurring. Just find a way to remove all pronouns. It'll be a little awkward at first, but might go something like this:

If you've done some time as a Vipassana practitioner, you may have played with a superficially similar technique, often called 'noting'. Noting practice is generally taught as a means of training concentration. While in sitting or walking meditation, you note anything occurring in your experience that might otherwise pull you off focus. A thought passes through and you say 'thinking' to yourself, naming the phenomenon rather than getting caught up in the thought. Sensations come to the foreground and you say 'sensing' so as not to get preoccupied with whatever the body is up to. It's a pretty potent practice in and of itself, but not what I'm suggesting. For our purposes, concentration is no more desirable than distraction, and meditation is not superior to any other activity. This becomes more obvious when you get up and take the contemplation into the rest of your day.

The most important difference from noting practice is that you're not merely witnessing what's happening. You are what's happening. All actions and activities are fair game. You can be happening passively, happening actively, happening receptively, happening assertively - no matter what, something is always happening. You're naming activities as they are occurring, identifying the movement rather than thingifying it and imagining a mover.

The problem with using any language to track what's happening is that sentences are designed so that verbs are paired with nouns. Even if you drop the subject (the pronoun) from the sentence, it's sort of implied. You think "feeling nervous", and the mind has no trouble just filling in the blank for you so it seems as if you said "I'm feeling nervous". The real contemplation begins when you drop all languaging of what's happening, and just happen.

As language addicts, it can feel pretty abstract to attend to yourself happening without naming yourself. So let me elaborate with another sort of preparatory exercise.

2. Dancing with Your Self

Try walking around a bit. Bring your awareness to each aspect of movement happening: swinging a leg forward, rolling across the ball of the foot, shifting balance, springing off the toes. You can walk down the street, or just move around the room you're in.

Start, if you'd like, by naming the movements as verbs with no subject, like we've been doing. After a few moments, however, drop the naming and just move. As you move, here's what I'm hoping you can notice. Can you begin to sense the absolute necessity of each movement happening exactly the way it does?

Your leg is moving. Why did it move just that way? It can't really move any other way. The forces acting on it produce precisely that movement! If you throw a ball in the air during a windstorm. The momentum of your throw, the pull of gravity, and the turbulent push of the wind on the ball's surface all provide vectors of force in different directions. Combine all those vectors, and some will cancel each other out, while others add together. Total them all up and you can describe the exact movement of the ball at any given moment.

Your moving leg is the same. There's momentum continuing from the previous movement, gravity providing a surface to push off of, the limits of the angles of your joints that change the direction of motion. There are small muscles acting to maintain balance, bigger muscles contracting in response to mental commands, mental images of what the body should do next - all informing the behavior of the leg. The leg responds to the total combination of all those forces in the only possible manner. Because of everything influencing it, it can move in no other way than exactly how it's moving, and it always does that perfectly. Subsequent movements will exactly and perfectly continue the cascade of causation that the current movement is a part of.

Bring that awareness to all the changing movements of walking. All you're doing is moving around through space. But every element of every motion is perfectly compelled, perfectly defined, and perfectly constrained. All previous choices, habits, influences, and limitations act in concert to produce the movement that's happening now. Each movement is simultaneously resolving and continuing all the forces that produced it.

Keep your awareness on your movements and try to sense how perfectly appropriate each one is, each inextricably leading to the next in never-ending sequence.

Don't merely witness the movements, as if from a distance. Dance with the movements.

This is one of those partner dances with a leader and a follower. You happen to be the follower, but your part in the dance is as essential as the leader's. Without a follower, there is no dance. Your job as follower is to attune to every minute adjustment the leader makes, and to follow them as instantaneously as possible, in perfect lockstep. I assert that you have always been doing this job, and in fact can never do anything else. So dancing, in this context, really means noticing that the dance is happening, just as it always has been. If you can notice you're dancing, every movement can be appreciated for its grace and beauty and perfection. You are not merely being moved by forces and influences. You are the movement. You are happening, endlessly and perfectly.

I'm calling this "dancing", but that doesn't imply any particular kind of ease or grace in how you move. Everything I've described is equally applicable whether your "walk" around occurs in a wheelchair, or with arthritic knees that won't stop screaming at you, or pacing back and forth inside a prison cell. This partner dance is implicit in everything you do, across all circumstances.

3. Dancing with Everything

After practicing sensing into this dance in the context of walking or moving around, now bring it to everything that happens throughout the rest of your day.

Is an awkward encounter with someone happening? It can't happen any other way. All the forces involved produce precisely this embarrassing communication. They bring about just exactly this anxious introspection, this particular flavor of wondering whether the other person likes you or not. Every uncoordinated moment of gawky blundering must happen just so. Can you become aware that you're the follower in this dance, beautifully executing every misplaced word with perfectly poor timing.

Is procrastination happening? If so, it absolutely has to. Some forces are producing inertia, others pulling attention toward some source of entertainment, while yet others are spinning self-condemning thoughts. Moment-by-moment, these forces miraculously balance a range of internalized demands, a sluggish endocrine system, socially-imposed priorities, and a dozen other subtle influences. Can you remember that this is also the dance and you are a flawless participant. It is a gorgeous and unique movement of procrastination unlike any other.

Is detached witnessing happening? If it is, then the spotlight of attention must be pointing itself in just that direction, with just that strength and disposition. The spacious feeling or spreading quiet impeccably follows the movement of attention, opening awareness at just such a pace. This too, is you following the dance, only with slighter, more internal movements.

Normal, mundane, daily activities are all note-perfect and can't be otherwise. Selecting items from the grocery store shelf, getting frustrated by a news report, cuddling with your sleepy child, wincing in pain, the motion of your hand as it opens a doorknob.

This "dance" may not be a waltz, but it is at least as rhythmically elegant. Keep bringing your awareness back to this dance that never ceases. Find out if you can sense the rise and fall, the flow and the glide of every little thing that's happening in the context of you.

What you had been calling I, thingifying with language, is a context in which happening never stops happening. You are what's happening, and you are happening flawlessly.

Without Words

Linguistic habits are reinforced over countless repetitions. This makes replacing a common word like "I" into a significant challenge. As challenging as that adjustment may have been, it's nowhere near as challenging as removing pronouns altogether.

Feel into the difference between using a pronoun, whatever it happens to be, and using no pronoun at all. It will probably feel like something's missing, like there's an empty space begging to be occupied by a word that thingifies you.

Allowing the empty space to remain empty is not easy. The mind, which lives to fill in the blanks, has to remain uncontracted in a way that's unfamiliar for most of us. It can almost feel like the mind is holding its breath. Keeping the mind open in this way makes all manner of things possible, so lean into the awkwardness. Learn as much about it as you can.

In each of our previous pronoun-swapping experiments, you've had the opportunity to change what you identify with. Rather than thinking of yourself as a person in the old familiar way, you identified with something new. In our current pronoun-elimination experiment, you're moving toward not identifying with anything at all. We'll go further into this identification progression in the final installment of this series.