What are you? That may not be a question you consider often, yet you answer it every time you use a first-person pronoun. We are in the midst of a series of experiments, replacing "I" with other pronouns, to see if your sense of self changes when you refer to yourself in different ways.

Our next pronoun-choosing adventure gets weirder and wilder. This one has had a profound effect on how I understand myself. Consider that, rather than an "I", or an "it", you are "life".

Before I explain what this means, let's look at it in action. Start again by sitting quietly and observing, but this time, replace the "I" in your internal dialogue with "life". Here's what that looks like if we use the same set of observations from our previous iterations.

Life is most certainly doing all these things. Life is also growing grass, duplicating viruses, stalking prey, and being stalked by predators. Life is holding atmosphere to the surface of the Earth, and the air inside your lungs. Life is producing rhythmic fluctuations in the stock market, and emotional fluctuations in your hypothalamus. Life is inducing tribal competition between sports teams, and epistemic competition between beliefs in your cognitive ecosystem.

Your body, your mind, and your ego structure are as much expressions of life in motion as the rest of nature, and the rest of human nature. Anything you have come to think of as you or yours - is life happening.

Because life is not a bounded and distinct entity, your initial response to this suggestion, that you are life, may be to say you are merely a part of life - a living thing, as it were. As a mental shortcut, it can be worthwhile to think of life as divided up into separate cells or independent organisms or bounded ecosystems. Life, however, observes no such boundaries. From life's perspective, everything is interaction, and nothing is independent.

Whatever force activates your thoughts, spurs your limbs into action, and drives your personality toward goals, also animates everything you come into contact with. 'Life', as a pronoun, invites you to recognize the seamlessness between you and the world.

Let's return to the experiment at hand. What happens when you contemplate that life is animating all the interacting processes that populate your awareness?

As with the previous exercise, you want to give this one a full day. Start simply, sitting still somewhere on your own. Then take your new pronoun into all the activities of your day. Keep it going throughout goal-oriented endeavors, conversations with other people, and all the in-between moments and waiting periods. You'll inevitably forget you were trying on a new pronoun, and then you'll remember and forget again and remember again. Every time you realize you lost track, come back to the practice.

For this exercise as well, half the work is in making this linguistic adjustment (and sticking with it). The other half is in paying attention to what differences occur when you change your pronoun to 'life'. How does your experience change? How does your state change? In particular, notice whether some things that seemed to make sense for an I, don't make sense for life.

Consider, for instance, the difference between saying:

and saying:

When you try to apply the concept of 'tired' to life, it might not fit. I, as a 'person', may be tired. But does life actually get tired?

Question it for yourself. 'Tired' is a word that describes a tension between your idea about what your energy should be like, and what your energy is actually like. If you think you should have high energy, you may find yourself resisting having low energy. Both, however, are really just different configurations of energy in the bodymind, contrasting patterns of life in motion. From the perspective of 'life', energy is always changing from one configuration to another. Neither configuration is better nor worse. So 'life' doesn't really seem to get tired.

To inquire into the difference between "I am tired" and "life is tired", you need to examine your assumptions about what tiredness is. The interpretation of 'tired' fits neatly into the familiar network of hallucinations that you are a person. It does not fit as well into this new notion that you are life happening.

As you move through the day in this contemplation, look out for these moments when a thought no longer makes sense because 'life' is your pronoun. Some concepts you usually use to bolster your sense of personhood may require revision when you contemplate that you are life. Can life get tired? Is life actually embarrassed? Is life scared? Does life have desires? Can life make mistakes? When you hit upon these opportunities for inquiry, pause and find out for yourself.

Don't get too lost in analysis, however. Your main focus should be trying on the pronoun and studying how it alters your experience. I'm only meaning to offer you a loose method for noticing what kinds of changes to look out for.

Of course, there are other words you could use besides 'life' as your pronoun, though I will preemptively caution you against most of them. You could use 'God', or [insert name of favorite deity here], or 'Tao,' or 'awareness', or 'existence', and any of these would be fine. Be careful, however, to see whether any prospective pronoun comes with extra baggage. Some terms have been dragged around acquiring meaning for decades or millennia. 'Life' is a nice alternative because it's fairly neutral. I use it almost synonymously with 'nature'.

I specifically advise against using 'spirit' or 'soul' or any variant of 'higher self' as your pronoun. Any of these easily personified terms are just synonyms for 'self'. They may be more complimentary descriptors than 'ego' or 'persona', but they introduce the same self/world duality that you get when you use the pronoun 'I'.

In any case, try playing with 'life' as your pronoun for a day first. Life is pretty rad.

Amongst the many changes you might notice when you choose 'life' as your pronoun, see whether you start to experience yourself less like a person or an entity or a being, and more like a happening. Life, after all, isn't really a thing. It's an ongoing progression, an infinite process. Perhaps using any noun at all to describe yourself is bound to be unnecessarily limiting. In our next experiment, we'll see what happens if we drop the nouns altogether.