What are you?

You may, in the past, have asked yourself who you are. This is a different question. I want to know what you are. Think about it for a moment.

No matter what answer you gave to that question,. I'll bet it began with a little word you take for granted - the first-person, singular pronoun.

Every time you talk about yourself to someone else, you use the pronoun "I":

• "I'm doing fine. How about you?"
• "I don't know."
• "I just wanted to call and see how you were doing."
• "I had the weirdest dream last night."
• "I'm so tired."

It seems as if, whatever else you may be, you're definitely an "I". The first-person pronoun is so built into the language as to make a list of "I" sentences unremarkable. But what is it that you're referring to when you use that little word?

"I" is a shortcut for you as a personality, you as the person with your name, you as the one having the private internal experience in your head, you as an independent agent exerting your will. The Latin word for "I" is "ego", which is why Freud chose to use "ego" as the descriptor for an individual's psychological center.

The omnipresence of "I" extends, however, beyond its conversational necessity when referring to yourself. It is fully integrated into your internal dialogue, along with its analogs: "me" and "my" and "mine". Thinking of yourself as a person means thinking of yourself as an "I".

The pronoun becomes you.

But what if it's the wrong pronoun? What if thinking of yourself as a person, or identifying yourself over and over with your personal ego, has led you to miss some things about what you really are.

In order for you to know what you are, you also have to know what you're not. What is included within the scope of "I", and what is excluded? Where do you place the boundary? The basic paradigm we grow up within asserts a simple duality - between what you are and what you're not. There's a weirder paradigm, sometimes referred to as "non-duality", that comes to some very different conclusions about your fundamental nature.

To find out what a non-dual sense of self might be, I'm going to invite you to try a series of experiments. Each explores a possible alternative first-person pronoun. Before we begin pronoun-hacking, however, there are some lessons we can glean from recent upheavals in the domain of third-person pronouns.

CATEGORICAL ERRORS

Moments after you were born (or perhaps months before), someone inspected a tiny region of your anatomy. Based solely on their findings there, they declared you a girl or a boy. You were gender categorized at birth.

When you encounter a baby you've never met, chances are they've been gender-tagged for you: color-coded and hair-styled for instant gender recognition. If they weren't, you'd be faced with the horror of an uncategorized baby. How ever would you know how to interact with it?

That may sound like a silly question. One of your social roles, however, whether you resist it or not, is to condition small humans. There are always differences in how you're supposed to treat girls and boys, even baby girls and boys. So it can be genuinely disorienting if you don't know a baby's gender.

As the recipient of conditioning, from the beginning of your life, there were ways you learned you were supposed to be, and ways you learned you weren't supposed to be. Everyone, for example, learns they're supposed to be good, smart, capable, and desirable.

But those qualities mean different things for boys than they do for girls. Pull up in your mind an image of a 'good boy', and consider what makes him 'good'. Now do the same thing for a 'good girl'. Do the same qualities and behaviors make her 'good', or are there differences? What would make her a 'bad' girl? Would the same attributes and actions make him a 'bad' boy? Now change the questions above so instead of being about 'good' and 'bad', they're about 'attractive' and 'unattractive', 'successful' and 'unsuccessful', 'strong' and 'weak', and so on.

This arrangement is problematic for every small human, just as it was for you. Some behaviors were off-limits for you based on the gender category you were assigned. Other gendered behaviors were required of you, even imposed on you. Gender role conditioning, like other forms of conditioning, came with its own special set of rewards and punishments.

As a child, the fit between your unique nature, and what was expected of you, was never perfect. For many kids, the mismatch between those two is impossible to reconcile. Often, gender role conditioning is the worst of it. It's a category problem. Being a girl means not being a boy. Being a boy means not being a girl. To differentiate the two categories, each is partially defined in contrast with the other, even in opposition to the other.

This means you might be told you belong to one category, but look over and think the other category seems like a much better fit. Some 'girls' wind up wishing they were 'boys', and some 'boys' wish they were 'girls'. Some kids can't muster enthusiasm about either of the two available options. Both feel dehumanizing - too small to fit within.

The binary gender system, which asserts that there are two (and only two) gender categories, is pretty well entrenched in much of the world. If you're "non-binary", you either reject gender categories altogether, or recognize a more nuanced range of possible categories. The non-binary movement is an effort to mess with the existing category system, part of the larger transgender movement.

What does this have to do with how we conceive of ourselves, with what you think you are? Well, we could modify the last sentence of the previous paragraph to read like this:

Turns out that "non-binary" and "non-dual" have a lot in common. I mean, at first glance, they're practically synonyms!

The gender problem is that having only two categories is insufficient to capture the range of ways people wish to express themselves and move through life. Having only two categories is far too restrictive.

The only thing that could make that even worse would be if there were only one category. Just imagine what it would be like if every one of us, without exception, was placed into a single rigidly-defined category, with no other options at all.

For better or worse, that's exactly what happened.

From the moment of your birth, if not before, everyone around you has been trying to convince you that you're a 'person'. It's the only category available; it's far too small to fit within; and everyone you know has been cramming themselves into it for their entire lives.

CHOOSING YOUR PRONOUNS

Let me extend the gender metaphor a little further. There are two potent lessons non-dual explorers can learn from non-binary ones.

If you've lived your entire life thinking of yourself as male, how would you feel if everyone around you started referring to you as "she"? If you've always thought of yourself as female, what would it be like for you if everyone started calling you "he"?

If you can't easily imagine it, try it out as a quick exercise. Ask someone to call you by the other gender's pronouns for a little while. It might feel weird, or make you mad, or be unexpectedly delightful. Whatever impact it has on you, it's unlikely to have no effect at all. How other people refer to us determines something about our sense of self. For better or worse, we are social and linguistic creatures.

Now invert this scenario. Imagine you were born into a male body, but always felt greater affiliation with the qualities and roles and behaviors associated with the female gender category. To try to align with the category that feels more like you, you ask people to start using the terms "she" and "her" to refer to you. They comply with your request, and suddenly, you discover how much "he" and "him" have always felt wrong. The new pronouns fit better. As people use them to refer to you, you start to feel more like yourself!

Or maybe you've been considered female for as long as you remember, but never liked that designation. On the other hand, being thought of as male would be even worse. You get the people in your life to use gender-neutral pronouns, like "they" and "them" when they talk about you. It somehow frees you. All the energy you've expended subtly resisting miscategorization is released, and you find yourself discovering more about your true nature, a nature which never quite aligned with any gender category.

These hypothetical pronoun shifts offer up two valuable pieces of information:

1. Pronouns contribute to your self-image. Different pronouns have the potential to change your self-image, and to make different aspects of selfhood available to you.
2. To get the benefits of this change seems to require everyone around you to change their behavior. Namely, they have to change their well-ingrained linguistic habits around you, and maybe even to refer to you when you're not around.

We're going to make extensive use of this first insight in the coming exercises. Trying out new pronouns can change everything about what you think you are.

We will part ways, however with the second point. Trying to get other people to change how they talk to you, and about you, is a major pain in the ass. Most people are just not particularly motivated to work against their conditioning. You yourself have to become a major pain in the ass to get people to break lifelong linguistic habits for your benefit.

Luckily, when it comes to our pronoun-hacking efforts, no one else needs to do anything. It's entirely an inside job.

Enough of our gender metaphor for now. We have a much more insidious pronoun to deseat than "she" or "he".

We're about to launch into a series of experiments that replace "I" with some alternative pronouns. As "I" am demonstrating right now, these exercises do not require you to speak in any cryptic way. As far as anyone else is concerned, you can keep using the word "I". The desired effect is for you to make changes to your inner monologue. Changing this one little word has the power to change everything else about your experience.

In part two of this series, we'll begin by swapping out "I" with another tiny word, and see what changes when the first-person pronoun becomes a little less first-personal . . .