When you think you're a person, you take things personally. That can mean a couple different things.

The usual meaning is that you believe things are about you, personally, when they might not be about you at all. The deeper meaning is that you make sense of everything from a particular kind of perspective, the perspective of a person.

The world is not merely unfair. Unfairness is happening to you. Someone is not just angry. They're angry at you. Failing is not simply occurring. You are a failure.

That all sounds like a pretty normal perspective, and it is, but it is also the source of most of human suffering. Luckily, it's not hard to stop taking things personally. All you need to do is stop imagining you're a person.

Your identity, what you identify with, is established, and reinforced, by the words you use to refer to yourself. Change what you call yourself, and your identity changes. We've been running a series of pronoun-replacing experiments, beginning with "I", and progressing through a range of increasingly less personal pronouns. Each has the potential to transform your identity.

Let's take a quick tour back through the differing identities offered by each of the pronouns we've been playing with. We want to see how each pronoun widens your perspective, and with it, your sense of what you are.

Identifying with the Suffering "I"

The pronoun "I" reinforces the assumption that you're a person.

What does it mean to think you're a person? It probably means you identify with your body and its feelings, and with your mind and its thoughts. Yet both mind and body seem to belong to someone, to a kind of character making their way through the unfolding drama of life. That character is tasked with constructing a self-consistent personal history narrative, and carrying it forward into an imaginary better future.

Are you that character?

If you identify with your character, you will be motivated to protect it, support it, maintain it, and present it to the world in a character-congruent way. To accomplish these tasks, you will find yourself dividing all of existence into three categories.

The first two categories are filled with the people, events, and experiences you take personally. Some are threats or dangers to your character, to be avoided. Some are resources or opportunities for your character, to be pursued. Threats and opportunities help or hinder you in your ongoing quest to situate your character within a favorable storyline.

The third category, which is much bigger than the other two combined, are all the things that don't have anything to do with you, or don't seem to. Because they're not self-relevant, they can be, from the perspective of your character, safely ignored. You probably hardly notice them.

This already leads to a kind of poverty of perception. Rather than appreciating the richness of existence, you will tend to miss out on most of everything, instead hyper-fixating on apparent threats and opportunities. Even the things you do register are probably more complex or multi-dimensional than you realize, as your threat-opportunity filter reduces them down only to features that are relevant to you.

Becoming an "I" contracts the vastness of life into a kind of person-sized bubble. You take up residence in a small world shaped and bounded by the demands of personhood. Both your sense of yourself, and the world you have dreamed up for that self, shrink. How much have you shrunken? How much of the world might you be missing out on? The only way to find out is to expand your way outward beyond the confines of "I".

Identifying with the Witness

The pronoun "it" allows you to look at the interacting system of body, mind, and personality from the outside.

When you use "it" to refer to yourself, you actually relinquish having a first-person pronoun at all. You, as the observer, remain unlabelled, and you speak about the system of the self in the third person. "It" thinks and feels and behaves and interacts.

This move changes your perspective dramatically. You are no longer identified with the system. Instead, you are identified with the witness observing the system. This is profound because it implies you have always been more than a body, a mind, and a personality. You were conflating yourself with your thoughts and feelings and motivations, with your desires and disappointments, with your roles and relationships. Meanwhile, there was always this other entire dimension of you, the one that can sit back and watch the whole wild thing in action.

Compared with the dramatic ups and downs of life as a character, life as the witness may seem pretty boring. Feelings arise and subside. Thoughts shift and change. Circumstances come and go. But witnessing awareness always stays the same. It is the aspect of yourself that remains unaffected by the vicissitudes of life as a person.

One way to think about why the witness never changes is to think of it as the context in which all those changes take place. The contents never stay the same for long. The space in which those contents vary is always just space.

"It" has only ever been the object. You, not "it", have always been the subject.

In a certain sense, the witnessing subject has no influence on the person. The person is a cascade of causal forces always producing the next thought, the next movement, and the next set-up for ever more thoughts and movements. It takes care of itself, while you watch, requiring nothing of you.

Now we're in the territory where people start questioning whether they have free will. How, from the outside, could you exert any influence on such a self-sustaining system, never mind steer the whole thing?

There's an unexpected kind of freedom some people discover here - freedom from free will! Previously, you imagined that everything that happened to the system of the self was happening to you. Now, no matter what happens to it, you remain unaffected. That makes you neutral, non-judgemental. It can't do anything other than what it does, so what is there to judge?

Alas, this identification with the witness can be quite alienating. You've gotten some distance, so you need not take anything that happens to "it" personally. But there's a cost. This distance separates you from the depth and dynamism of existence. You are safely situated on the outside, but life seems to be continuing without you. Luckily, we've got a solution for that!

Identifying with the Movement of Life

The pronoun "life" allows you to take your place in the order of things, or, perhaps, as the order of things! It breaks you out of the confinement of a personal identity, without needing to distance you from anything.

When you identify as an "I" (with your body, mind, and personality), you are swept up in an endless sequence of stresses and successes, deficits and excesses. There is no distance between what you are and the experiences you have. When you identify with the witness and see that ever-changing system as an "it", you expand your sense of self to include something that never changes. It's a great relief to find such peace and stability. You identify with the context of experience, but lose touch with the contents. To establish a more inclusive sense of what you are, you need to identify with something that encompasses both.

Life includes everything. Whatever happens is part of life. Life animates the body and mind, and life ignites the consciousness that makes witnessing awareness possible. Everything that you have thought of as you is an aspect of life in motion. It's possible to identify with life because life is all you've ever been.

There is an internal ecology that moves and motivates the system of the self, but that system is everywhere influencing and influenced by the larger ecology into which it is embedded. As life itself, you can get interested in how everything interrelates with everything else, rather than needing to prioritize the parts of life that you previously boundaried off and called a self. The preoccupations and perceptual filters that are important for an "I", for preserving and protecting identity, have little relevance to life.

The witness is able to be non-judgmental because it doesn't take what the system of the self does personally. Life is able to be non-judgemental because everything that happens within it is completely natural. Otherwise, it couldn't happen. Everything in life occurs in perfect accordance with nature, human nature, and the nature of reality.

Each time I make the switch from conceiving of myself as an "I", to conceiving of myself as "life", a laugh spontaneously bubbles up. I immediately see how caught up I was, how small and fearful my thinking had become. Laughter emerges as the considerable energy that had been devoted to my conditioned responses is suddenly set free. "I" was upset that the other driver got to the one remaining parking spot before I did. "Life" has no such petty concerns, instead appreciating the whole crazy system of competition for finite resources, the way the mind holds so much goal-oriented tension, and the absurdity of dragging a several thousand pound machine around with me to go to the store.

It is important to make a distinction here. In order for me to describe the pronoun shift to you, I am saying that "you are life" or "you can identify with life". But when it's flipped, I never say to myself, "I am life". That statement has an "I" in it, and the whole exercise here is about replacing "I" with something else. So you wouldn't say, "I am life." You would just say, "Life is happening."

No Longer Identifying

The absence of any pronoun points you in a much weirder direction. As it turns out, you don't need to identify with anything at all.

Releasing all identifications is a much trickier bit of mind yoga to perform.

The mind is always attempting to orient. In service to the mind's efforts to manufacture a sense of stability and continuity, you usually identify with some thing, as some sort of object or entity or being that can be pointed to and labeled. You thingify yourself.

I have, throughout this series, been asking the question, "What are you?" But the question itself has a thingifying assumption built into it. Taking away all pronouns to refer to yourself means taking away your self. Then the question, "What are you?", no longer fits. Instead, you have to ask, "What's happening?" If you wanted to really commit to replacing thingifying pronouns with verbs, you might even ask, "What's selfing?"

"Life" as a pronoun already steers you toward thinking in terms of processes, and yourself as a process. Is life a kind of thing? Not really, but using any noun is likely to eventually steer you back to your thingifying ways. If you relinquish even that pronoun, movement is all that remains.

When you use the pronoun "it", you are also relinquishing any first-person pronoun. To do so, you assign all activity, intentionality, and agency to the system of the self. You, separate from all that, are essentially a passive witness.

This is great if you're a monk. Monks have already given their lives over to something outside themselves, and they spend a lot of time sitting still. Identifying as a receptive observer is a handy way to monk out.

Removing all pronouns may seem similar to identifying with the witness. In this case, however, you aren't setting yourself up as a distant observer of activity. You are the activity itself (which includes the activity of observing). You are not separate from what's happening. You are what's happening. You happen.

This is mind yoga because it requires that you learn to use your mind differently. If, even for a short time, you can replace all personal pronouns with silence, with a gap in thinking, it reconfigures your whole experience. Your experience becomes entirely impersonal.

When you are what's happening, do you distinguish between the happenings that are "you" from happenings that are "not you"? The boundary we imagine exists between the two becomes increasingly difficult to find. This is in great part because nothing within your experience happens without you. Just try to have an experience that you're not there for. You are the experience that's happening. If you hit this insight, and sink into it, now you're starting to really get the non-dual groove.

Getting Less Personal

Over the course of your life, how many times have you used the pronouns "I" or "me" to refer to yourself? I'm guessing you've done it more than a few times. Each repetition of your first-person pronoun reinforces a set of beliefs about what you are. The cumulative effect of all those reinforcements is to firmly establish you within a particular identity structure.

That's why such a small intervention can have such a profound effect. It's really remarkable how fully you can reconfigure your identity just by changing that one little word.

Let's try a little side-by-side comparison. I'll offer up a few common kinds of thoughts that usually include the "I" pronoun. Each of these thoughts lends itself to a particular flavor of mundane, everyday suffering. We'll look at the same thought across all four of the pronoun adjustments we've been playing with. We want to see how your perspective changes with each new pronoun.

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• "I'm tired"
  In theory, there's nothing wrong with being tired. Nonetheless, the statement tends to have a judgment hidden within it. From a personal perspective, you should have more energy than you do. Lack of alertness, or motivation, often registers as a personal shortcoming.

• "It's tired"
  Apparently, the body is tired, as it often is. From the witness's perspective, there's nothing wrong with that particular state. Any body, subject to the same conditions, would also be tired. No judgement.

• "Life is tired"
  Now this statement no longer fits. From life's perspective, patterns and qualities of energy within organisms are always in flux. That's not really tiredness. It's simply a natural reconfiguration of energy.

• "Energy waning - muscles melting - thoughts drifting dreamily"
  Without a pronoun, we need a different kind of language. Instead of slapping an adjective like "tired" onto a noun-like self, we need verbs. We need to describe whatever in that moment is happening, how tiredness is actively occurring as a process.

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• "I have to feed the kids"
  This could be a neutral description of what needs doing. From a personal perspective, however, there can be a sense of burden built into the statement, even a quality of being victimized by an unchosen obligation. You might prefer to do other things, but you have to, once again, put your responsibilities first, to check yet another item off your to do list.

• "It has to feed the kids"
  The parent here is part of a social network in which everyone has a role to play. From the witness's perspective, the personality may need to juggle priorities or manage resources in order to play its role, but those are no better or worse activities than anything else it could be doing.

• "Life has to feed the kids"
  What is life for if not for nourishing and sustaining life? From life's perspective, feeding children is one of the most glorious activities possible. This particular family of organisms all exist in mutual interdependence. Life needs to feed the kids in this family, and all others, because that's how nature continues to grow and evolve and discover itself. Life is for interconnection and shared activities.

• "Providing sustenance"
  It's hard to see how the "have to" part of the statement can survive the removal of a person that would have to do something. There is simply direct experience, attention focusing intently upon preparing, cooking, feeding, nourishing, interrelating.

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• "I'm a failure"
  This self-diagnosis, or superego attack, directly produces shame and suffering. From a personal perspective, your sense of worth depends on meeting a set of standards. Those standards may or may not actually be possible to meet. Regardless, repeated inability to meet them has now made you into something. Failure is not just something that happened. It's what you are!

• "It is a failure"
  Observed objectively, failing is just another step in ongoing development. From the witness's perspective, it is easy to have compassion for a personality who is struggling, and failing, to achieve something important. You certainly have no motivation to condemn or criticize such a personality. Rather, you might wish to soothe, strategize with, or otherwise support such a being.

• "Life is a failure"
  It's hard not to laugh at this statement. From life's perspective, how could life possibly fail? You have to interpret it to mean something like, "some of life's motivations and goals took a backseat to some of life's other motivations and goals." The whole dance just continues. Whatever apparently failed to happen was only due to a momentary misunderstanding about what was possible. Things had to happen exactly as they did, and they won't stay this way for long.

• "Something failed to happen"
  There's no longer an entity here to place into the "a failure" category. Things are always occurring. Of all the things that could have occurred, some of them didn't and others did instead. Predicting or expecting a specific imaginary future led to a discovering that the prediction was inaccurate or incomplete or immature. Endeavoring, aiming, and missing the mark all happened perfectly and led to whatever is now happening perfectly.

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These are just three examples to try to see how a change in pronoun produces a change in perspective, and how that change in perspective causes a reinterpretation of whatever thought accompanied the pronoun.

You might have a different analysis than mine of how the different pronouns alter the thought in question. The point is to try to compare them and discover whether anything new becomes possible for you with each identity shift. Specifically, you want to find out whether becoming less personal leads to less suffering.

What's in a Pronoun?

Does it really matter what you call yourself?

The purpose of all these pronoun experiments is to expose something that's been happening your entire life. You have been engaged in habits of identification. These habits have, among their many advantages, a built in tendency to produce suffering.

Changing your pronoun is a way to break the identification habit. You started with your customary identity, configuring your sense of self into the shape of a character. Then you tried reconfiguring yourself as the background of witnessing awareness, or as life in motion, or as everything that happens to be happening.

In each of those experimental configurations, you tried to notice how the new identity changed your moment to moment experience, your state of consciousness, your perspective, your priorities, your behaviors.

What happens when, after going off on one of these pronoun adventures, you return to the familiar territory of "I"? Can you bring the insights you picked up home with you? Or does saying "I" again revert you unconsciously to old habits of identification?

You'll probably return to using "I", "me", "my", "myself", and "mine" as your first-person pronouns. Over time, you may forget what you discovered by replacing those pronouns with something less personal. After all, the whole ecology of human society and language and belief is set up to reinforce your identity as a person. So it won't be surprising to find yourself taking things personally again.

When you notice now that you're taking something personally, you can always come back to the practices in this series. Or come up with your own variations. These kinds of experiments are only meant to be temporary, but the insights you gain along the way don't have to be. It might take a few rounds of practicing, and forgetting, and practicing again. Change is often like that.

There is always more to discover about what you are, and what you can be.

Speaking of which, "you" is another pernicious pronoun worthy of further investigation! But we'll save that one for another time . . .