A Momentary Lapse of Reason

  What is that thing I refer to when I say "I"? I can't pin it down despite how much I try to. The thing I thought is there deep down as the basis of my experience, is not. Is it the other way around? This "I" is up there, at the highest level of our abstractive capacity as humans. It's the greatest abstraction, the focal point of all other abstractions. The "I" is a virtualization of a multitude of phenomenological experiences. Is it something we curate from our fixations and attachments? A staging area for the thoughts, feelings and emotions that we think of as "me" or "mine".

One of the things that made fall in love with software development is this sense of control it gave me at some point I lacked it at many personal levels. This shiny hope that all abstract ideas can get formalized, all formalizations can get implemented, and all implementations can get optimized. What else I could ask for?  For someone like me who have been always in a fight with himself, a fight to control this illusory thing we call it "self". It always appeared as something too stubborn to define, to control. Then I learnt one hell of a lesson: it's only heavy because you are carrying it.  Most of the things we refer to when we refer to ourselves aren't actually constituents of this self, but attachments we hold onto because they are the only things we are familiar with. We confuse them as essential parts of ourselves. The memories, the feelings, the emotions and the thoughts. These are not YOU. Once I told myself that I can let them go, I didn't need to control...