溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is There Something Seen Only When "I" Is Lost?
By losing the small "I," do I draw nearer to a truer self?
Just now, I have lost my self.
In Zhuangzi's parable, Nanguo Ziqi sits as if his spirit has left him and says, "I have lost my self." What is lost is the small, self-centered, clinging "I" (wo); in that emptied place a wider "I" (wu) appears. For Zhuangzi, true freedom lay not in building up the self but in setting it down. This question branches opposite to Descartes's road — where Descartes made the "thinking I" the ground of certainty, Zhuangzi held that only by releasing that "I" does the state of being one with all things open. The Buddhist teaching of non-self and the Upanishadic true Self (atman) beyond the small ego have each answered the same question in their own way.
The more an age demands we constantly display ourselves, the more precious the rest found in "losing the self" through absorption.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
I pause before this paradox. Having heard only the call to know myself, I am thrown by a call to lose myself. Yet looking back, the moments I was most myself were often when I forgot the "I" — lost in work I loved until time vanished, helping someone without calculating my own gain. Zhuangzi says the true self is in that self-forgetting. Where I stand between building the self up and setting it down, I do not yet know — and I remain before that question.
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