# The Expression of 'I' in 'You' The moment I speak to you, I become myself. Not before. The 'I' that exists in solitude is incomplete, a sketch. It requires your presence—your eyes, your listening, your silent acknowledgment—to take on flesh and meaning. This is not mere dependency. It is the fundamental structure of consciousness itself. When I say "I," I am already speaking to someone. Even my most private thought is shaped by an invisible *you*—a internalized other, a witness to my own becoming. Language confirms this. Every 'I' is born from dialogue. The child learns to say 'I' only when she hears herself reflected back: *You are my daughter. You are clever. You are loved.* The self is this echo chamber of recognition. Strip away all the *you*s that have named me, and the 'I' collapses into noise. But there is something stranger still. In the moment of true meeting—when I look at you and you truly see me, not as a reflection of your need, but as a separate, irreducible reality—something unexpected happens. The boundary between 'I' and 'you' becomes luminous and thin. I do not lose myself. Rather, I become most fully myself. Your otherness doesn't diminish my 'I'; it completes it. This is perhaps what the mystics meant. The dissolution they sought was not an erasure of self into some abstract universal. It was the discovery that selfhood itself is relational, dialogical, alive. The 'I' that stands alone is a fiction. The 'I' that meets *you* is real.

I wish to think of myself without you, and that is why I fear, why I suffer. Yet I am never without you. I am only myself, countless matters of my life... forever forgetting, living in forgetting. When I forget them, they do not perish; they remain in you. And then you bring them forth again.

From your eternal, timeless nature flows this truth into my flowing, temporal life. It exists, and then it passes. When I fall asleep, when even the sense of 'I' abandons me, still my life, my very being, remains intact within you. It remains, and then awakens and manifests in my waking life. I have never left you; bound to your eternal nature, I exist always.

Birth, death, the countless stream of events in life—none of these are new. All belong to your timeless, beyond-flowing nature. When I see myself in this way, eternally joined with you, I am without sorrow, without fear. Yet this divine vision does not stay with me long. I lose it again and again, falling back into worldly ways of thinking.

How much longer can this go on? Draw me into your realm of truth, your changeless world. Fulfill the longing of my life. Banish utterly from my heart this delusion—that I exist without you, that you exist without me. Let me dwell always in you, seeing your divine purpose in life, witnessing your eternal play.

You are not easily glimpsed in small, ordinary things. But why do I make such distinctions between small and great? Why do I call something small when you are in it, when you are doing it? In your presence, everything becomes great, everything is sanctified.

And what if my life unfolds through events of great consequence? When I consider what work you are doing through me, I am astonished. On these deeds, the lives and deaths, the joys and sorrows of so many depend even now! In time, countless others will be touched by their ripples! I cannot remain abandoned in the world. I must become a dweller in your realm of truth, your changeless world. My thought, my feeling, my word, my deed—all must be covered by you, saturated with you, made entirely yours.