As mentioned above, my sense of ‘I’ ends at the tip of my nose. Beyond that, every one (even, everything) constitutes ‘YOU’. This narrow and limited, ego and misapprehension-driven understanding of I and YOU is common. Let us deep dive. The expressed meaning of YOU is understood by us all in the sense of someone who is not-ME. At this level of understanding, unification of I and YOU is not possible. To say that “I am YOU” is absurd, even ridiculous!

When direct meaning does not lead us to a conclusive understanding, implied meaning must be explored. For example, a boy is carrying food for his father working in the fields. The mother may say, “Take care, my son, keep the food safe from the crows!” Here, crows imply not only the black birds, but also other birds or animals like dogs and monkeys who may attempt to snatch the food away on the way. Similarly, when someone says, “The house was shaking with his shouting,” he does not mean that the house was actually shaking as if in an earthquake! The implied meaning is that the people present in the house were terrified and unsettled listening to the person’s roar of rage. Again, when someone meets his friend after ten years and exclaims, “Oh this is the same Siddhartha I worked with 10 years ago!” he cannot literally mean the sentence. A person changes over a period of 10 years. What is meant by same is all the sameness that continues, irrespective of all the differences that have arisen between the two Siddharthas over 10 years.

The sense of separateness arises out of individuation of perception through ego, which shrink-wraps the consciousness. When this ego-wrap is peeled away, what remains is the essential sameness and ONEness between I and YOU. Like, when the earthen pot is broken, the I-space formerly limited inside the pot and the YOU-space outside the pot become ONE unitary space. The unitary ONE-consciousness is the truth, the reality. It is simply realised (and not recreated or reworked mentally) through understanding I and YOU as fundamentally and naturally ONE in the field of awareness.

Ivalyou enables sensitisation and contemplation on this ONEness. It is a symbol or imagination, if some may say so. But a very useful imagination! “Please bring me water” – the words in the sentence are imagination too, where meanings have been imposed on sounds. But a very useful imagination indeed! Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, commenting on the Kena Upaniṣad in  c. 9^th century CE, said, “All knowledge derived from books is imaginary. Only that knowledge which is absorbed, lived within and becomes part of awareness is true.”

YOU are only a reflection of I in the mirror of the mind. Let the mirror not limit the understanding of the imagined selves. Rather, let the mirror enable ME to see myself even more clearly in all the YOUs. At the purest level of awareness, YOU is the YOUniverse which includes ME. I am the infinite Consciousness that includes YOU. The word for you in Xhosa, an African language, is, Ubuntu, which means, ‘I am because we are’.

Brian Rotman in Becoming Beside Ourselves (2008) explains how the spoken ‘I’ folds within itself the unexpungable invocation of ‘you’ to whom the utterance ‘I’ is addressed and how without ‘your’ presence human speech is impossible. ‘I’ also includes the generic ‘they’, the others, reference to whom is always symbolic. It is inevitable to conclude then with Eros Corazza, (2004), “One cannot conceive of oneself as oneself without also  conceiving others.” There cannot be any ‘I’ without ‘YOU’! This ‘I’ refers to a self-conscious entity simply known as the Self.  As mentioned earlier in this book, the Saṃskṛt word for I is ahaṁ. It comprises the first letter of the Saṃskṛt alphabet, a, and the last, ha. The nasalization of ha is indicative of the infinity beyond any sound. Ahaṁ thus includes all the alphabets, making sense of I, an all inclusive awareness of myself, which includes all you. While I makes sense of myself as limited and exclusive to the others, Ahaṁ makes me feel all inclusive, “I include all, I am all, I am you and the whole of Youniverse”. The personal mission then is to journey from I to Ahaṁ. It is time that ahaṁ replaces I in our daily communication. I love you could be said as, Ahaṁ love you!

Scientists also believe that the ‘I’ pronoun is becoming obsolete, according to an article from Vanderbilt University and the University of Michigan, in August 2015 edition of PLOS Biology. Recent microbiological research suggests that thinking of plants and animals, including humans, as autonomous individuals might be an over-simplification. Seth Bordenstein, Associate Professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, says, “It’s a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. In this case, the parts are the host and its genome plus the thousands of different species of bacteria living in or on the host, along with all their genomes, collectively known as the microbiome. The host is something like the tip of the iceberg, the researchers say, while the bacteria are like the part of the iceberg that is underwater. Nine out of every 10 cells in plant and animal bodies are bacterial. But bacterial cells are so much smaller than host cells that they have generally gone unnoticed.”

Thus the body of a human, for example, called the ‘host’, comprises 40 trillion cells. Ten times that or about 400 trillion cells, are the ‘guests’ that live on the ‘host’ body. Each of the 440 trillion cells is an independent living entity, each having its own life cycle and intelligence. Together, they form the whole, known to us as our body! Microbiologists have coined new terms for these collective entities – holobiont, and for their genomes – hologenome. These terms are needed to define the assemblage of organisms that make up the so-called individual who refers to herself or himself as a singular, ‘I’.

My Guru,

Once, in a whisper,

Muttered, and fell silent-

God is a poet,

He wrote only one poem though,

Of only one verse-

the Uni-verse …

I often strained my ears

To hear

That one verse which God wrote.

In the cankerous cacophony of a day

I once heard a whisper echo

In the sky dome of my heart-

“Ivalyou”.

–        Dr. Pawan Kumar Mishra