How many I's am I?

There's our animal self, which hungers and lusts and bares its fangs when its turf is challenged; our emotional self, which loves and fears, exults and agonizes; our intellectual self, which perceives and analyses and contemplates the other selves with smug detachment; our spiritual self, which strives and yearns, worships and venerates. There's the self you were at the age of 8, and the self you're going to be at 80. There's the self I was last Tuesday, when I woke up in a foul mood, snapped at my kids, cowered before my boss, stabbed my co-workers in the back and hung up the phone on my mother-in-law; there's the self I'm going to be tomorrow, when I'll be loving to my family, respectful but firm with my boss, and kind, fair and considerate to everyone else.

How can we possibly imagine that in the conglomerate of cells, organs and limbs we call our "body", extending across the rises and furrows of the terrain we call "time", there resides a single and singular "I"?^[1]

Oneness

Yom Kippur, explain the Chassidic masters, is the day that our intrinsic oneness rises to the surface.

For 364 days a year, the fragments of our life and personality lie dispersed throughout the chambers of our soul and strewn across the expanses of space and time. On Yom Kippur, we are empowered to unite them with their source and point them towards their goal.

{NOTE: This is a piece that upholds the idea of the "I" that I am, also is uniting with 1 (singularity) that I am.}

Footnotes