Egg

Separation was done to you.

It’s quite the miracle.

There’s the baby, fresh out of the womb. Immediately, intense conditioning is thrown at it and doesn’t stop for the rest of its life:

you are a person
you are <your name>
you are the owner of the body
you are the doer, decider, thinker
you are xyz (millions of beliefs)
you must control much of your life.

From the moment the body is born there is relentless conditioning of its software.

This is a group programming effort.

Everyone chips in. It becomes a mass movement of programming the body into believing it is a separate self.

And it works almost all the time.

The miracle is really that we end up with one, coherent self-identity: my self-narrative, continually revised and optimized to ensure coherence.

And sometimes it goes haywire. Then we need psychiatry.

But for most of us most of the time, there’s a coherent self and this self is obviously who we are.

Until we start noticing the cracks in that egg of self.

Until we break out of a shell that never was.