It seems that there are two distinct places where I can focus my attention. The first is the world of the mind connected to thinking, which we commonly refer to as ego, which from a young age has created a separate and distinct sense of self from everything that surrounds me. I am and I exist distinctly. The other is from the connection to the underlying consciousness that tends to be broader and interconnected with all of the universe. In this place, there is no I, there just is interconnection with everything.
Having said that, in my own experience, the interconnection did seem to happen from a perspective I. Meaning that I was interconnected with everything else. And in that experience, the I did seem to melt away into the expansiveness of everything, but since it has been so long in my memory, the I had the experience, so I can’t say with absolute certainty that the I disappeared. In fact, this is an experience I have been trying for years (without success) to return to and experience with greater presence of mind.
Regardless of if there is no place for I in the world of consciousness, it certainly is a different mental space, which just seems to exist and is stable, steady, and quiet, unlike the the part of my mind connected to thinking, which is constant, and noisy, and loud. And it is this part of my mind, that pushes itself to the forefront, either by design, or perhaps habit.
On an aside, thinking back, what I am now referring to as consciousness, I had previously noticed, but thought of as the border of the subconscious. In the past, I had thought of it like a membrane, where thoughts could go back and forth, but the underlying reality was a black box that my conscious mind could not access. I mention this since my mind model is constantly changing, and integrating new information, and am not sure if I might be incorrect before or now, or in both cases. As I look within, it is also possible that both of these are true, and are just of different focuses within the mind.
Running with my current thinking, though, there does seem to be a quiet part of my mind that I can access that is the exact opposite of the noisy part of my mind. When I can quiet my noisy mind, and sink into the peace of that place, I can sit with wholeness, or more correctly I am whole for a few minutes while I visit.
I guess the point of this post is really to tease out how diametrically opposite these two aspects of self are from each other. Thinking more about that, perhaps without the quietness I would not notice the noise, which makes a lot of sense. It is only with the contrasting background of quietness that we can ever hear anything, or it is only by experiencing the noise, that we can notice the silence that sits between it.