One of the strong taken-for-granted illusionary convictions one carries consistently is that he is a one single unified entity, one monolithic "I", one solid personality, one same-in-all-times John, one atomic Barbara.

The reasons the mind has developed and maintained this conviction are obvious - in this way the subject can relate to himself/herself as an object and moreover in this way an ego can develop, a sense of individual being, otherwise there can not be any individual entity to fit into that being.

The mechanism that enables the maintenance of this illusion of oneness is the free access to a common memory storage granted to all the personalities.

The truth is that such a monolithic "I" does not exist. A "person" is actually a huge collection of different inconsistent "I"s which in turn each of these "I"s is a huge collection of "mental particles" - thoughts, feelings, impressions, sensations - bundled together under a set of conditionings unique for each "I" which governs the transitions between the many mental particles in the conscious and unconscious levels (e.g. which thought will be invoked as a result of a previous emotion, which sensations will trigger a certain kind of anger etc.). You may say that each "I" is equivalent to a different set of conditionings and more accurately you may say that there are no "I"s at all, just a huge set of mental particles and conditionings with typical subsets that we tend to refer to them as "I"s. These different conditionings determine which of the "I"s is the one to take charge of consciousness at each time.

This is not a dogma or a theory, it can be easily noticed in personal experience. You can observe your "I"s, you do it subconsciously all the time.

You probably experienced zillion times a situation in which you went to sleep at night as one "I" and waked up in the morning as a completely different "I", inconsistent with the "I" that went to sleep, an "I" with a totally different agenda, many times quite angry at the previous-night "I". Moreover, if you sensed closely, you would have noticed that the two "I"s had different energies.

During the practice of Ramana Maharshi's Self Inquiry, when one observes the "I-feeling", one easily notices that actually there is no one consistent "I" but many different "I"s. Each with different presence, different flavour, different aura, like the difference you instinctively sense when you observe two persons in daily life

Are we merely sets of automatic robots equipped with ridiculous sense of importance wondering around until our batteries run out? Or even worse, is the "I" actually not even that, is it that it doesn't exist at all?

The answer to these questions is Yes. Yet there is a consolation: we haven't talked yet about the ultimate subject that observes all this, including these "I"s. Well, there is no much talking possible about it except that you may call it "god" and "you" are.

(Note: the above description is yet another futile trial to use words to describe things which are beyond words. It should be regarded therefore only as an approximation to the experiential essence intended to be conveyed. Also note that the text may be prone to different semantic and connotative interpretations of words made by different readers.)