text: would you exist without me knowing of you? are we each all that is? no, i pretty much just pop into existence whenever you think of me. . . . ok, so that was sort of a joke. but really it depends on your idea of “self.” i do not believe that, metaphysically, i am an independent existing self or soul. my physical body is distinct from your body, so my perspective is distinct from yours, but this manner of speaking in terms of “i” and “you” as distinct souls or isolated selves is misleading. existence is ultimately a unity. every experience is experienced as “mine.” when you have the visual experience of seeing a tree, you can think about this experience and say with confidence: “this is my experience.” similarly, if i look at a tree, i can say with confidence: “this is my experience.” we can also say with high degree of confidence that we are talking about two experiences. even if the experience are qualitatively identical (i.e., we are looking at identical trees with identical backgrounds and experiencing the exact same sorts of bodily sensations and we both happen to happen to experience the same sorts of emotions and memories when viewing the tree, etc.) we would still want to say that these experiences are numerically distinct because, upon further investigation, we will discover that we have two distinct physical bodies, and we are having these experiences at unique locations in spacetime. but when we consider “who” it is who, in each case, claims that the experience is “mine” we find something interesting. the “feeling of being mine” is (or at least seems like it could be) what philosophers call a “universal”. a universal is basically a property or attribute that exists whenever and/or wherever a particular thing instantiates it. take a shape, for example, like “round.” the shape “round” exists wherever a round thing exists. there is one shape “round” that exist in many different places (round baseballs, soccer balls, soap bubbles…). my suggestion is that the experience of “mineness” is a universal, and furthermore, the deeper roots of universality (of any sort) are to be found in the oneness of the source of all experience. there is, you might say, one experiencer having many different experiences, and the differences in these experiences are based on the differences in the embodied perspectives associated with each instance of experience. i would say that the experiencer is the universe itself. “i” am the universe experiencing existence from my perspective, and you are the one and same universe experiencing existence from your perspective. so, would “i” exist if “you” did not know of me? it depends one whether you are thinking in terms of the universal experiencer, or the individual embodied experiences. my body, and thus my own experience of “mineness” would exist whether your embodied consciousness knows of my individual existence or not. but in terms of the universal experiencer, obviously “i” can exist only so long as “you” (in your deepest metaphysical identity as the universal experiencer) in some sense “know” about me (because at this metaphysical level of discussion, the “you” and “i” are one and the same being).