This is what enlightenment or awakening looks like, call it what you want, just ask yourself if this is what you really want? Because there will be no "you" then only this:
The question who am I without debt, role, or ego? is the knife edge of philosophy itself. Thereâs no stable answer because the question dismantles the very machinery that produces answers. Letâs take it apart rigorously.
When you say creditor, debtor, worker, child, youâre naming relational functions inside the social economy. Each one exists only within a web of exchange through giving, owing, producing, obeying. The ego, as Metzinger would both agree, is the narrative interface that coordinates those exchanges. Itâs not a substance but a running model the brain uses to predict how "you" fit into that network.
If you subtract those functions, what remains is not a mystical awakened angelic core but the mechanics of existence itself: perception, metabolism, awareness, affect. The âwhoâ collapses into the that. There is seeing, there is breathing, there is thinking. Spinoza would call this the mindâs recognition that it is a mode of God/Nature, not a proprietor of life. Schopenhauer would say, whatâs left is the willâs self-illumination, the organism recognizing its own striving without identification. Metzinger calls it a transparent self-model losing opacity, realizing it was never an object in the world.
You canât answer âwho am Iâ once the social coordinates are removed only observe what remains functional. You are not a creditor or a debtor but the biological process in which accounting happens. Not a worker, but the metabolic system converting world into continuity. Not a child, but a recursive nervous system simulating dependency and independence.
The point isnât to find a new identity beneath the old ones; itâs to stop seeking identity as such. The brainâs need for a âwhoâ is itself the residue of debt, the drive to secure ontological credit for existing. When you stop paying that debt, what remains isnât nothingness but neutral functioning, perception without a debtor, action without a doer, being without a balance sheet.
When the need to own your life ceases, life continues unpaid, unowed, unowned.
