Yesterday I was sitting alone in a Chinese restaurant staring at a bottle of soy sauce,

remembering when I was 22, visiting family in Detroit. My aunt introduced me to a psychologist friend who asked me, "What is 'I'?"

"Huh?"

"What do we mean when we say, 'I'? When you refer to 'I', what are you talking about?"

"Well," I said, "I'm talking about my thoughts, the things that go on in my head." No, he said, that's not it."

I was studying psychology and anyone who was already a full fledged psychologist automatically held a lot of respect in my eyes, so I tried harder to answer his question. "It's everything you see, my body, my hair, the words that come out of my mouth." He responded: "That's how I see you. But how do YOU see you?" "I identify myself by what I do. I'm a student, a traveler..." he shook his head no. "It's my history," I babbled on. "It's everything I remember about myself."

I was at a loss. I didn't know how to please him, or what he was after. My aunt watched all this nodding her head. Whenever I'd come up with an inadequate explanation he'd turn to her and say, "See what I mean?" and she'd nod some more.

Finally I got frustrated with the exercise and took a stand. "I'm my thoughts... my picture of myself, and that's it." I figured he'd then tell me who I was, or rather what sort of answer he was looking for, but he didn't. And by then I felt too defensive and proud to pursue it.

Since that day I've thought about awareness of self, and what it means. Somewhere along the way I discovered we can't describe 'I' from the inside, but only objectively. We see everything from outside. This bottle of soy sauce on the table... it has the characteristic Kikkoman shape but I know the sauce inside is not Kikkoman.

It never is in a Chinese restaurant. They always refill it with that mushroomy stuff you can buy in Chinatown by the gallon. I can tell you scads about this bottle, but I cannot become it. We don't describe

things from the inside out, not

even ourselves. To talk about me, I stand outside myself and look in.

If I were to meet that man now, forty years later, I would answer him differently. I would begin by speaking about him. I would say, "You are my mirror. The deeper I look into your eyes the more I see myself. At our core, there is no difference between 'You' and 'I'. I am you. And if I look deeply enough into you I know I will find the beauty of the universe.

So to answer your question, I am the beauty of the universe.