The Split between I and Me: A Step towards Enlightenment through a Grammar Lesson

For almost 10 years, in front of thousands of college students, I taught English. While English Instructor is not an especially enigmatic title, there are some pretty common misconceptions about what goes on in those classrooms. When I would tell people what I did, most would quietly respond with an embarrassed, “Oh, I’m terrible at grammar.” I heard it so often that I had a rehearsed, “Well, I can barely add,” reply that I’d clumsily toss into the conversation. What most people don’t realize is that those of us who hold advanced English degrees didn’t go to school to learn grammar. We studied literature, rhetoric, and critical thinking. We looked at the nuances of language and how those slight variations have decided our fate through the creation of laws and institutional oppression. We examined cultural movements, historical inaccuracies, and the human condition. And we wrote – we wrote a lot. Ask any college English instructor what he or she does, and the response will overwhelming include some of those words. Rarely will anyone say, “I teach pronoun case.”

Most of us weren’t confident in our own grammar usage when we first started teaching. As a novice instructor, I would write “Awkward Construction” and “Revise for Clarity” on the majority of student papers. Those phrases helped with the revision process and kept me from having to figure out what seemingly arbitrary grammatical law had been broken. Sometime around my third year, though, I taught my first developmental writing course. These non-credit courses are for students who, for whatever reason, are unable to be placed in composition courses. In general, they are designed around reading comprehension and, as expected, grammar.

Like anything, to be able to teach grammar, I had to learn grammar. Textbook after textbook, quiz after quiz, I learned the rules. To my surprise, they weren’t arbitrary at all. They had long histories, complicated changes, and systematic patterns. I found them fascinating. I spent days researching the shifts from Old English to Middle English and Middle English to Modern English. Within a few months, I was confident and ready to answer any question a student might grumpily toss my way. Because I loved it, my students began to love it. Although my background was in post-modern literature and theory, I volunteered to teach every ENC 0001 course that showed up on the schedule. In a field like writing, we live the in the gray area, that place where good and bad are subjective terms that teeter back and forth depending on the situation. When I taught grammar, I was able to give definitive right and wrong answers, and that was often comforting… even if it did mean a certain level of consistency that sometimes became monotonous.

One of my favorite grammar lessons to teach was pronoun case. I would always tell the students that pronouns, as simple as they are, are some of the most commonly misused words in all of English. We’d talk about who and whom, and she and her, and all those other pronouns that sound weird to people when they are used correctly. I must have drawn the Subject/Object chart on the whiteboard 100 times. I’d tell them, “Don’t go by what sounds right. All you have to do to know whether to use I or me is to answer the question, 'Am I the subject – am I doing something; or, am I the object – is something being done to me?'” Funny how understanding subjects and objects can change the way we see our own
situations.

About a year ago, there were the first talks of moving me into administration. And since this is a blog about subjects and objects, notice that I am not the subject of that sentence. These conversations had been going on for months behind closed doors. Finally, after several other things had fallen into place, I became aware of them. My initial response was quick, without hesitation, “No, thank you.” Then, I thought more and more about it. I called my mentor and asked for his advice; I talked to my most trusted colleague and friend, whose knowledge of educational administration is rivaled only by her devotion to seeing me happy; and I spent time asking myself if I was really ready to come out of the classroom. Although I loved teaching (and will probably one day return to it), I was ready for something different, something that would get me back to that gray, chaotic area I so adore.

My final interview – there were four in total – for this position was in Ft. Lauderdale with the person who is, essentially, over all of academics. During my interview, he told me that he was excited to have someone with a liberal arts background in this role. He said that he wanted someone who was able to think critically about situations and understand that, at the end of the day, we deal with philosophical questions that don’t always have right and wrong answers. “We could train anyone to be a manager,” he said, “but we want thinkers, people who are able to accept the complexities of leading human beings who all have their own motivations.” I realized (and exclaimed), at that exact moment, that my entire academic life had been preparing me for this. He shook my hand and welcomed me to the position.

After that interview, as I drove back to Orlando, I thought about how I responded. The interview lasted several hours, but all I could think about was how I had phrased that one key sentence. Grammatically, the sentence was perfectly acceptable. Logically, however, the statement sounded trite and weak. As someone who had studied the subtleties of language, why would I have said that my academic life had prepared me? Why was I the object of that sentence?  Why had I allowed myself to be acted upon? My academic life wasn’t even a living thing – how could it have been what prepared me? I was trying to show prowess and confidence; I should have been the subject.

The next week I started in my new position and the error in rhetorical logic that had plagued the four-hour drive home had all but left my mind. Like any nagging thought, though, nearly five months later, it reappeared. It was in a different form, but the meaning was the same. I was reading Tolle’s The Power of Now for the second time when I came across his chapter titled "Enlightened Relationships." In that chapter he presents the argument that in order to find fulfillment in our relationships – platonic, familial, sexual, spiritual – we must first realize that we often split ourselves into two: I and me – the subject and the object. He suggests that this duality is the root cause of unnecessary complications and conflicts. Instantly, I realized that this profound statement about enlightenment was, at its heart, a grammar lesson. How we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we experience pain, happiness, loss, even excitement, all revolve around whether or not we use I or me. Are we subjects, or are we objects?

Even when we find ourselves as objects, we still have a choice. There are situations that will always put us in the object case, but how we react, how we respond, and how we feel all return us to the positions of power – we have the choice to become the more powerful subjects. What an empowering realiziation. Then, without any form of mental warning, the clarity dissipated and I felt the twinges of focused confusion.

Once more I returned to my professional life. I thought back to the drive from Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando, when I felt such irritations with myself because I thought I could have responded to an interview question better – even though I got the job. I thought about the way I’d tell my Professional Writing students to use passive voice when they didn’t want to accept responsibility. “If your company does something questionable, focus on the action, not the ones who did it,” I’d say. I even thought about the “Revise for Clarity” statements that I left when I was unsure of the error. Becoming that all-powerful I also means accepting responsibility for the decisions you have made.

With practice, through mediation and awareness, almost every spiritual guide suggests that this split between I and me can be mended. I like the way Tolle says it: “In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself. […] The split caused by the self-reflective consciousness is healed.” Perhaps that’s what self-love and self-awareness are all about. Perhaps all those grammar lessons were so appealing to me because they were ways to examine our existence through simple rules… but like any good writer will tell you, you learn the rules so that you know when to break them. (I've broken about three in this blog alone because I want the tone to be contemplative.) Even in my new position, there are times when we break policies because we know the good outweighs the consequences.

Since I can remember, I’ve examined dualities: good/evil, dark/light, male/female, and now, as I’m realizing, I/me. Tolle posits that when we achieve enlightenment, those dualities cease to exist, or as he says, the “curse [will be] removed.” Are good and bad completely subjective? Do gender roles exist solely because we want them to? Questions like this are so perfectly complicated. I could spend years thinking about them. In terms of achieving enlightenment, I still have a lot of work to do. I struggle, especially with self-love, but I think I am closer to self-awareness than I have ever been before. I’m slowly getting better at remedying the conflict between I and me. And as much as I’d like to thank the spiritual texts and the years of meditation, I think most of the credit really belongs to “Chapter 4: Pronouns.”  

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Although I see some inherent flaws in his logic, I'm presenting Tolle's section here:

But do you need to have a relationship with yourself at all? Why can’t you just be yourself? When you have a relationship with yourself, you have split yourself into two: “I” and “myself,” subject and object. That mind-created duality is the root cause of all unnecessary complexity, of all problems and conflict in your life.  In the state of enlightenment, you are yourself – “you” and “yourself” merge into one. You do not judge yourself, you do not feel sorry for yourself, you are not proud of yourself, you do not love yourself, you do not hate yourself, and so on. The split caused by self-reflective consciousness is healed, its curse removed. There is no “self” that you need to protect, defend, or feed anymore. When you are enlightened, there is one relationship that you no longer have: the relationship with yourself. Once you have given that up, all your other relationships will be love relationships.