How Did I Get Here?

I was brought across a chasm from a place where there was no 'I.' When I got here I couldn't remember any more than that - no sounds or sights or feelings from that place before. If it even was a place. All I can remember is that yawning, gaping chasm that fell beneath me like an eternal, black well.  Silence. Fear. Flesh. I felt them as I took them on, as they flew toward me from the nothingness, that black silence, that impenetrable darkness that was separating me from my earlier home. All at once I had these constraints, these limbs, these eyes, these hands, and it was only because I now had them that I knew I hadn't had them before. Now I knew there was an I, although I didn't know what that meant. 

As I flew, or drifted, for I had no gauge for the speed at which I traveled, all I knew was grief, for a time, although time, too, was indistinguishable from a singular point. It washed over me like a tide, drowning me in despair and loss, and as I reached out I could feel nothing else. Where and what and who I had been, when I hadn't been self-aware, was gone, like a drop of water vanquished by sunlight. My bereavement was thick, like a scar covering my entire soul. It was only in turning toward that conceit, that there was a self, that there was a soul, and they were me, that the depthless dark hole of abandonment and wholeness rent asunder began to retreat. If I turned toward this new knowledge, this new way, I could begin to slide that solid, black pain first to the corner of my vision, then, gradually, to shun it to the most distant recesses of what I was coming to know as my mind. I found that if I didn't see it, I didn't have to look at it. And if I didn't look at it, I didn't have to see it. And I began to breathe. In this new way of being, this was relief.

I looked around and soon could see the others who had not been others when they had been with me in that place before. They had not been anything. And now they were here. With me. We were here. The chasm was gone, as was the hard, smashing pain of leaving behind what I could no longer remember. For a moment I could still feel them inside me, us all together, when we were one. But then I remembered that I was. I was. And so they were too. And were each an I. And soon I forgot that there was anything but I. And there was a world. A world full of beings called 'I.' And I grew happy to be lost in it, and to be left to my own devices.