A quest about existence

The feel of nothingness is not feeling nothing, but exploring something which is beyond the breaking point of our own thoughts.

Did you ever ask yourself what is a person? Or what is the existence of a person or you yourself? I think these are the kind of questions which require much amount of wisdom and curiosity to reach to an end. So, this is not an attempt to reach an end, instead, I am trying to give some thought on it.
One day I was standing in front of the mirror, and I felt like I am a stranger to me. Initially, it was not like that, but as time progresses I look deeper and deeper into my reflection and found myself strange to me. Then there were a whole lot of questions: Why I was like that? Who is actually there in the reflection? Why a person cannot think like someone else? etc. For easiness, I jumped into the oversimplified concept of uniqueness. But, the search was for the root of all that. Everything was normal before that, but from that point, there was some blank space that should be filled with something, perhaps which cannot be filled. It seems to be very strange to me. It was like someone walking in the dark without any source of light.
It is said that we are all made of atoms, which are born at the heart of stars and supernova. And today’s physics tells that all the matter started its journey from the big-bang. But, describing a person from a physical view alone would not be appropriate. It is more philosophical.
The materialistic view found to be too narrow. It would ultimately reach a state where there is no difference between anything, and everything collapses into the concept of matter and energy alone. One could build a great ideology out of this, but it would terribly lack anything more than a physical entity. Of course, we could say that for physics a man and a stone having an equal amount of matter have no difference. But, let us think in a wider perspective.
A person has a physical body, mind and he would interact with his fellow being through behavior. This is true at least in my reality, which is what I could perceive through my senses. So clearly concept like soul or anything like that is out of this discussion. The body of a human being could be explained biologically, from the cell to the organ systems, we could explain each of its function and properties. The mind could be roughly explained, at least as the sum of all cognitive ability, where cognition gives the ability to an organism to respond to its very surroundings. This is there even in microorganisms such as bacteria, where it could respond to its surroundings through chemical reactions. The basic mechanism of response is some set of chemical reactions in higher organisms also, but there would be added complexity. So we could say that each living things possess body and mind, so each has its own existence, and therefore are unique. Notice that uniqueness doesn’t necessarily mean genetically different here. It only means the independent capability of an organism in decision making and in executing such decisions. So from here, in this discussion, we could call such things, any living thing as an “entity”.
We could say that any such entity may change from one point to another, both in space and time. Here we are considering mainly the mind. That is, consider a person, he would change from point to point, and from one time to another. You can’t surely say that he is the person you had seen in the past, even though they are so similar and physically appear to be the same. Each entity would evolve from time to time behaviourally.
Being a social animal it is important for us to consider the group. Society isn’t just a collection, it is rich with interaction, coordination, and rules. Rules and coordination are there to make social life easier. We’d already said that a person would change from point to point. These changes are caused by incidents in the past. That is each person is a product of a process through which he had passed until the present point of time. That is the sum of many things he has received from society or his surroundings. This makes a person, a representative of the society in which he lives.
Let us see what makes the society then. Roughly it is the result of interaction between the persons living in it, or entities in it. And many organisms could organize into larger groups. Society would become ordered or chaotic depending on the people living in it. So, before we had seen that each person is evolving in his or her social environment. Now, we could say that each person has a contribution to this environment, and as a whole, this would look like a cyclic system, which is self-evolving. This property can explain the evolution of human society from the stone age to this ultra-modern era, with all its complexity. Here the social memory comes into the play to explain things more efficiently than individual memories.
The religious philosophies had already talked a lot about the integration of individual entities into larger and larger bodies, as it is the need of any religion for its existence. But, some of the views they had presented have deeper meanings, whether or not they intended to say so. There is a concept of cosmic soul in Hinduism, which gives the view of connectedness between all in the universe. In Mahabharath, after the incarnation of Yudhistira, Barberi who is the grandson of Bheem was giving a description of the war. In that only person who was fighting in the field was Krishna and no one else, he was using weapons and he was bleeding. I found this to be one of the finest moments in the whole story. But, here we are not going into the religious concept of cosmic soul. Let us go to the concept of society and person. That is that instance nullifies the existence of a person and gives more importance to society. And any act is affecting society as a whole. Each war or a crime is the result of a system and not of a single person. A system has to be capable of liberating a person from the past and enabling them to attain their capabilities.
Sometimes one could feel like, they don’t actually exist. That the boundaries of their body are vanishing and diffusing into the air. There is no person or entity. One would forget about himself, about the reality in which they live. There would be no darkness or no light. There would be nothing. Absolute nothingness is where I reached last. As I told you in the beginning, we still not reached at any end, and my dear friend it is your pursuit to go behind this question, ask questions about your existence. As I had said, it was darkness, but that nothingness was something that I had to feel. The feel of nothingness is not feeling nothing, but exploring something which is beyond the breaking point of our own thoughts. It could be a fresh step.