When I was seven I had the experience that my senses didn’t belong to any central “I”. I didn’t know to whom the senses were relaying information to but I did notice that there was some kind of memory and accumulation of experience that affected how this body-mind developed.

But it didn’t seem to fit in with how my parents and teachers interacted with me as if I was a Martin person at the centre of it all. This was deeply unpleasant because it was the first time that I realized that our general language did not always reflect what reality was actually like and actually couldn’t accurately reflect anything quite that well.

I pretended to be Martin as best as I could for everybody else and even sometimes even believed that the name actually referred to some kind of Martin self that existed inside and experienced things that the senses delivered to it. Really the experience was more like there was no “me”, only God and it was God that was “seeing”, “hearing” etc. There was no me in the shadow of God.

I had my next even more powerful experience of this when I was 15 and then knew that I was not going to have a very conventional life and that I had to find out who I truly was if that was at all possible.