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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: somebody else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody
else's feet against the stretcher; my own body seemed to have no
more intimate relation to me than the canoe, or the river, or the
river banks. Nor this alone: something inside my mind, a part of
my brain, a province of my proper being, had thrown off allegiance
and set up for itself, or perhaps for the somebody else who did the
paddling. I had dwindled into quite a little thing in a corner of
myself. I was isolated in my own skull. Thoughts presented
themselves unbidden; they were not my thoughts, they were plainly
some one else's; and I considered them like a part of the
landscape. I take it, in short, that I was about as near Nirvana
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