At the beginning of your life, some innate modality set a sense of presence in the driver’s seat and handed it the reins, forging a ‘you’ in the process. Despite our grasping at definitions, you are not a myth to us, we all very much believe you exist, largely without any verifiable evidence. ‘You’ are the prolific actor, proprietor and progenitor of our world. Everything we build around ourselves was made for the ‘you’ idea, making it clear we have believed in you for a long time.

Most of us tend to recognize another ‘self’ when we see one, to observe it seeking nutrients or enjoying something gives us an even more powerful feeling than recognition. We rightfully apply a host of ubiquities to most other life forms based on the experience of being this one, especially towards those who live in the ecosystem we do and are seen partaking in it. It doesn’t take a scientist to see that all other animals eat like us, plants spread their leaves in the sun for selfish gain, and everyone’s babies cry more or less for the same reasons. These are concepts we are ready to understand. We are surrounded by ‘selves’ and every one of them seems to have needs. 

All of this is good reasoning to take the idea of the self very seriously, and we do; believing wholeheartedly in the existence of ourselves and others without much evidence besides this shared personal experience we appear to be having. It’s worth mentioning that from what little data we have, it would seem the format of conscious life invites us to draw this big conclusion about itself, since these are the faculties we were given to view the data as well as the conditions this data first came in. This conclusion I’m talking about is that ‘you’ are real. It might seem like a stretch, but it’s at least safe to say that you and many others feel and act real all day long.

But to define you will take more than this anecdotal evidence. There is no better starting point for objective definition than biology. It’s quite difficult to define a leaf apart from the context of the tree from which it grows, but as a vehicle for photosynthesis, the leaf’s presence at the end of the stem makes a lot of sense. Similarly, your brain has no capability without the body by which it experiences its stimuli or sends its signals, and your stomach has no use except to a body of organic material that could discover it is hungry and seek out nutrients to add to its mass. All across your personal systemology, you are useful to something, mirroring the systemology you are from. 

In your own biological self as well, you are a system not of thousands, but of millions of separate enterprises. Rather than envision the native human person as someone with singular or monocular administration - as the modern world defines adulthood - recertify your inclinations to their origins. Your vacillations between methodologies, motivations, thoughts, and environments are markers of your symbiotic habitation with the many agents within and topical to you that make you up. To separate yourself from this mass of life the universe tossed you into is an exceptionalist idea. You are not just one, two, or three. ‘You’ are many. 

The primary problem with the modern world’s definition of you is what it leaves out, not what it includes. To really get somewhere with an objective definition of the native mind, you have to conceptualize yourself as one of the functionalities of nature and not just one of her members. To leave out your inherent mutualist functionality is to ease yourself away from the only reality you have, and the only reasonable basis to define yourself apart from the social struggles you were handed. The effect of those social throes is the world we have, whereas the result of your body’s functionality is an affective synthesis alongside masses of life that do not need evidence of your social standing to make deals with you. One of these systems creates castes and hierarchies atop nature’s order - for better or worse - and the other creates healthy bodies. All other lifeforms on the planet have definitive places in the original system, but the modern world treats your genome as if you are an invasive species, muddling the evidence around who and what you are in your native state as a result. 

Because you exist, we know that nature has some use for you, one that may be re-discovered in the mind it initially gave you. In contrast to what most modern messaging claims, ‘you’ are just like the leaf in your natural state, neither parasitic nor paralyzed in your search for functional wellness. This biological context helps define you in a way social standing cannot. If life is a tree, you are one of its vital nutrient gatherers; and this is an activity, not a job description or mindset. The native mind may be described as one that doesn’t need to think it is something to act in the interests of the system at large. It simply observes its needs and seeks to fulfill them. By doing so, it performs the function that denotes its purpose. To begin our search for the definitive state of the anthropic human mind, your purposes towards personal wellness must be recategorized as life’s envisioning of its own wellness. In this recertification of your natural inclinations you will find what it is that sets your modern mind apart from your native one. All ideations that define your existence outside of your participation in an active ecosystem are clear divergences of trajectory in nature's mutualist systemology.