I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you are not who you think that you are.
How do I know you have it all wrong? Because I know that the entire world has conspired to define who you are in a certain way that was repeated so often, you began to believe it.
The basis of this definition is that you are a separate, automated, isolated entity: what most often refer to as an “individual.” In fact, right now you might be thinking of yourself as a person reading an article.
However, that is not the truth at all, in fact. It is a grand delusion, and I am here to tell you how it all happened and how to go beyond it.
How it started
When you came into this world, you were given a certificate that said you are a person with a name, a social security number, a birthdate, and a birthplace.
Before you could speak, everyone around you referred to you as this name and you were given things that were “yours.”
As the indoctrination process continued, you were trained very well. People would ask you the same questions over and over again: “Who are you? What is your name? How old are you? Where are you from?”, and sure enough, you would provide the requisite response of autobiographical information.
As life continued on, those things that were given to you as “yours” suddenly became part of the tightly wound conglomeration of things that you called “mine.” You said that things were “my shirt, my room,” and you decided on something that you called “my hairstyle.”
Along with seeing yourself with a conglomeration of materialistic things and superficial qualities, you also took on a number of thoughts, emotions, beliefs, likes, and dislikes, and deposited those into your identity bank.
It did not matter that none of these things started out as your own. Now, through a constant act of clinging and identification, what you were given and exposed to became part of who you think you are.
You speak a language you did not invent, share political views with your parents, friends and things you have read (which are essentially other people’s opinions), emotional responses you saw in the media, and a belief system put forth by your religion or education system.
You might say you are a cat person or a dog person, but where did this belief come from? Most likely, you were raised with cats or dogs and became familiar with them, or you had a bad experience with one or the other and that formulated this belief. Either way, this self-identity is a mixture of likes and dislikes to things you perceive as good and bad.
But, of course, your biography is not who you are, the past doesn’t really exist and even your name is just a random set of phonetics decided by your parents.
Thought is founded on the past, so thought cannot know the unknown, the immeasurable. The thought process must come to an end. Then only the unknowable comes into being. – J. Krishnamurti
You are not the English language, you are not your political views, you are not your father’s eyes or your mother’s anxieties. You are not the ugly loser somebody called you that one time or how your teachers have evaluated your reading level in 4th grade.
You are not who you think you are.
It’s Ok
First off, there is no need to blame yourself. This world has a vested interest in you not knowing who you are and has done everything it can to set you up as a lonely, isolated, and separate entity.
Every form you filled out, every bathroom you entered into, every social media profile you made, every bank account, nametag, and introduction, required you to solidify the autobiographical information that solidified your idea of yourself as an individual subject operating in a separate objective world.
Capitalism wants you to buy things to define yourself, politicians want you to adopt their beliefs rather than come up with your own, and pretty much everyone you meet wants you to conform to their sense of reality and not yours.
All of this begs the question: who are you, really?
For us to truly understand and discover who we are, we have to unravel all that we are not.
You Are Not Your Shoes
To understand who you are, let us first focus on who you are not. You are not your thoughts, your emotions, your love or hate for Taylor Swift, or your Instagram page.
You are not your hairstyle, lifestyle, or how expensive or cheap your clothing is. You are not how much money you make or even what you do for what you call your job.
All of these things are temporary, anyway. If you think that you are a teacher, are you still the same person after you get fired? If you think that you are a runner and your legs get broken in a car accident, are you a different person now?
If suddenly you take a bunch of music classes on the beauty of jazz music, are you a different person because you no longer listen to Drake? If someone deletes your Facebook profile, do you cease to exist? Do you think like Descarte, that “I tweet; therefore, I am?”
Clearly not. Throughout our life we assume certain identities and roles, finishing the sentence “I am” with a sister, brother, parent, teacher, friend, good swimmer or poor chess player. We might think that we are beautiful or ugly, a success or a failure, old or young or that we like Chinese food or Mexican food.
All of these things are temporary, relative and if we are honest with ourselves, pretty abstract. Sure, if you judge a fish’s ability to climb a tree, you might say it was a failure. But is the fish itself a failure? Of course not.
And if by reading this you begin to think you are less like a combination of your judgements and more like the maple tree or the arrangement of stars, then you are on the right track.
In the same vein, you are not the stories you tell yourself. Stories are just stories; they are made up fairytales that we use to navigate our world in.
Whether you think the earth revolves around the sun, the earth is flat or hollow, or that the sun is pulled by a chariot across the sky, all those are just stories. Do the sun, earth, or flowers that arise from the meeting of the two have any of those stories? No, they do not bother, they do not need to. They know who they are.
You are none of these things I have described so far, because, well, you are not a thing or a conglomeration of things at all.
You are something grander, something larger, something more beautiful and more incredible that your little mind could ever imagine.
Get on with it! You might be thinking. Tell me who I am!
Ok, here we go.
Stepping onto the path
Unfortunately, I cannot tell you who you are, because who you are is not a thing at all. You are not a word that I can convey to you at this moment. A word or concept is going to come from the outside, but true self-discovery can only come from within.
“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.” – José Saramago
You, yes you, can only be discovered on a path. A path of self-discovery, one of the deepest callings we have as human beings, and the beginning of any genuine spiritual path.
Indeed, the question, “who am I?” is one of the most deeply spiritual questions you can ask yourself.
“He who knows others is wise, he who knows himself is enlightened” writes Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. “The kingdom of God is within you,” Jesus of Nazareth said in Luke 17:21. “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward person dwells truth.” wrote Saint Augustine.
Even the psychologist Carl Jung shared a similar perspective, “Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
And again, the question does not have an answer, it has a path. On that path, you might discover any number of possibilities.
Maybe a Buddhist will tell you that the nature of anatman, or the reality of egolessness, and you are an illusion. A nondual Hindu might tell you what you are is unknowable, so all we can say is you are that. That which goes beyond any word or idea. A Christian might say that you are a soul on the path of judgement by God. A person more involved in the new age movement might tell you that you are love, light or source energy.
Whether you are a soul, spirit, love, source energy, the absolute, emptiness, or a complex bag of skin doing an infinitely complex set of chemical reactions, the truth is no one can tell you who you truly are.
Only you can truly know who you are through a path of internal discovery and transformation. You will not find yourself in any book, lecture, or meditation hall.
One thing is clear
On this path of self-discovery, one thing should be eminently clear: in this moment, you are not a thing at all, but a phenomenon. A process. A flow. A verb.
Just as a “waterfall” is not an object but a description of a relatively consistent flow of matter and energy, that is what you are too.
Seven years from today, every atom that is in your body right now will have been replaced by a new one, and those that made up your body now will have a new life in fish, birds and leaves.
Indeed, you are much more similar to the candle flame than the candle. You are constantly interchanging and exchanging with the world around you. If you do not believe me, try holding your breath. Try stopping your heart. Try not drinking water for a week or food for a month. Trust me, any attempt to become a solid stable separate object will not succeed.
In just the minute that you have read the previous two paragraphs, 120 million red blood cells have been born and died and 40,000 skin cells have flaked off your body to create the dust on your bookshelves.
In your last breath, you inhaled a molecule also breathed by Jesus, and another by Caesar. Now that molecule is a part of you, as millions no longer are.
Our existence is based on borrowed matter and energy. “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”, wrote Walt Whitman.
So that whole thing about being an “individual” that is a separate, automated, and isolated entity? Not true. Like every other living “thing,” you depend on air, food (also living things), and water. All of life is flowing through you, and you in fact, are that same life.
But as human beings, we uniquely depend on each other more than any other species on the planet. We are social beings; we thrive on social connection. Our most popular technology? Social networks.
It’s true. You are not an independent entity, but an interdependent being. Connected in this one world we all belong to where everything sooner or later is a part of everything else.
In other words, you cannot think who you are, you cannot know who you are, you can only be who you are and discover more of what you are on the spiritual path.
