For my whole life I have been searching for the answer to the question, “Who am I? Who am I really?”
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I looked for the answer first in religion, the one I was brought up in, and then those I discovered afterward in other spiritual traditions.
At some point that question changed from, “Who am I?” to “What am I?”
I started to have the sense that I wasn’t really this identity, this separate idea of myself that I had been taught I was, even though it felt like I was.
The question, “What am I?” seems more accurate to me.
Now I think, “What am I not?”
These questions aren’t things I can answer with my mind. I like the feeling of them.
When I ask these questions, I feel something about what I am that is beneath, beyond, before my little mind, my personality, my body and my self-created identity.
My identity, the way I talk about myself, is a story based on the past. I can and do tell that story every day. Mostly it runs my life. It makes the choices for me because I know who this person that I call “me” is, what she likes and what she doesn’t like, what she identifies with and what she pushes away.
I’m surprised to notice that rather than being depressed or perplexed by this, I’m asking what’s before that, I’m seeing through more of the illusion.
My identity can’t be me. It’s constantly changing. The feeling of it is unstable and insecure, so variable.
So what is me?
What is the truth of me?
It feels like aliveness. Like energy. This feeling leads me to the question, “What is not me?”
It’s interesting that when people describe the experience of flow which athletes have in moments of highest performance, which everyone has in moments when they are immersed in action without thinking, there’s a sense of, “I’m not really there. I am not the one doing this.”
In these moments, our identity is absent from our awareness and we are just being.
We are most ourselves when there is no self on our minds. Because the self isn’t what I am, it isn’t what you are.
We’re something far greater, far sweeter, far more miraculous.
“Enlightenment is when a wave realizes it’s the ocean,” – Thich Nhat Hanh.
I’m not after enlightenment, and I can’t say that I have fully realized that I am the ocean, but this little wave has glimpses. This little wave sees more and more ocean-ness in its being.
Ocean-ness makes up the wave that is me; it feels lovely and true.
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