After 14 years of teaching (I started in 2010), this simple question continues to be one of the most powerful ego-shredding questions there is.
Who are you?
I can feel your mind jumping into action.
This is to be expected.
It will, however, fail.
What will come to mind are a list of beliefs about yourself.
These answers are who you think you are.
Additional responses soon follow those first attempts to answer the question. They all mask the truth.
What will follow in this spiritual blog post will answer this question, but it won’t give you freedom.
Freedom must be realized.
The truth must be known, not just thought about.
And the question of “Who are you?” and the answer are starting points, not ends.
Overcoming Attachments and Illusions
Today’s post may be the only spiritual blog post you need to read to intellectually understand the spiritual path to freedom.
And I am talking about spiritual freedom.
Or liberation, moksha, nirvana, Self realization, and any other term that means you are no longer attached to illusions and what is temporary.
I’m not talking about the spiritual and religion paths that aim to soothe you, control you, and/or create a social order.
I’m talking about freedom from what is not real. Usually, I call that unreality “illusions.”
“Illusions” isn’t a good word actually.
Let’s say patterns and attachments to transitory experiences.
This gets closer to the truth.
Beliefs and attachments aren’t inherently real. Practiced patterns can be changed. Beliefs about wanted outcomes are ideas in the mind. We can then project our beliefs onto things and people. We can even believe an outcome has been achieved that hasn’t.
For example, two spouses get into an argument at lunch, and then someone decides that the argument is resolved. But it isn’t. They just decided that because the two people stopped actively arguing.
Naturally, at dinner, the two spouses begin arguing again. The person who thought the argument was resolved gets more upset.
“I thought this problem was gone!”
But the problem re-emerges regardless of what is believed.
More concrete examples are around health.
The heart attack is over, but the person is not well. Yet, they want to believe that they are. So they continue to avoid lifestyle changes because their ego wants to believe that they are fine.
Then the second heart attack comes.
And suffering continues.
The Power of the Question
Here’s one truth/answer to “Who are you?”:
You are a human being.
A human being is a complex set of patterns.
Many of those patterns are changeable, and some are extremely changeable.
For example, the body can lose weight. That’s changeable, but not as quickly changeable as dropping an idea.
Ideas don’t exist anywhere.
Your body does.
In terms of the weight loss, knowing that you are not “thin” or “fat” or “athletic” means you can change. They are not you. Your body weight is not who you are, and the body can change with a little bit of discipline.
Yet in this time of great human physical sickness (which is a reality we’ve chosen to create), people build identities around disease.
Dad-bod, BBW, etc.–these are ways that people create an identity to protect an unhealthy lifestyle. This identity then blocks taking healthy action to lose weight.
This creates not just suffering (the pain of our emotional and psychological resistance to reality), but legitimate physical pain and an eroded experience of life.
Ironically, the mind can change with the least effort of all to address weight loss or any ailment, yet this is where so many spiritual seekers struggle.
The Power of the Proper Spiritual Approach
Most people’s approach to “Who Are You?” is to offer an intellectual response.
These responses follow predictable routes:
- Name (Sue, Stan, Riccardo, Deshaun, etc.)
- Job identity (engineer, civil servant, writer, dancer, singer, creatrix, chief mojo officer, etc.)
- Family identity (mother, father, brother, daughter, sister, son, grandparent, etc.)
- Ethnic identity (Black, White, Latinx, Paiute, Indian, etc.)
- Spiritual identity (Christian, Psychic, Jewish, Muslim, Indigo, Rainbow child, etc.)
- Location identity (American, Californian, Bay Area resident, so forth)
People cling to ideas and to the activities that they do as identities. None of these are intrinsically who they are. People cling to physical attributes like skin color, but that is not who we are.
For those who are clever enough to know that they are not the above things, they like to jump to a correct conclusion.
“I am no one.”
“I am consciousness.”
Correct!
You did it!
You gave a correct response.
But do you know this.
I doubt it.
The proper approach to come to these understandings is to see all the things you believe yourself to be and try to be. Hold your name in your hand, and think about all the things it takes to be Laverne, Henri, Javier, Latisha, Jon, or [insert your name].
You were taught to construct this identity.
You re-construct this identity every day.
Sit with each response to the question of “Who are you?” and let the realization sink in that these ideas and patterns are not you.
They’re an ego somebody that you practice.
Attachments to Feelings and Sensory Experiences
If intellectual attachments to ideas are sticky, the attachments to emotions and the body are like super-glue.
When asked who someone is, many people default to how they feel themselves to be.
Most people use feelings as the basis of most of their decisions, and humans deeply believe that they are their sensory experiences.
But all these experiences come and go.
They are not permanent.
Some of these things change extremely rapidly.
How can you be a relaxed person if the next moment your body is tense?
How can you be a joyful and content person if the next moment you are irritated and bored?
All that changes is not you.
The timeless awareness is you.
The timeless awareness is the space where you are free to be, and from freedom, you can change thoughts, emotions, and sensory experience.
Or not.
Awareness has no preferred experience.
Yet, few people cross this juncture of seeing that they are not their feelings and body. This leads most people to endlessly trying to manage their sensory experiences, and that leads to endlessly trying to control life, which is a losing battle.
The Dismay of Nothing Belonging to You
As a person works with this question, they typically feel fear.
They feel the fear of loss.
They may feel like an important part of themselves is being ripped away.
Like their very skin is being torn off.
“I’m not my thoughts?! I’m not my emotions?! I’m not even my body?!!!! Who am I?”
Moments of ego exasperation are tipping points where things get close to being removed.
It’s like a really disgusting, wet shirt stuck to your body is peeling off. It clings and sucks at your skin. But then it’s gone.
It feels strange at first to not have it on your body.
Then it feels good.
Waiting at the Doorway of Ego Death
But people hesitate in this weird transition.
Shifting Perspectives: Walking Through a Weird Wonderland
They don’t let go enough soon enough.
They tend to spin-out in their minds over the fear of loss–the fear of losing just a thread from that shirt. Not even a patch or a square inch.
Then they torture themselves with guesses about all the things that they will lose if they give up one more thread of that old disgusting ego shirt.
They run up to the reality that all the ideas that they have been thinking about don’t exist. Their feelings aren’t theirs. Their bodies are just patterns do themselves.
They don’t feel like anything belongs to them.
Then they back away.
Have courage!
Let the internal attachments to thought, feeling, and sensation fall away. Your whole life is waiting for you on the other side.
So who will you be now?
The Freedom of Nobody
Nobody is not attached to any identity or pattern.
Therein, you are free to be anybody.
In a culture Hell-bent on constant change, adaptability is a superpower.
Those who cling to old social patterns will suffer and ARE suffering right now.
The types of changes being made in this culture are debatable, and many social shifts are worsening our quality of life (cellphones and social media both have interrupted in-real time, in-person interactions).
Nonetheless, change is happening. Being stuck in the ego will not help in guiding change or adapting to change.
Being stuck brings more suffering to yourself and to others.
Conversely, realizing that you are nobody liberates you to embrace the reality of change. Knowing that nothing belongs to you allows you to let things move through your life.
And things will move.
As a nobody, you can adapt, grow, and even persist in resistance to unhealthy changes without suffering them.
It’s a powerful thing to know that you are no one.
Looking Again
Look again if you feel satisfied with your answer to the question, “Who are you?”
Do you really know who you are?
Do you really know that you are consciousness?
The truth doesn’t mind another long, deep look inside. It can take it.
The ego gets itchy. The subconscious ego sloshes around in a sea of upset emotions as the light shines deep into it. The light of your inquiry shows you the truth. It shows you if you are truly realized.
As I close this post, I want to emphasize this:
The truth can never be harmed by deeper inquiry.
In the spaciousness of freedom, you know that you cannot be harmed by inquiry. There’s no ego to harm. No fear of being seen.
You are.
That is the final answer and what remains when all else has been shredded into spacious nothingness.
