WHO AM I?
The most enduring and all-encompassing of mysteries must surely be the nature of life itself – especially the mystery of our own life and existence. Answer that riddle, one supposes, and the answer to all other mysteries will become clear. But what form will this ultimate answer take? Words? A book? Intellectual thought? It seems unlikely, for these are all a part of the mystery itself. And you can’t answer a mystery with a mystery.
After all, what is language? What are thoughts? And more significantly, who is the one who’s doing all this thinking and questioning? If we can’t answer that, then all the answers framed in words and thoughts are related to a point of ignorance – ignorance of ourselves. So who is the one who is asking all these questions?
It seems pretty clear that we can never really get sufficiently outside ourselves to have a truly objective view on anything. We want to solve the riddle of thinking with our thoughts. We want to know the nature of our mind with our mind. We want to understand the nature of our self with our self. It’s not rocket science to figure out that that kind of approach will lead us round in endless circles. It certainly is a puzzle!
Is there, then, another way to look at things? If we cannot get outside ourselves, can we get inside ourselves, and see things from another perspective? What can we say about our ‘selves’, anyway? Let’s look at some fundamentals.
For a start, we are living beings. Conscious beings. We wake; we sleep; we dream. We imagine; we think; we daydream. We can sleep deeply; we can sleep lightly. We can even become completely unconscious. Yet even in the waking state, some folk seem to be more conscious than others. More aware, and more perceptive. Are there, then, levels of consciousness, levels of being? Can we expand the box of being we call our self, and become more conscious? And if so, how do we do that? Not by mental and psychological analysis, for that way will keep us at the level of the very mind and intellect that are conducting the analysis. And surely we can fly higher than endless thoughts about our personality?
Then again, we are beings in flux. Our thoughts and emotions change all the time. The world itself continually changes all around us. Everything is in motion. The panorama presented to our senses, which makes up what we call our world, is forever shifting. Scientific experimentation tells us that even apparently static objects are constantly moving within themselves – and at incredible speeds, too. Inside of us and outside of us, everything is changing.
We perceive this constant flux as time. Yet time does not pass us by. We are forever in one moment – the now – perceiving change as time. Caught up in this constant change, we mostly live out our lives in memories of the past and concerns for the future. Yet the only moment that is truly real for us, that ever actually exists for us, is the present moment. But to learn to steady our being in this one true moment, to live in the eye of the storm, where all is peace in the midst of turbulence, seems like a massive undertaking.
But who is this I? Who is the one caught up in the travails of time? The body? No, you can lose bits of the body, without losing bits of your sense of self. And the body gets old, and wrinkled, and diseased, though the self may not. Are we our mind, then? That’s getting closer. Our sense of self is certainly lodged in our mind. But it is forever changing. Thoughts, moods, desires, attractions, aversions, images, and all the rest of it, pass through our minds like a confused and never-ending movie, with many scenes unfinished and unresolved. And each, however fleeting, grabs the attention of our self. Temporarily and transiently, it becomes our self. “We pronounce it ‘I’, as if it were the whole of us, despite the fact that the very next moment, when external circumstances change, another ‘I’ has ousted it, and taken over control.”
So do we even have a real and lasting self? Or are we, as the madman in the Christian gospels claimed, “legion, for we are many” – “possessed with demons”, composed by a myriad selves that do battle with each other inside our heads?
Wise men and mystics say that all these selves are just an illusion. Just a show, transient, having no lasting reality. All that truly exists is the One Being. He has made us as parts of Himself, and has projected this amazing and ever-changing show we call creation. Our reality, our true self, is the same as His. Our innermost being (Sufis call it the ‘secret’), our innermost consciousness, our spirit or soul, the essence of our existence – call it what you will – is the One Being. The ‘legion’ selves created by our minds are only imaginary demons (and angels, too), waiting to be exorcised and banished into nothingness as we awaken to our true spiritual selves.
So much of our sense of being is founded upon a mistaken sense of who we are, upon an ephemeral and ever-changing ‘self’, upon primal egotism. This is the essential characteristic of the human mind. So what then is this mind? It’s clearly no small matter.
