The last three blogs have taken us on a search deep inside to find out who we “really” are. Along the way we learned that we are not our bodies nor our possessions, despite the signs on the back of some pickups that “the one who dies with the most toys wins”. And we know as well we are not our thoughts nor our emotions, both of which can change so quickly and so dramatically that they present no stable base on which to build an identity. So what’s left? Today we’ll find out.
Deep within the many layers that make up our physical presence, personality, and state of mind is the one thing that never changes. Our sense of ‘I’. This self-referential pronoun is the one factor that has remained consistent, true, and unchanging for our entire life. No matter our age, our physical condition, what we’re thinking about, how we feel, whether we’re angry or sad, happy or confused, sick or well, hungry or satiated, when we say “I am”, we are speaking fact. Cold hard fact. Everything else we add after that, “I am… man, woman, single, married, young, old, American, African, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Atheist, rich, poor… all these are simply adjectives, descriptors of what ‘I’ am experiencing at any given moment in time.
Have you ever self-referenced yourself in a sentence as both the subject and object? “I’m so mad at myself”, for example. What does that really mean? Who is actually mad at whom? Is there a difference? This is the point that Ramana Maharshi would make that we spoke of in the last blog. It’s so easy to say that and slip into paradox. But stop for a moment and you’ll realize that when you double self-reference, you’re really acknowledging a deeper and more fundamental reality of who you truly are.
“I am” is who ‘I’ am. This is the unchanging constant that exists at each of our innermost cores. Not just your ‘I’ but my ‘I’ as well. Inside the adjectives, the descriptives that create our uniqueness from each other, our ‘I’ is the same… not that our experience of ‘I’ simply feels the same as someone else’s ‘I’. It IS the same! It’s the same ‘I’! When you get right down to it, there really is only one ‘I’, one consciousness, one Being in existence. We are not just our brother’s keeper, we are our brother. Deep down, at our innermost core, there is only One of us speaking to Itself. We are The One. Each of us. The absolute, living, conscious.
When God told Moses, “I am that I am”, he wasn’t blowing smoke.
Hindus define two ‘I’s, Atman, the small ‘I’ experience within individuals and Brahman, the Universal ‘I’ experience of God. Atman, they declare, is God’s way of hiding from Himself. Evolution has been the ever changing, ever more complex growth of the physical organism, from rock to plant to animal to human and the time when we now have the capacity, brainpower, and consciousness to look within and know who we truly are. And knowing that… will we still continue to live in a way that causes pain and suffering to other beings who turn out to really be parts of our very own self? That part of the equation, the free will part, is yet to be determined.
peace…………….ag
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