You Are Not Who You Think You Are
Who are you, really? Are you so-and-so with a certain past and a certain body and personality and certain roles talents, weaknesses, dreams, fears, and beliefs? You may define yourself to others in these ways, but that is not who you really are. Who you really are can only be discovered through deeper questioning and exploration and through a more subtle experiencing of that which is beyond all ideas about yourself. It can only be discovered when the mind is quiet and no longer telling you who you are. When all the ideas about yourself are stilled, then what remains is who you really are: Consciousness, Awareness, Stillness, Presence, Peace, Love, the Divine. You are that which is Nam less and yet has been given a thousand names.
To those of you who are not so sure about who you really are, you are not alone. Even those who have realized this are not always certain. The realization of who you are comes and goes to some extent depending on what you pay attention to. Even those who have realized the truth, that there is only one Being in all of existence, can temporarily forget who they really are when they become lost in believing their thoughts. The mind is very compelling, and giving your attention to it, will bring you back to the experience of yourself as separate from the rest of creation.
Nevertheless, you are not who you think you are. Thinking gives you the illusion of being someone, but you are not some-one but rather Oneness itself, the Divine masquerading as an individual. This masquerade is for the purpose of exploring this physical reality and for having the unique experiences you are having as some-one. The Divine is enjoying the experiences it is having through all of creation, even experiences you would consider unenjoyable. What the Divine enjoys is experience—any experience. It created you just for that, or rather you created you just for that.
You may think you are not enjoying an experience, but if you touch deeply into yourself, you will discover enjoyment in even the most unpleasant experiences. The joy from these experiences comes simply from the ability to have them, the ability to be alive and experience them. The Divine is enjoying life and celebrating in every moment through every creation, regardless of what is being experienced. Therefore, it is possible for you to find joy in any experience as well when you align yourself with the divine Self in you, or Essence, instead of the personal self, or the you that you think you are.
This you is very difficult to please. It can be having a very nice experience and still not be happy. The you is programmed for unhappiness because it is programmed to seek that which can never bring true happiness. It goes after more and better and different from whatever is actually present, and that creates ceaseless searching and dissatisfaction with whatever is found. This is a very unhappy predicament, and yet this is the human condition.
This is why humans suffer, but you are not actually human, so it isn’t necessary for you to suffer this way. Once you discover your true nature, it is possible for suffering to end, or at least be greatly diminished. The Divine doesn’t suffer in its experience of life, and you don’t have to either. You can experience the joy the Divine has in life in any moment if you turn your attention to the moment (where the Divine, as Essence, resides), but you have to want to and you have to make that choice. This is the greatest obstacle to happiness of all. Many experience the Truth that lies in the moment and turn away from it again and again because there is nothing in it for the egoic mind, which is the mind that is driven by the ego, or illusory personal self—the you that you think you are. The egoic mind is the familiar voice in your head, the ongoing mental commentary that accompanies whatever you do.
This you thinks of itself constantly. It is constantly forming thoughts about itself, which is how it creates itself. It describes itself to itself and to others, and that gives the you a sense of actually existing, when in fact, it exists only as a description. This description—this you—is made up of a jumble of ideas that are not even consistent, since they change from moment to moment, day to day. This you believes one thing one day and another thing the next. It likes something one day and the opposite the next. It sees itself one way one day and another way the next. And yet it seems so solid, so real, that this you is willing to argue with others over what it thinks, what it believes, and how it sees things. Where do all of these ideas come from?
They are just there. Stop a moment and look. The ideas that arise in your mind that define this you arise from nowhere and disappear into nowhere, only to be replaced by other ideas. They have no more reality or truth in terms of defining you than the last set of ideas or the next set of ideas. Ideas come and go, and they are as meaningless and random as what happens when you flip from station to station on the radio. It is just that certain ideas come and go more frequently on your particular radio station than on someone else’s, but that doesn’t make them any more real, true, or capable of defining who you are.
Who You Are
Who you are cannot be defined by words. Who you are lives in the space between words, in the Stillness that is ever-present and known only when the mental chatter has stopped or is no longer given attention. Who you are cannot be described; it can only be experienced. However, the experience of it is often missed because attention is being given to other things, particularly ideas. These ideas, when you are identified with the mind, seem more real and interesting than who you are because the mind is only interested in things it can understand, describe, and categorize.
Since there are plenty of things and ideas for the mind to get absorbed in, this you that is identified with the mind is very busy paying attention to things and to the thoughts that arise in the mind. When you are identified with the mind, you often give thoughts more attention even than things. This you that you think you are not only thinks itself into existence, but also everything else, in the sense that what it thinks affects how it perceives actual things and other aspects of reality. Thus, the mind filters and colors experience and gives experience its own spin.
The Divine intends it to be just this way. It created the mind to do exactly what it does. In order for the Divine to have a unique experience through every human being, it was necessary for every human being to have a separate sense of self and to forget the Oneness that is everyone’s true nature. Thus, you have traded in the remembrance of your divinity for experiences. You learn and grow in love as a result of your experiences, and that is also intended by the Divine. It also intends that one day you will awaken to the truth of your divinity and express that in life, which will bring experience of a different kind as well as further evolution.
The goodness, or divinity, in you drives you forward in your evolution until you express that goodness increasingly in your actions and speech. The ego, which does not seek goodness and love, but pleasure and avoidance of pain, also drives your actions and creates experiences, many of which cause pain, but also evolution.
Eventually, you realize that love and goodness are what bring lasting happiness, and you find your way to living from the Heart, from Essence, more than from the egoic mind. When your identity shifts from the egoic mind to the Heart, where your divinity lies, you are said to have awakened to your true nature. It is the most significant point in your evolution because you are finally free of the domination of the egoic mind, and life is lived from a very different place.
Being Awake
Being awake doesn’t mean you never identify with the egoic mind; it means you no longer believe the mind, even when you do find yourself identified with it. This may seem contradictory because identification with the mind usually entails believing it. When you are awake, however, the experience of identification is more like you know you are playing the role of someone who is believing the mind, while you know yourself as what is observing the entire drama. So although identification with the mind happens after awakening, identification doesn’t last long, and it isn’t a problem when it does. You know yourself as other than the self that is momentarily identified, and you spend most of your time in the experience of the moment.
After awakening, because you never lose sight of who you really are even when you are identified with the egoic mind, life feels very different. You can enjoy the play of consciousness as it moves in and out of identification. What does it matter what you are identified with once you know the truth? Consciousness enjoys playing the part it is playing in this lifetime. Once you awaken, it is really possible to enjoy this life, this character you are playing, and everything that happens to it because you know it is just a story that is being played out. That is why mystics and sages describe the world as a dream. From the perspective of someone who is awake, life feels very much like a dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming.
Such detachment allows you to enjoy life in a way that wasn’t possible when you were attached to the outcome of the story you are living. When you are identified with the egoic mind, you have ideas about how you want the story of your life to go in all the presumably important areas: career, relationships, health, home, and family. You envision your life being a certain way, and you try to make it be that way. These thoughts are what the egoic mind, posing as the you that you think you are, is preoccupied with, and this can keep you very busy.
On the other hand, once you have awakened, you don’t require life to be a certain way in order to be happy because you are already happy and you know that what you thought you needed to be happy isn’t necessary for your happiness. You are happy because you are aligned with the divine Self that lives in and expresses itself through you: Essence. And, unlike other things of this world, Essence is eternal and eternally available and eternally fulfilling.
To know true happiness, all you have to do is choose to be aligned with Essence instead of the egoic mind. What the egoic mind chases after is often unattainable, and even when it is attained, it is never enough. The egoic mind always wants more, better, or different than whatever it already has. Its prescription for happiness leads only to unhappiness, discontentment, and suffering. Given this, choosing Essence over the ego would seem like such a clear choice. But there’s a catch.
The Need to Choose
If it were easy to choose Essence over the ego, everyone would be happy and free from suffering. This choice is difficult because you are programmed to be attracted to thoughts and to the objects of the world. Without that programming, you would be born knowing your divinity, and you would miss out on the experience of feeling you are an independent entity with a will, and you would miss out on all the experiences, learning, and growth that go with that. This Mystery is designed to veil the truth of your divinity and the existence of only One so that that One can have experiences. It is through giving you a mind that is programmed in the way it is programmed that this is accomplished. So the catch is that you are programmed to choose the ego over Essence until a time comes in your evolution for the realization of the truth to surface.
Given that you are reading this now, it is likely that the time is approaching for this realization, if it hasn’t already arrived. When the time comes to awaken, Essence calls to you in a number of ways, and you begin to experience Essence more often and for longer periods of time. What we will be exploring are some of the many ways the Divine calls to you and makes itself known. Some of these ways are so obvious that they are overlooked or discounted. Other ways require diligent looking before the Divine’s face is seen.
The desire to experience the Divine and the choice to look for it come, of course, from the Divine itself, since there is no other. At a certain point in a person’s evolution, the Divine seeks itself. It calls to itself and awakens itself so that it can live and breathe more fully through that body, mind, and personality. It beckons itself Home. In the coming chapters, we are going to take a look at some of the ways the Divine does this. But first, it is important to realize that the Divine is everywhere and in everything, including within every experience.
Everywhere You Look
There is nowhere that the Divine is not. Stop a moment and really take this truth in, because the mind has a very different perception. If really grasped, this truth will change your life. Everything you see, everything and everyone that exists, and everything that happens is a manifestation of the Divine. The Divine is not only behind every good act, but also behind every evil one, which is what happens when the you that you think you are is lost in fear and the illusion of being separate. The Divine is both the perpetrator and the victim, the lover and the hater. It plays every role that has ever been played because there is no other. There is only the illusion of other.
Imagine that—there is no other! The mind is so good at imagining, but it has difficulty imagining Oneness because it goes against its programming. So when Oneness is experienced, as it is momentarily many times even in one day, it isn’t acknowledged. Oneness goes unnoticed, unappreciated by the mind. Worse than that—Oneness is rejected by the egoic mind because acknowledging it would threaten its existence. The ego doesn’t exist in Oneness; it can only exist in separateness. The ego is created by and perpetuates separation. That is the very definition of the ego. The ego and Oneness are at odds, or so it seems. However, Oneness designed life to be this way, so Oneness has no problem with the ego, although the ego has a problem with Oneness.
Everywhere it looks, the ego sees separation. It translates all the differences it sees as separation: The ego sees a tree, and because the tree is different from the ego’s image of itself, the ego sees itself as separate from the tree. But is that true? Where did this definition of self come from, in which anything that is different from itself is seen as separate from itself?
It is the ego’s own definition that creates the idea of separation: Different equals separation by the ego’s own definition. The ego sees boundaries between things and people. It even creates boundaries conceptually through language and in terms of time and by holding certain beliefs. This is just how the egoic mind digests life. All these differences are seen by the ego as potentially dangerous and problematic. The ego is constantly on the defense, trying to protect itself from everything out there that is different from itself. Its world is full of fear, anxiety, jealousy, hatred, anger, and pain. This viewpoint and the sense of being separate is at the base of all suffering.
But reality is not as the ego supposes. There are no boundaries. There is no separate self in opposition to the world. There is only the Divine creating each moment fresh from itself. Everything is the Divine expressing itself as tree, as dog, as person, as thought, as emotion, as light, as sound. No boundaries. No one. Only One. Only the Divine creating and expressing itself through life.