The Collapse of Identity and the Rise of Is-ness
It seems every great saint, sage, avatar, and Groot across time has urged us toward the same discovery: Find the I Am. Ramana said it. Nisargadatta echoed it. Seek the “I Am.” Return to the “I Am.”
But for years, that phrase struck the wrong chord in me.
The very word “I” lit up my ego-identity like a dashboard warning light—drawing attention, demanding maintenance, flooding me with contradiction. Instead of guiding me toward Being, it locked me in the loop of becoming: a self trying to find a self that didn’t quite feel like a self.
Eventually, I hit the wall.
Fed up with the mental gymnastics, the efforting, the internal debate—Who is the I that’s seeking I Am?—I dropped it. All of it. I stopped chasing the “I” because I wasn’t that interested in “I.” Not that I came to a conclusion—I just let the “I” drop.
And something unexpected emerged.
Not a revelation. Not a realization. More like… amness. Or maybe isness.
That’s the only word I have for it. The quiet, ever-present is-ness that had always been there. Whether I was frustrated or content, confused or clear, is-ness was steady, undisturbed. I didn’t find it—I recognized it. Once the search gave way, it was simply obvious.
By that time, sensing, looking, and listening were no longer clunky practices. They had become part of the weave of my daily life—a quiet presence in each moment. Not techniques, but natural capacities. Not things I did, but ways I lived.
What came alive in me was a deeper curiosity—not “Who am I?” but what is the relationship between true nature, essence, and presence?
That inquiry changed everything.
I came to understand—not intellectually, but phenomenologically—that is-ness is not a side effect of presence. It is its primary affect. The very tone of presence, the feel of being itself.
This wasn’t an idea. It was a felt clarity. Not a thought about experience, but the experience of experience.
From there, the phrase “I Am” began to shift for me.
Not as a mantra.
Not as a pointer.
Not even as a memory.
But as something self-evident—evident only to itself. Not remembered and not constructed, just recognized. Fully.
That’s why I no longer resonate with the idea that awakening to “I Am” is some kind of remembering. To me, remembering involves the mind. It has a story, a timeline, and a narrator. However, this recognition doesn’t require reflection. It doesn’t come from thought.
It undermines thought.
And what I’ve come to see is that I don’t need the “I.” I can navigate life with a name, a body, a history, and an ID card. But none of that has anything to do with the whatness of what I Am. The fact of being. The saturated, undeniable am-ness that breathes itself through every moment.
In hindsight, it’s clear: my frustration with the search for “I Am” was rooted in my concept of it. I was trying to grasp it—define it, hold it still, reduce it to a sentence I could understand. But the journey into true nature isn’t conceptual.
It’s phenomenological.
That’s the only way it reveals itself.
It was never missing. It’s the experiencing of the experience, which the mind would like to claim as the experiencer, but that “I” is no longer present.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and a student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.