The spiritual and psychological power of: Who am I? and What am I?
Exploring these two simple questions: Who am I? and What am I? – with sincerity and openness hold the keys to real, life-changing spiritual transcendence and psychological transformation.
Religious and moral codes may help maintain some semblance of social order but are also major contributors to global divisiveness and conflict. All of this boils down to one simple factor: the self with its positions, reactivity, and convictions.
Humans are lost in self, a self that is absolutely convinced that it is an independent, long-lasting entity. This separate self operates on the conviction that it can control its experience, has free will, makes conscious choices, and can change itself through its own volition. All this while living in fear, anxiety, and apprehension of its eventual demise.
Who am I?
Who am I? is a central practice for many spiritual paths. I see it as the cornerstone of a powerful mode of psychological exploration that will eventually lead the intrepid inquirer to recognize the self as the “not me.”
Many people are living under the delusion of being “my real self” or “my true self,” but even a cursory open-ended exploration will reveal this “spiritual self” is little more than the separate self with a spiritual patina.
Genesis of Self
The self does not exist. It is a construction, a result of human psychological development. Once constructed, it moves to the forefront of human experience, claiming centrality and significance to individual experience.
In YOUR beginning, there was no self
That’s right! Every human being is born without a self!
You lived the first couple of years of your life with no self and the next few years with a developing, tenuous self. Around age six, the self becomes established with its engine of perpetual existence engaged – constant mental dialogue.
The Power of Who Am I?
If we are lucky or blessed, a powerful dissatisfaction or curiosity arises: Who am I?
What may begin as a mental questioning or curiosity will, hopefully, eventually evolve into more of an experiential mode of inquiry into the self. Open and open-ended experiential inquiry into the self will give rise to a psychological process that is, in part, regressive, eventually giving us tastes and insights into our early experience of existence without a self.
You see
The spiritual path is not a path of getting or becoming. It is a path of returning or, more accurately, seeing through or waking up from the self, the “not me.”
If you’re looking for something, you’re not seeing what’s there. – Adyashanti
The big issue is this: Self cannot get out of self
When our efforts toward transcendence and transformation come from the self (higher, lower, true, false, or in-between), we’re basically screwed because this activity of self reinforces the self.
What’s a self to do?
Explore, investigate, inquire into: Who am I? Not to get a verbal or conceptual answer but to challenge the whole notion of the self, to clearly see the “not me.”
Reality is beyond the self
The self cannot see the real. The real exists outside of the system of the self (so to speak). Since the self cannot escape the closed system of its existence and because its mode of perception and understanding is dualistic, the self cannot perceive the nondual.
What Am I?
Who am I? will lead us to the more fundamental curiosity of What Am I?
We are what we are looking for.
You are what you seek. – Saint Francis
And here’s the rub
We can’t see that.
We can’t know that in the way that we currently know knowing.
This perspective of the man of spirit, which contrasts ego with Being and sees the latter as fundamentally real and the former as illusory, is incomprehensible from the perspective of ego, which cannot conceive of experience that is not related to a separate individuality. For ego, each experience is personal, related to oneself. The man of the world will understandably ask: “How can there be experience if I am not there?” – A. H. Almaas, The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach
We are the seeing (perceiving, awareness), the knowing. The issue here is that we have made awareness a thing. We are not a thing.
It would be closer to reality, to say – aware-ing. We are the dynamism, the seeing that sees through the self into the world. Not the seer. Not the seen. The seeing. The sensing. The hearing. The sensitive field of perception, of is-ness-ing.
Wonderful synthesis with this post, really like the pop up bubbles and links to other Almaas quotes with images.
With the clarity of the two simple powerful questions, of who and what am I.
And in the moment of asking, being curious,
exploring, discovering, revealing, etc,
really allowing everything to be as it is…
Truly be who I am, what I am, merging with reality,
loving the intimate presence…
Thanks for the inspiration.