What Do You Mean "Who Am I?"

It’s rather astonishing how most of us go about our lives accepting something which is completely untrue, as being a rock-solid foundation of our life. We build a whole “life” around this falsehood and become quite startled when this is pointed out.

Once we recognize this situation, we will understand that the truth about who we really are is the key to unlocking a whole new “life”, and the chance to finding the happiness we have always sought.

Please note: This track was recorded live and may contain background noises.

Transcript

Om Namaste.

So I'm handed a little bit of an interesting topic.

What do you mean?

I'm not the body.

We have entered,

I mean it's always been bad,

But unfortunately we're not really becoming more enlightened.

People like to think they are,

But unless a person is able to unlock this door,

Which leads you into a world of spiritual discovery and understanding,

Then one must remain bound in that which is temporary,

That which is impermanent,

That which cannot deliver what it is that we truly seek.

On one hand it's like a really simple idea anybody can sort of grasp,

But it's a whole nother thing to be able to actually deeply appreciate and to experience the reality that the temporary material covering my body and my mind,

These do not really define who I am,

Not even a little bit.

They have actually nothing to do with my true identity.

And until that time comes when a person begins to seriously contemplate on and consider this truth of their actual identity,

One must be faced with the reality that they will struggle through a life where there will be difficulty finding true and great value and meaning and which comes to an undesirable end.

This is called death.

But it's not a necessity that we live in this misunderstanding.

So I thought I would share with you today a little few minutes.

It's only about five minutes long.

It's a portion of a short documentary some friends of mine in Europe are producing.

They're going to be producing a series.

But what was I think really appealing for most people as they do some of these people in the street interviews,

So they're in London and they're talking to different people in the street and asking them a few questions.

And when you watch,

The first thing you realize is,

Oh,

My God,

That could be me.

You know,

I'm no different than the people being interviewed.

And you will see that many of the immediate responses that people give to certain questions are responses that we would most likely also give in the same situation.

But when they are pressed a little to think about their answer a little bit more deeply,

All of a sudden everybody goes into the state of it's not confusion.

It is a state of this realization that actually I don't know the answer to these questions,

Things that I thought were so self-evident.

I realize now that I actually don't know the answer to them.

And so we'll play this and then I'll just discuss it a little bit.

And hopefully you will enjoy and benefit from it.

We're doing a research study on identity and we just have one question.

Can you please tell me who are you?

My name is Christy.

I am an American student.

I'm from Colorado.

My name is Zoe.

I'm from Cyprus.

Kathleen.

Amy.

And Torres from Spain.

My name is Mark.

Natalie.

Who am I?

Well,

My name's Gemma.

That's who I am.

I'm a successful,

Handsome French guy.

I'm 82 years of age,

But I feel I'm 18.

Right,

What else do you want to know?

I want to know more than just your name.

My job,

Where I live.

I want to know your essence,

Who you are in essence.

My essence.

Yeah.

Happy person,

I'm a happy girl.

Someone who's trying to go through life as happy as they can.

A sassy,

Fun kind of guy who just likes to have fun and yeah.

I see myself as quite unique,

Different,

I'm quite energetic.

Your core essence,

Who are you?

Not so much take away the traits,

The culture,

The family,

The boyfriend,

Where you live,

You know,

Where you're from.

Take all that away and tell me who are you.

To be honest,

Sometimes I don't even know who I am.

That's a really hard question.

Who am I?

Oh,

I've no idea.

You have no idea?

No idea whatsoever.

No,

Myself.

You don't know?

No,

I don't know.

I'm a bit lost.

A very small piece of the universe,

That's what I am.

My essence is a person in the midst of a very fast technological world that has gone crazy and lost all sight of the real,

Of the self.

Your core,

Your core being,

Who are you?

I've no idea.

Actually,

That's a tough one.

Well,

I have no idea what to say.

The essence of myself.

I don't know.

I wasn't prepared for such a deep question.

I never really think of myself too much in that way.

I get on with it.

What is my essence?

I don't know how to answer you.

I really don't know.

I've never considered it.

I think that's a difficult question.

Does anyone have a ready answer?

I don't know.

To be honest,

I don't know.

I don't think you ever really know who you are.

I think you just go through life as a journey to find out who you are,

But you never really know who you are.

No,

In reality,

I don't know who I am.

Really,

Who I am,

Yeah.

It's a good question.

Yeah,

It's a very good question.

What do you mean?

Who am I?

Yes,

Who are you in essence?

In essence.

Oh no,

That's hard.

That's a little bit philosophical for me,

To be honest.

I've never thought of it like that.

Who am I?

To be honest,

I don't know.

Your core.

Who are you?

It's such a difficult question.

It's a very difficult question.

In essence.

I don't know.

It's really complicated.

If you'd asked me all this stuff when I'd had a drink,

I'd probably answer it better.

I don't know if I can say any more about it.

I mean,

You've kind of caught me out on that one.

It's really hard.

It is.

It's really hard to know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's really interesting to be asked such a question so you'll have an idea and think about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If I were to ask you to point to yourself,

Where are you?

Where is yourself?

Your head.

Your brain?

In Spain,

We call it coco,

The cerebral,

The brain.

Point to yourself,

Your essence.

Where is yourself?

Myself?

Where is myself?

Wherever my head is generally,

That's kind of,

I don't know,

That's where I am as such.

Your head like,

Your head here.

Yeah.

If my head is saying I'm something and I'm there and then I don't have to literally be there but I am there in my head,

You know,

Like a state of mind as such maybe.

A state of mind.

A point to my finger would be here.

Your mind?

My mind.

Where I am.

So now I'm confused because I don't know who I am,

How I'm going to know where I am.

Point with your finger.

Where with your eyes.

Yeah.

Your eyes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're your eyes and you lose your eyes.

And then I suppose you'd think,

Wouldn't you,

But you'd still be there but it might,

I might feel alone but you do get a feeling of like something inside.

Yeah.

A lot of people think they know how perception takes place.

Take visual perception for example.

They imagine that it's very straightforward,

That light comes from objects,

It enters our eyes,

It goes down the visual pathways and tickles up the occidital cortex of the back of the head and that's the sum total of vision apart from other bits of the brain being tickled up as well.

The trouble with that causal chain of events,

It explains how the light gets in but doesn't explain then how there is a gaze that looks out.

Well some people indeed not only think that personality and consciousness is produced by the brain,

They think it's identical with brain activity.

But there are many reasons for questioning that.

So I think we've got to think again about the relationship between ourselves,

Our brains and our bodies.

And we won't even start that process of rethinking until we set aside ideas that suggest that we already know the answer,

That we already know that we are our brains or we are our bodies.

What do you think?

A lot of questions here,

Especially when you're able to observe somebody that's very much like ourself responding to these questions about who I really am.

It's really an important question and you can see that people try to play it out and so many different ways.

Of course the most absurdly ridiculous way that it happens is through selfies.

The idea that this snapshot in time of my body really represents who I am and I try to put on this image.

You know we struggle with this idea of identity.

It has become such a big thing,

Identity politics.

They call people are divided into different types of groupings based on bodies,

Based on desires,

Based on political or social philosophies.

And I really get immersed in that identity in the hope that I will truly find happiness,

That I will truly find the things that are of great value and that which I seek.

For me,

The first time I saw that,

A few things jumped out.

Of course the East German guy or Polish guy maybe he was,

I think Polish guy,

Saying I don't even know who I am so how would I know where I am?

And the woman thinking,

Associating her identity,

Who she is with her ability to see.

Then the girl asking what if your eyes were removed if you were blinded?

Then she suddenly thinks well what's going to happen?

Yeah you'd feel really lonely and you'd have the sense of actually being there somewhere deep inside.

And you can see how there are these sort of ideas that people have that we grasp at but which do not really provide the answers that are necessary for us to come to live a successful life.

In the Vedas your success in life was determined by the degree to which you had a spiritual awakening.

It wasn't equated with how much money you had or what kind of social standing you had or the size of your family or how beautiful or handsome your husband or wife was and bank balances.

These things didn't define success.

They were things that sort of you did during this journey in this particular lifetime.

But real success lay in whether I was able to actually open that door and step from the realm of temporary material existence which is not fulfilling and which can't give us everything we need,

Whether I'm able to unlock that door,

Open it and step through and experience a deeper and more meaningful reality.

The process of meditation was precisely to help with this awakening.

I mean we take so many things for granted like you see everybody in the street.

They're like I said,

You and I,

Everybody's sort of going about their thing and somebody comes up and pokes a microphone and starts talking to them and she seems kind of pleasant so okay I'll answer the questions.

I start answering the questions and then all of a sudden I'm confronted with this problem that I actually haven't thought this stuff through.

I have adopted ideas that are not profound at all,

That are actually completely wrong and I am now dedicating all my energy in my life to living out something that is fundamentally untrue.

This is the root cause,

The root cause for all unhappiness.

This is the root cause for all pain and suffering,

The root cause for a general lack of fulfillment.

There's this guy,

A German guy,

What's his name,

Gantor von Hagen,

I think it is something like that,

Hagen's,

And he developed this amazing technique of being able to take human bodies or any kind of body and he puts it in this solution and this vacuum chamber and everything and they plasticize all the tissue and then when he's got this plasticized body he starts peeling away like the skin and things to reveal muscle and tissue and I think they recently,

Some months back in Auckland,

Had their exhibit here and it's kind of like it's really astonishing,

Mostly people were utterly creeped out to go to anything like this,

It was like,

You know,

It's like hanging out in a morgue or something,

You know,

Really,

What are you doing that for?

And so he discovered that he had to start putting these cadavers into different postures,

You know,

He's got one with a woman,

You know,

Doing flexing muscles and this gymnastics pose and then they had a photograph of a woman in a bikini right beside this thing,

You know,

Doing the same thing and you look at the difference between the cadaver that's put into that form and skin has been stripped away and the woman right beside it and the contrast is so stark it was one that really struck me of a young girl with a parent holding the parent's hand and they'd brought the girl obviously to exhibit and in the exhibit there was a stripped away adult,

You know,

Skeletal structure with some muscle and sinew and then a small child,

It was just a skeleton and then it was holding the adult's hand like walking along and the kid was standing there holding the parent's hand looking at it in complete amazement,

I mean utter amazement because we don't really actually think about things very deeply,

We don't think about,

You know,

The fact that our body is simply a machine which we are occupying and using and yet this is like such an important discovery,

This discovery of my spiritual existence first and then my actual spiritual identity is what will utterly change everyone's life and it is not a path of difficulty,

It is not a path of great austerity necessarily or anything,

It is actually a joyful path,

A path of great happiness where a person becomes awakened to their actual spiritual identity and I begin to live in that reality even while occupying this temporary body and in this state,

In this condition,

Gradually one is able to experience becoming free from all forms of fear and anxiety,

One can actually attain great peacefulness but the true fruit comes when a person is able to awaken that great spiritual love that we actually seek and to reconnect with the supreme soul in the highest union that is to be experienced in this path of yoga.

So we have such short time that we're not going to speak about things in any depth at all but I was hoping that like they say a picture is worth a thousand words,

When you watch that,

You know,

It's sort of like whoa,

It's a serious eye-opener and then you have somebody that is actually a scientific mind who is declaring that the brain and the body are not really the self.

In another part of the documentary he talks about the fact that every single atom,

Every single cell in your body,

The matter within the cell at least,

Everything becomes changed within three years.

The lining of your stomach,

I think it's only a couple of weeks,

It's getting renewed,

Everything is getting constantly renewed and replaced yet there is some consistency there.

If your identity was the body then you would assume a new identity every few years but the reality is you remain that same constant principle who experiences a young baby's body,

A childhood body,

A youthful body,

A middle-aged body,

An old-aged body and you will experience leaving that body.

You are that constant principle and it is so important to live a life of balance,

Not just being utterly absorbed in that which is external,

That which is temporary,

That which is passing.

We need also to cultivate this spiritual understanding.

We need to,

Just as we need nutrition for the body,

We need nutrition for the soul.

This is what the spiritual awakening is all about and of course as we always mention this process of meditation upon spiritual sound is the most recommended and the most doable of all spiritual processes and at the same time the most potent of all spiritual processes that one can engage in during this time.

Okay any question?

How would I answer?

Here's who I'm talking to.

I'm an eternal spiritual being,

An eternal servant of the Lord.

That is how I would answer.

Of course there's much more to add to that but it depends on the individual.

I'm an eternal spiritual being having a temporary material experience.

If I get lost in that experience like that it becomes my whole world then I am gravely misfortunate.

I'm really unfortunate to be totally lost in that which is temporary.

When I become reconnected with my eternality then I am most fortunate.

Reviews

Worth repeating over and over again. Om Shanti

Fascinating. Thank you for the meaningful question. I am glad you didn't say this was a sleep meditation for I would be up all night trying to figure out "Who am I?
Namaste 🙏🏻🦋