Who am I?
This is one of the great existential questions. Mystics and philosophers have struggled with it for centuries. Let us contemplate some of their teachings.
Day 55
You are not the body. The body is not you. Nor are you your personality. The me of the body is illusion, a state of being in existence, a string of sensations strung across time. You hold the body in mind as an experience of separation. You think of yourself as the me of the body. The mind perceives it as real.
Continue to think of yourself, but not as a body. When you enter the room-within, leave the body aside. It is not your true nature. It is an abstraction of sensations, memories, thoughts, and perceptions. Their presence in mind generates pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow. These are the ways of the world. You, in truth, are not of the world.
Do not limit yourself to form. The body’s desires attach you to existence. Attachment maintains your life of worldly ways. There is nothing right or wrong, good or bad about this. It is simply existence as you know it. Choose worldly ways if you wish. The illusion can be comforting. If you choose not to maintain worldly ways, enter the room-within when you are ready.
To be ready is to accept your reality as consciousness in existence. You are not the form. You are the energy expressing the form as an illusion of separation in mind. Words cannot say this. At best they say what you are not. Your true nature is beyond your experience as the me of the body.
When you can ask, who am I? The me of the body answers, I am this, I am that. In truth, there is no this and that. There is I AM and nothing else. You can say, I AM, but you are saying it as one who exists, and your true nature does not exist. I AM is a statement of existence and not of reality. You cannot know what is real in mind. You come to know I AM without words.
You are in the present moment always. Use that moment to witness the mind without either knowing or not knowing. Stop trying to describe yourself. You are letting existence clutter the nature of your true self. Your true self is the only self. There is no separate my self, her self, or his self. There is one self, the whole of the all. Separate selves are expressions of separation where there is none. Your mind perceives separation as objects in spacetime. Reality is whole, complete, perfect, eternal.
What you perceive as real is a display of separation in consciousness. For the me of the body it is an experience in mind. You imagine your source as the world. You turn to it for sustenance, meaning, and fulfillment. All that you attain is transitory. Attainments are flickers in the mind that extinguish themselves time and again.
