It wakes you in the wee hours when you want only to sleep, whispers in your ear while you celebrate yet another milestone birthday, gazes up at you from earth or urn when you say good-bye to yet another loved one. It is the question that has haunted every self-aware human since the dawn of time: What am I?
The question may take on different forms – What am I doing with my life? How did I get so old? What is the point of this existence? What happens when I die? – but at their core, each is really just a variation of the same question: What am I?
Seemingly unable to answer this question, we instead dedicate our lives to building our own definition of ‘me.’ Meaning that we take the inherited stuff – the body, name, family history, cultural flavorings, etc. – and set about building something called ‘my life.’
Over time, the relationships and children, jobs and careers, domiciles and material stuff, move us deeper into the fiction and farther from that nettlesome curiosity about the ‘real me.’
For some – usually through disease, divorce, death, addiction, psychic breakdown, etc. – the question may resurface, but as older dogs firmly wedded to our invented stories of me, any ‘solutions’ to these problems almost always are sought within the same fiction. (Or what the mystics might describe as the dreamer seeking a solution to the dream within the same dream rather than questioning the whole thing and awakening from it.)
Ergo, the human world is filled with fictional characters constantly seeking either to reaffirm their story or constantly reinventing it. And woe to anyone who challenges those ideas we hold about ourselves (“Nail that guy to a cross!”).
But even as we move further into the fictional me, something – call it soul or spirit or God or whatever you like – continues to whisper to us that the whole thing is a charade.
All of which helps explain why so many of us are perpetually steeped in anxiety about being found a fake, a phony, a fraud, yet fight so fiercely when those contrived stories are challenged. A long-time psychologist friend says the ‘F’ word (fraud) routinely makes an appearance in psychotherapy sessions, “even among the world’s most successful and seemingly confident CEOs.”
Nevertheless, these fictional selves are all we have, and better the devil you know….
Ever wonder why so many parents clash with their teens? Perhaps because the kids are busy building fictional selves that clash with the fictions their parents already have in mind for them. To a teenager, “When I was your age….” or “I didn’t have nearly the same benefits….” translate to, “Your story isn’t matching up with my own version of reality.”
Never mind that none of these stories – those of the parent or child – are remotely grounded in truth. The older generation is convinced the ‘wisdom’ of their story is all that’s needed, the younger generation equally convinced the elders are clueless about their vibrant new story.
And these fictions extend well beyond the personal. With strength in numbers no doubt in mind, we flee from those pesky insecurities through the creation of religions and philosophies, movements and missions, corporations and empires. People squabble, fight, and even kill in defense not just of their own little identity, but the bigger ones to which they belong.
What am I? The unanswered question that, at least from here, helps explain much (if not all) of the angst and drama that for so long has plagued the human species.
Which is not to say that it has never been answered. Across the ages, the occasional rebel aka mystic, has emerged to announce that the answer is indeed available to us all. Further, that in its answer lies the secrets to ourselves, the universe, the whole shebang.
“I am that I am,” Jesus announced, with the deepest conviction, the kingdom of heaven, of the God who sent him, etc., within not just him, but each of us.
“I am that,” proclaim numerous other mystics, the Truth of our being nearer to us than our own breath. Oh, and also available to anyone who bothers to look.
How, then, to find the answer to ‘what am I?’
The answer, say those mystical types, is to shed one’s skin, to forget everything one has been taught, to completely and utterly surrender to the silence, the emptiness from whence we emerged and shall return and never really left. If we want to SEE the truth, we need to stop blindly following the blind.
The question to all the minds reading this, then, is are you willing/able to let go the reins – the ones handed you – and see where life takes you?
