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"Who Are We, Really?"
Inquiry and Spiritual Practice
Spring 1997


A 1970's pop song cries, "One is the loneliest number ..." If the Truth be known, one is only lonely if they are limited by the perception of their ego. Our True Self lies within the One. Yet, most of us believe we are "truly" someone else. Who are we, really? When one discovers their True Self, they will find that they are in the Company of Saints.
     "Who are we, really?" This question needs asking because, for most of us, it is hard to simply "hang out" and just "be." Being is scary. Our minds find difficulty in relating to life "as it is." As it really is. In an attempt to create order, we begin to categorize, compartmentalize and label, giving our minds something to do and something with which to relate. We seek a formula, a definition, a form to make us comfortable. For example, when meeting someone, we always tend to ask, "How old are you? Where do you come from? What's your religion?" etc. During my time studying Sufism and Islam in South Asia (India and Bangladesh), I really stood out. I seemed to be at least two feet taller than everyone! I was often asked questions like, "When did you convert?" meaning to Islam or, "What religion were your parents?" I always had a hard time with these questions, not answering them, but with the very questions themselves. Why do these questions actually exist in our minds, and why such a need for definition?
     After all, who are we, really? Nothing that I can articulate about myself satisfies me sufficiently as to be a description of my true self, yet I still feel myself to be. Am I my body? No matter what medical or cosmetic technology we employ such as face lifts or transplants, our body inevitably wears out and is gone. No one can stop the process of aging and death. So how well can we say, "I own my body. It is me. It is mine."? If the body belongs to us, how effective will we be at offsetting death when our appointed time comes?
     And how about our minds? Are we really our minds as Descartes suggested, "I think therefore I am." If our ideas are truly our minds, how about those things that we used to believe in but no longer believe in? What happened to all of that stuff? Boy, when we believed in those other ideas, we believed them! Apparently that was us then.
Between our changing bodies and thoughts, the regeneration of our ideas and the very cells of our bodies, we are not the same physical or psychic entity from day to day. Within seven years or so, there is not one cell in the human body that is not new. Where did that body go? After the course of seven years, I guarantee you that the values or the beliefs that you once held are not the same as what you believe or who you are now. Looking at the history of your own life, you can see how every aspect of these physical and psychic attributes changes, or could we even say die? Yet, because we are human beings with free will, we will argue for and about all the things that we like or dislike, want to do or are avoiding, as if our particular preferences are actually us.
     We are conditioned by the impressions of life over the process of time. We not only see ourselves as the performers of our activities, saying words, having thoughts and feelings, etc., but our separation is proliferated because we have thoroughly identified ourselves as those impressions. We actually start to think, "I am my body. I am my mind. I am my thoughts. I am my emotions. I am my opinions. I am my gender." We do not have the training or the conditioning to know anything else. What should we think?
     Perhaps the most base division in the human form is one of gender, male and female. We can develop the list of separations from there: language, race, geographical location, religion, economic bracket, etc. These are all things to which we have attached labels to give our minds some definition and form to operate within.
     However, to the degree that we actually identify ourselves with any of these, we suffer. This is ironic because we have adopted these definitions to make us comfortable. To the degree we believe ourselves to be any of these things, we are separated from the One whom we truly are. Caught in the dance of our minds in this way of comparing, competing, feeling superior or inferior, we become attached to these false identities and cannot be in Union. As my guru, Baba Anandamurti, would say, "Knotty problem."
     There is a particular personal exercise of self inquiry designed to offer the experience of "Who am I?" Imagining it for just a moment, you can get some benefit from the exercise. We did this in Denver a while back; we divided our group into pairs, "A" and "B." A had only one job, and that was to ask B, "Who are you?" And B's job was to answer the question. However, the way the rules of this exercise work is that you try to never repeat the same answer twice. You go on and on exhaustively questioning to find who you are and to get those pieces out verbally. At regular intervals, the partners would switch their roles. Then the questioning would start all over again.
     After a whole morning of this relentless back and forth, the person on the end of the question starts to experience and realize, "I have a sensation or a feeling of 'who I am,' but none of the labels nor things that I say about 'who I am' satisfies me in describing that intimate sensation which is within myself. As a matter of fact, I cannot get out of my mouth "who I really am." None of the things in the description of what a person spends time doing or thinking, nor their pastimes, mental, emotional or physical activities, satisfies the true definition and answers the question, "Who am I?"
     The result of the tension that exists between those things we have falsely identified ourselves as being, and who we really are, produces a type of fear. We fear losing what we have identified ourselves as being: place, position, recognition, money, power, understanding, values, or whatever. All of these are the things that we have become attached to for our identity in the world. You already know the old adage, "As you think, so you are, and so you become." This is "Spirituality 101." Then why do we stay anxious over those things that we fear losing, even when we realize that those are the very things that do not adequately describe us nor are us?
     This tension has us suffer. We act as if we ultimately are our bodies and minds with all of the limited attributes that go with them. We do more than act as if, we argue for this material point of view. We hold tightly to those things that we established are not really us. We grip to them. This gripping is what is called "attachment."
     Spiritual practice on the Path is like a therapy that operates on us for the release of attachments. It might be compared to Rolfing for example. Rolfing is a physical therapy that releases the muscle attachments of the human body from the connective tissue and skeleton. The Rolfing process goes in deeply to reopen the attachments so that the muscle can seat and align itself properly. Another health example exists inside the physical human heart. If we keep a poor diet with a lot of anxiety and stress in our lives, things become attached to the interior walls of the heart. Cholesterol, fats and other tissues build up and become attached, blocking the flow of blood. A therapy is needed to free the attachments of a blocked heart.
     Attachments are easy to understand in this manner. They block the flow, and to the degree that they are attached, there is a commensurate amount of pain that takes place to release them. In the spiritual process, we release the "I" who has become attached to its identification.
     At times, this process can be painful. More often than not, the sensation of pain is something we would like to avoid. We call this avoidance "fear." In the intensive physical therapy of Rolfing, we know that the pain can produce ecstasy by being released from the muscle attachments, but the point of the interruption of those attachments, or the removal of the block produces a momentary pain, heat or some other visceral sensation. When we are confronted with letting go of the things in our lives that we falsely identify as ourselves (attachments), we find that we also get corresponding physical and emotional symptoms.
     Every moment life asks us, "How attached are you? How do you identify yourself? Are you really that?" So long as we are attached to and identified with those attachments, we set up mechanisms to protect the system of attachments. In so doing, we perpetuate our fear. Having to protect my attachments is the same thing as suffering, because of the cycle of holding onto not only what is not really me, but the continual lie necessary to affirm that it is. This is the nature of protection. I must insist that it is, but I am not. Go figure!   
     Then life becomes like living a lie every single day. "I am this! I am that!" our attachments insist. While our Heart, the Self that lies as the quintessence inside the human Spirit screams back, "No you are not! You are more than all of this or that." Our fear desperately argues, "No. I am. I am. I am." This flux back and forth creates a tremendous amount of suffering. We are afraid to lose the things that we think that we have and that we are, in spite of the fact that they are not ours and they do not last. Can you see the dilemma? That is why the Buddha's first truth of the Four Noble Truths is "Attachment is suffering. Desire is suffering." It is the same thing. Attachments are tied to the expectations we have for them as well.
     By being identified with the things that are other than our True Self, we have now become a separate subject from the "whole." Easy to understand. This teaching is the classical Truth of the Eastern philosophies, i.e., Sufism, Yoga, Hinduism, Buddhism. So long as we experience and establish ourselves as different by our gender and our preferences, each individual remains a separate subject. If we were able to get a vantage point that was broader than our own personal perspective, say instead of us being in a forest looking at one particular tree, we were able to look at the forest itself (life from Allah's perspective), we could see the whole. The universal creation operates as a whole, not as compartmentalized separate subjects. We would see a whole process in place, something akin to viewing an anthill. How do we regain the vision of the whole? Well, we certainly will not regain the vision of the whole so long as we are lost in, attached to and are afraid of letting go of our tiny little idiosyncrasies which are the attachment play of the ego.
     To live as the One who we really are, not the one we have come to think of ourselves as being, is the purpose of our Path. The Path of Yoga and the Path of Sufism form the common Path of our Community. I am using the word "Community" to refer to communion, the process of establishing (actually reestablishing) one's Unity. In Community, we can heal the ways we have divided ourselves through the limited associations of our minds. The Unity we are reestablishing is the Unity between our small self and our Divine Self, between the Lover and the Beloved, between our narrow desire and the Heart's desire, between our own personal will and the Divine Will.
     This idea of being beyond limitations is something that we have all experienced in our own lives within our own right. We experience it in our breath. We have experienced it at times in a quiet, still moment when we have seen the fleeting spark, which is the glimpse of being alive. This experience is not located in any one of the identities or labels we have attached to ourselves. Think of those moments where everything comes together -if you have not had one in awhile, I pray that you start having one right away. It may have been in nature, a moment of solitude, a moment of prayer or meditation, whether it was with a lover, a child or when a project came together and you were spontaneously and innocently absorbed by that moment and there was nothing wrong.
     You will notice that in that moment, there were no separate subjects. You did not have an inner dialogue going off inside declaring, "I am a woman fighting for women's rights," or "I am a black fighting for black's rights," or "I am a man fighting for men's rights." There was not any of that dialogue taking place. You were devoid of the distinction, of the identities that are created by these attachments. That is why those moments are so extraordinary, and we call them "peak experiences."
     Spiritual work is, in part, to interrupt and remove the false notions and identifications, so that we can reestablish clearly the essence of our True Self. Then our work is to live it. It can be likened to clearing away the brush or weeds from a garden. It is our job to care for that garden so it feels like a hospitable place for Grace to come. Seeds, even the best seeds from the best stock, placed in an inhospitable environment may sprout, but they can not take hold, because there is a poor place, or even worse, no place for them to root. That is why we speak of "tenderizing the Heart" or making the Heart soft. One who is on the Path of Enlightenment has the visceral experience of the Heart opening, softening and becoming fertile ground where the seeds of divinity can actually sprout, take root, be and live. This is the spiritual process. One of the sayings of the Sufi mystics is "Empty yourself." Empty yourself of everything that is not of the Divine, so that you create the space for the Divine to come and live. Empty yourself of everything that is "not of God," so that you can be filled with God.
     One who is like this is a peaceful person. He or she is not protecting anything anymore. This person is free. What do you have over a person like this? Approval does not work. Convention does not work. Whether you agree or do not agree with them has no influence. Suffering no longer matters. Ecstasy is just a distraction. The free ones amongst us, the liberated saints, have given everything away and in return have received everything. One great saint of our century. Meher Baba, once said, "Desire for nothing but to be desireless. Hope for nothing but to be beyond all hope. Want nothing and you will have everything." One who is like this no longer has the cycle of suffering in their life, because they let go of everything that was not who they really are. This is the crux right here, let go of the things that are not really you to find out who you really are.
     The Sufis and the Yogis say that this is the process of enlightenment, and its Path is the birthright of every human being. This is why you are human. You came in with this birthright. It is the "warranty" you got when you received your human body and mind. You have two arms, two legs, two eyes, a belly button, and with that came the "Enlightenment Policy," if you decide to use it and cash it in. We support each other in our Community toward that end and purpose.
     There is really only one Teacher, and we are all students of the One Teacher. The personal spiritual Teachers of the world are the representatives of the One. It is important for us to understand our relationships with these people. They are the hopeful support and reinforcement for us to become whole. True Teachers are the directors, the guides, to our True Selves. A real spiritual Teacher demands that we turn into ourselves, as opposed to looking outside ourselves for somebody to come save us, or some new deity, or a new picture to put on the alter table.
     If what I am teaching has any real value at all, it means that my life and the lives of the saints are replicable experiments, an experience of enlightenment to which each person is entitled. This is what makes spirituality different from religion. Spirituality turns us inward so that we have the unfolding experience ourselves, rather than turning us outward to worship somebody else who did it, or who we think is better than us. We want to venerate the blooming of the rose within our own Heart. Then serve others. This is spirituality.