Ultimate Question - Who am I?

'Who am I?' I have wondered about this since I was a child, searched for definitive answers and really come up with next to nothing. So, why ask the question at all? Why bother writing about it if there is no definitive answer?

I think that the question is an important one to ask, because in the asking we help foster a constructive curiosity. Constructive, because curiosity facilitates an openness and receptiveness to life, that potentially deepens our understanding and broadens our otherwise limited perspectives regarding who we are, and who others might be. 

Let me offer a contrary example. Failing to be curious limits our understanding of people because we may believe we already ‘know’ them by virtue of their clothing, their looks, their demeanor, their personality, a bad habit, or even a bad day. As such, we miss the fact that people are much more than these superficial markers alone will ever reveal. 

This ‘inch deep-mile wide’ mentality cannot really get to the heart of what it means to be human, nor provide a satisfactory answer to the question ‘who am I?’ 

Curiosity, on the other hand, encourages us to probe deeper, to ask questions, explore and observe the diversity of what is actually inside us.

I believe we often settle for superficial explanations, because, again, we think we already know who we are and what a ‘self’ is.  In point of fact, ‘self’ is just an idea, a conceptual framework we use in the attempt to try and understand the experience of being in a particular body, at a particular place and time.  

And, we complicate matters further by so busily confining ourselves to our ‘selfing’ projects that we blind ourselves to the larger construct of which we are all a part. 

We are blind to a fantastically vast, beautiful, complex and (ultimately) mysterious universe. We are folded into this universe in such a way that we are neither separate from it, nor from each other—a phenomenon that unites us both literally and figuratively as one. 

To use a Buddhist analogy:  each of us is like an individual wave on the surface of the ocean, but we are not separate from that ocean—we are the whole ocean as well. 

Quite literally we are all in this together!

There is, of course, more to be said on the matter, but I will leave it to you to dig deeper into it. I just thought I’d provide this snap-shot, as a reminder that we are much more than our small ideas of ourselves (and others) often acknowledge or allow. 

Who are we?

We are a fantastically vast, beautiful, complex and mysterious expression of the nature of the universe itself.

Dare to discover!