Realizing One’s True Nature – Who Am I? – Part 1
All spiritual studies are pointless and worthless, unless they give you enough courage and determination to face the question: Who Am I?
In Nisargadatta Maharaj’s words: “Dwell therein from where you have sprouted, stay put there in the source; how it occurred to you that ‘you are’, and when?”
A formidable task indeed, when the only “tool” one has is one’s mind…
The same mind that actively conspires to keep one away from reality, and under the ruthless reigns of the ego.
But, using the mind is the only way to wrestle the control away from the mind. Studying spirituality and getting immersed in spiritual concepts facilitates the shift from personal to universal consciousness. And although the final jump, call it realization, enlightenment or liberation, is yet to be taken, answering the question: Who Am I? will put you on the springboard; actually, no, it’ll make you feel the springboard you’re standing on all your life.
Who Am I? Where did I get the idea that the body and the mind combined make a Me?
Let’s go back in time, using nothing else but the memory.
Say, you’re 56 years old now. You know what you were 10 years ago; similarly, your memory gives you pretty accurate picture of yourself 20, 30 and 40 years ago. You can recall lots of (memorable) incidents from your earlier life, and many will remember a single happening far away in time, the first thing we found out about ourselves.
This is the moment when you, for the first time, realized that you are. To your amazement, you’ve said to yourself: I Am!
Whether it happened when you were 2, 3 or 4 years old is quite irrelevant here. What is crucial to know though, is what were you prior to the discovery of “I Am.”
Surely, you were you, were you not? Your parents can certainly testify that you were born; they have photos and witnesses to that!
But, why your realization of “I Amness” begins some 2, 3 years later? What was your “I Am” doing meantime? Was it absent? Surely not, for many people had witnessed that you were – smiling, crying, eating and sh…ing.
Yet you don’t remember anything, neither the cramped living in your mother’s womb, nor the moment you left it and landed in the cold air, helped up by some stranger.
Back then, little you knew that the only reason that this little crying “thing” came about was a moment of passion that your parents shared…
And because of that, they were heaped with the life lasting responsibility to care for you, to make you who you are today – a person, fully adherent to then current principles of upbringing.
Through the bodily contact, play and words your mother implanted in you the same belief that was implanted in her by her mother – that you are what she sees: the little bundle of body. They even gave you a name!
