Who am I? This question troubled me through countless sleepless nights as a child. My days were spent doing what children do, but at night, as I settled into bed, my mind would soon return to the same crucial conundrum. My intuition told me there was an answer; it was just out of reach, and it would be worth finding.
I would not have known it then, but this simple question represented my first essential steps on the spiritual path. The three words would bounce around in my head for hours, and sometimes, the lack of an answer felt terrifying. Who am I? The emphasis was always on the second word of the three because I felt it offered the best potential gateway to understanding. The ‘I’ who posed the question was the narrative voice in my head. It wasn’t the young boy contemplating his existence in his safe Hertfordshire bed, but the awareness that now spoke through the physical form of the young boy. It was not a question of my name, identity, or ancestry, but instead a baffling question of who, or ‘what,’ was the nature of the awareness that was being the boy. That was the mystery of the ‘am.’ Expanding the question to make the distinction a little more precise, it could be put as, ‘Who is it that is the conscious awareness that is ‘being’ in the mind of this child.’ It was a profound question for a child’s mind, and of course, the answer never emerged to the child – not in the beginning, at least.
The power of the nightly meditation was not in the answer that stubbornly remained elusive to me but instead lay in the process of the meditations themselves. Unbeknownst to me, the constant asking and exploring for answers was changing the neurological structure of my brain. Neurons that fire together wire together. The brain, so complex and unfathomable in that it creates thoughts and then allows those thoughts to change the structure of itself physically, adapts to what is asked of it.
To actively stay with the same conundrum or paradox is to challenge the brain to find the solution. It takes dedication and patience, but like a persistent thief, even the most complex locks can be picked eventually. After many weeks, the emerging insight fundamentally changed how I viewed the world.
Sometimes, a question is not very good. It can appear simple, but it evades the answer because that answer calls for a greater understanding than the degree of understanding needed to pose the question in the first place. Another example of such questions might be: What is north of the North Pole? Or, what happened before the Big Bang when time began? The question might not be good, but it can be an extremely useful way to unlock higher levels of understanding.
The question, ‘Who am I?’ took me to that higher level, and the only way to reach that level was to tease apart my developing ego from the ‘awareness’ that sought the answer. Having achieved this, the fog of mystery fell away, and I could see the answer with perfect clarity. The ego's identity lives in space-time- in our three-dimensional physical universe with dates, clocks, school homework, and laws of physics. My ego went to school, played with his friends and siblings, watched television, and did all the things expected of a young boy. All these things happen in time, and the child that exists at any moment in time does any of those everyday things. We are all born in space-time and will die in space-time. The ego with which we naturally identify is made up of the thoughts, fears, motivations, feelings, and sensations that awareness allows us to experience in space-time. Yet, these all pass just like leaves floating down a river.
Crucially, the ‘awareness,’ which we will call ‘conscious awareness,’ does not live in space-time. It is eternal and exists outside the dimension of time. We all experience this. There is only ever one moment, and it is always now. It is only ever through the present moment and only ever in the present moment that we experience such awareness. The ego will worry about the future or dwell on past injustices, but no matter where our thoughts go, our conscious awareness can never be anywhere other than in the present moment. So, the answer to the question was there in front of me. When I ask my ego, ‘Who am I?’, it tells me my name, gender, job title, nationality, or anything else that might be relevant to that situation in space-time. When I ask my conscious awareness, who am I? The answer is always the same. I am conscious awareness, nothing more and nothing less. From then on, I no longer had any doubt: My ego and conscious awareness were forever untethered.
Once this insight had been revealed, the nocturnal meditation on the question, ‘Who am I?’ stopped. It is still a valuable question to return to from time to time, and indeed, the ‘Who am I?’ enquiry is one of the key meditations of the Buddhist tradition. That’s not to say my mind didn’t embark on other meditations. Now it was ‘wired’ for exploring riddles; other important insights occasionally came to me that resonated with the same sense of being a profound truth. I will share some of these later in these posts.
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