The Ultimate Question: Who Am I?

Isn’t this the question that guides our whole lives? Isn’t this what all of our actions, thoughts, feelings, and relationships are really all about?

The question of who I really am is like a tiny light in the distance, sometimes receding, sometimes closer, that leads me on through what often seems like the darkness of reality. It’s why I keep going when things are really hard. It’s why I celebrate when things are great; not because of some final answer, but because of the constant and comforting permanence of the question, and the ever evolving solutions that present themselves.

What if we could learn that we are immensely powerful, creative beings, that we live not at the mercy of events but at the creative heart of them? This would be the most powerful realization we’d ever have, and the most profound. Creating reality in an inspired way, giving birth to new events, is what our nature is all about. The questions we ask about ourselves are the way we begin to learn about the process.

Who Am I? It’s Always What We Are Asking

When we first learn to crawl or walk, isn’t that the question we are asking? The safety of mother, or the excitement of striking out on our own? We take a few, then many steps away from what we know, following that tiny light. When it gets too scary, we come back. All our ultimate excursions and adventures are like that first one, venturing out to follow the light, then retreating to safety when we get scared, tired or lonely.

As older children we try on different ways of being, and ask a new question: What do I want to be when I grow up? This is just another version of, Who am I? Some of us know early on what our mission is and we pursue one path with a single-minded devotion: art, science, writing, construction. I’ve known people who immerse themselves in their careers to an extent that most practitioners of the same activity cannot imagine. Their light leads them deeper into one thing, rather than further out among many things.

Then there are people who follow the light here and there, answering the question in a multitude of ways.

The question is also fundamental to the arena of relationship. Isn’t that what we want our most important interactions with other people to do—tell us who we are? From the “best friends” of high school days, to the lovers of adulthood, our spouses, our business colleagues, our children, we look to all of them for the whole or part of the answer to Who Am I? This is often what makes those interactions so highly charged: so wonderful when they work and so devastating when they don’t. We are looking to someone else to be our light; tell me who I am.

Where Is The Answer?

Where do we find the answer to the question Who am I? Religion declares that we are children of a god or gods, and that our role or nature is to be servant, worshipper, promoter, follower, reflector or some other relational aspect of the god-human dichotomy. Many religions give explicit explanations about who we are and what we’re supposed to be doing, and sometimes these satisfy us, sometimes they don’t. Volumes of interpretation are written to describe that relationship and our role, but our intuition often tells us that Who We Are is more individual than that, more personal and less verbally accessible.

Medicine and psychology have tried to answer the question. Our cells and psyches have been scrutinized and analyzed. Every corner of our anatomy has been laid open to the scalpel and the microscope, we’ve lain on the couch for decades of afternoons, and though answers have arisen, the essential question of Who Am I remains.

That’s what all the roles we take on, and take so seriously, are about. Am I daughter, wife, sister, aunt, teacher, writer, gardener, shopper, thinker, knitter, cook, neighbor, dreamer, sufferer of headaches, diarist, quilter, dog lover, bargain hunter, blonde, grey-eyed, skinny, middle-aged, New Englander, American, human being, inhabitant of planet Earth, peace lover in the universe---does any of that, or all of it, define who I am? Am I simply the sum of my parts?

Reading through this I can see that it does not. How many people would fit that definition? How many skinny blonde peace-loving American gardeners must there be---and yet all of them are not me. So there is something else, something beyond role, activity, description.

The Observer And The Gap

Deepak Chopra in many of his books talks about finding the gap between thoughts. This is found by quieting the thoughts and watching them pass, as in meditation, and then noticing the gap between thoughts. When we learn to let our thoughts go, we can detach from identifying with them and learn to be aware of a presence beneath and around them.

As we become familiar with the quality of this presence, we learn to tap into its wisdom and share in its peacefulness. After experiencing this in meditation, we can learn to feel the presence of this part of ourselves in our ordinary lives and tap into it for help and insight. In this basic way we can learn to become acquainted with a part of our essential nature, a deep and trusted part that underlies our daily experience and can be relied on for support and guidance.

These gaps are moments when we can let the chatter die down, calm our fears and see beyond them, let go of expectations and just learn about who we are.

Quantum physics talks about the observer. If you’ve seen the film What The Bleep Do We Know!?, you are very familiar with that discussion of the observer. Laboratory experiments on subatomic particles have shown that these building blocks of all reality not only respond, but come into being as a result of our observation.

By reading about these experiments and what scientists have found, we learn that on the fundamental level of quantum particles, all that really exists, independent of observation, is potential. The universe is a field of pure potential, waiting to be activated by consciousness. Intention and attention is what creates reality. This occurs in a way that can be observed. This isn’t academic theorizing. It's scientifically proven.

That we continue to live our lives as if this weren’t true is what’s truly amazing!

So what does this mean, that when we look at a particle, it’s there; when we don’t, it’s held in some kind of escrow, as a wave? Does it mean that we can create whatever we want by looking for it? Does it mean that everything around us has been created through our attention? What an incredible discovery this is!

Just on the basic level of physical manipulation of objects, every article in my house got there because I gave it attention. Nothing walked in of its own accord. I didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly there were things there that I had never seen before.

We are so used to thinking of ourselves as passive receivers of life, at the mercy of other people, the past, our memories, our emotions, politeness, cultural tradition, all of that, that even on this most literal level we disregard our power. No wonder it’s so hard to see through to the deeper level, and see that we not only buy it or build it or inherit it, we create it, on a moment to moment basis. We are powerful beings, with our own built in genies or magic wands, who respond to our thoughts and desires.

How long it takes to create something, how hard it is to get, how expensive, how rare, all are reflections of our belief systems. This is what plays out into the time frames it takes for these things to arrive, all the negotiations, payments, arrangements, etc., that we find so necessary to getting what we want. These beliefs, and that entire process, are not an expression of anything but what we have put there ourselves.

One, Two, Three

Abraham-Hicks says that there are three steps to creating anything:

1. Ask
2. It is given.
3. Allow yourself to have it.

They emphasize that every time we desire something, as soon as we have that desire, it is answered, every time. Source, spirit, God, the universe, whatever you want to call that element of larger nature that is the ground source and energy matrix of our being, always answers, always gives. So the first two steps are easy. It must be the third one then where all the problems lie, and here too we find that these problems are all wrapped up in the question, Who Am I?

Am I someone who deserves things? Am I lucky, poor, loved, lonely, a winner or a loser? Am I good at things or a slow learner, a renaissance man or a one trick pony? Am I a hard worker?

To take the last example, if I have a belief that I am a hard worker, only things that match that will be found in my reality. I won’t recognize or allow anything else. How could I? My definitions of myself draw a circle around the reality I create, and everything else is outside that in a realm that is terra incognita. How then could I create something easily? How could I have effortless prosperity? It would violate my definition of myself.

If I believed it strongly enough, going against it would threaten my existence. Accomplish something easily? How can I? If I did that, who would I be? It would go against the reality I’ve set up. It would be like expecting stones to float or dogs to fly, in defiance of gravity. My beliefs and definitions create the “rules” of the world I live in and everything that happens in that world then follows those rules. I am not able to see anything else.

In just this simple example, I can see that Who I Am is not answered by those kinds of definitions, not on a satisfying level. That’s why those beliefs drive us so hard; we feel their shallowness and so we have to keep proving them over and over again. What we need to do is look beyond those things into the miraculous depths of our nature.

Relationships can bring the same emptiness. If I am a mother and stake my self on that definition, what happens when the children leave? If I am a wife or husband, a daughter or son, and that defining relationship ends, where am I then? The desolation of grief often involves not only the loss of the loved one, but the loss of our self. Who Am I screams most loudly in our ears at those times, who am I now?

Synchronicities Are A Clue To Who We Are

What are synchronicities? Synchronicity was originally introduced by Carl Jung. He defined it as an alignment of event and meaning that had as its connection the observer (just like in physics).

You can also call it a coincidence, though this word doesn’t imply the significance that synchronicity does. Two things that are connected on a deep level—but only through the observer. If the observer is removed from the synchronicity, it’s just a meaningless event—only the observer experiences the meaning.

Without the meaning that we bring to it, it remains just a wave, in physics terms. With the meaning that we bring it suddenly particle-izes, real-izes, becomes something that stands out from the mass of meaningless events. It’s lit up in a magical way that lets us suddenly see into the inspired nature of reality.

Our observation brings it into the kind of sharp focus that says to us: pay attention here! Look! Listen! But understand that it’s not our observation that saw it after the fact; it’s our observation that created it as a significant thing.

Here’s an example: I was reading some material that mentioned a particular book. At the exact moment I read the sentence mentioning it, there was a knock on the door and it was the mailman bringing my latest Amazon order. In that order was that very book, which I hadn’t even intended to order (it was a last minute fill-in, to get the free shipping); additionally, the book was Chopra’s The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, a book about synchronicities!

Now, all the elements of this event are perfectly ordinary. I read all the time, and many of the things that I read mention other books. I order from Amazon all the time. The mailman always knocks when he leaves a package. There is nothing out of the ordinary going on here and if I explained the event to anyone and left out the time element, it would all seem totally mundane.

What made it special was my observation, my awareness and involvement. I was reading about a book and it arrived on my doorstep just as I read its title. Think of all the precise arrangements of time and distance, handling and packaging, all the deliveries made on that and all the previous days, that led to the delivery being made at just the right time. Think of all the alterations of activity that I myself had to make, the decisions, actions, choices that led to my sitting in the chair at just the right time… it almost looks as if everything in the entire universe conspired to make that one thing happen, just then, just for me.

What if this is happening all the time?

What if every moment is a synchronicity? What if in every instant of time we are manifesting events that totally mirror our inner being, our nature, our process, our current arrangement of energy and focus? What if at every moment the universe is conspiring to create just the perfect event that, if we noticed what was happening, would say to us: Wake up!

This is what quantum physics tells us. We’re bringing it into being in every moment, like magic or alchemy. We create by our observation, instantly and fully. We are active partners in this wonderful universe, bringing worlds into being with each glance. There’s nothing passive about life!

And It All Happens Now

When we observe something or a synchronicity happens, this is what we find: It all happens Now. There is no other time. There is no past, no future, only an ever-present now.

Language makes this hard to get a sense of, as language is linear and goes from here to there across “time”. Our words have past, present and future, and this convinces us that those actually exist. But in reality, we only have Now. When I was two years old, it was Now; when I was ten, it was Now; Now it is Now, when I am 85 it will be Now. You can’t live in any moment but the current one.

I used to think of Now as a kind of hinge between past and future. I had an image of a tree, with the network of roots below ground being the past, and the network of branches and twigs above ground the future. The singleness of the trunk was the present, the intersection point between all that massive past and future, like a fulcrum or pivot.

But this gives all the weight to something that doesn’t exist.

There is a better metaphor we can use to describe Now. It’s more like a lightning bolt than a tree, something full of power, crackling with energy, instantaneous and single. It lights up the area all around it in the moment of its flashing, illuminating areas that we may call past and future if we like. But in itself it is entirely in the moment, entirely whole. Each moment of Now is like a new bolt of lightning, full of the same miraculous power, never diminishing, never wearing out.

Our thoughts as they impact our brains have been compared to lightning bolts, our thinking to a thunderstorm. This metaphor lets us see the truly immediate, ever-renewing nature of our selves in the present moment. Each “flash” of present power is just as full of potential, just as direct an expression of the universal source, as any other moment. And each one is independent in a way; we are not stuck seeing any part of reality by the light of some long gone flash of lightning—we see always by the light of this one.

It’s All Up to You

Each moment is a new chance; there’s never a time that’s “too late”, and we’re never “too old to learn”. In each moment we already start over again; the only thing to learn is to start over with something different, instead of recreating the same thing every day.

Who Am I? Am I the observer, the keeper of reality, not in a frozen sense of stockpiling objects or moments in some kind of warehouse of materialism or memory, but in the sense of keeping it going, keeping it moving forward, keeping it alive and full of action and emotion? That’s the question we all ask and the magical journey we are all on.

We are all searchers here, and we have found some insights, processes and practices that help immensely to reveal and release our power. Our desire is that you join us in the search and add your own insights and discoveries to ours. If we all join together in doing this we make the journey easier for everyone. And each additional person adds their own uniqueness to the whole, making it a better and richer experience for everyone.

There are many ways to look at who we really are, and each one of us will have a different and personal answer. The process of discovery leads to wonderful, magical experiences, a sense of power never found before and a peaceful acceptance of the nature of life. There is a great untapped field of potential right within our grasp and if we learn the different ways to let that power work, we can find all around us an incredible wealth of events and experiences that will bring us closer to our dreams.

By raising our vibrations, investigating limiting beliefs, raising our awareness, and really looking into the nature of our consciousness, we can begin to answer the ultimate question.

We encourage you to join the adventure, learn to look at reality in a new and exciting way, trust your own innate wisdom and power, and start making your dreams come true.

Go into the gap and see who you find.

By Margie Waters

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