Is there a person in us?

This post is part of the my blog series non-duality.  I suggest you to read my previous posts -- Does God exist?,  How we search for God, and Who am I? before reading this post. 

Almost every one of us believes that there is a "Person" in us. When we do a little introspection and investigation of this belief, as we did in the blog post Who am I?, we struggle to find the person in us. We saw in our previous investigation that our physical body, our thoughts, perceptions, sensations, feelings/emotions, or images we have of ourself are not the real "I/me/self" because these are not always present and they come and go (they are phenomenal); however, the activity of our body, feelings coming and going, emotions rising and sinking etc., are observable by us. We believe this observer to be a Person with real existence. Is this belief true? Why do we have this belief so strongly and when does this belief start during our life? 

When we are born, we experience the entire world as one. As a baby we see our mother and everything around us in the same way we see our own body parts, that is with no separation. There is just one single experience of life. At this point we don't see the difference between ourselves and others. We don't understand the concept of "me/I". We think, act, and play in tune with everything and everyone around us. 

As we grow a bit older, the first concept of our separate existence comes into our mind. We start believing to be separate self. This happens because of the conditioning we get from our caretakers and also due to our natural instincts to survive. We first start seeing our body to be "me". Once we see this separation of ourselves (Once a separate "I" emerges), everything around us becomes something else, the "other". And all other things around us start transforming from being just part of a single experience to having their own existence with names, characteristics, values, attribution of good/bad, and a lot of other things. This is the beginning of the outside world for us. From seeing everything and everyone, including ourselves as one, from this point on, we start seeing multiplicity in the world around us. 

This is symbolically explained in The Bible (Genesis 3) as the "Original Sin" when Adam and Eve ate the apple from the tree of Knowledge. From this point on, the paradise they lived in turned into a sinful world, and they started seeing the world in terms of good and evil, they started feeling shame, and they started feeling fear and other things. This original sin (and the belief from then on to be a separate person) makes us continue to Sin (take on more beliefs) and see the world in terms of good and evil. This continues until we no longer find true happiness in the world and finally find our salvation and rediscover heaven that has always been there. 

Many cultures don't allow babies to see themselves in a mirror for the first year or two. This is to delay the process of recognizing themselves as a separate person and let them continue to live in unity as long as possible. 

Once the belief of separation is formed as a baby, the process of further division and separation (Sins) continues and we start piling up hundreds and thousands of identities (READ: How our identities influence our thinking and actions) around an imaginary person and start believing all of them to be "me". We associate ourselves with a race, a gender, a nationality, a community, and a religion. We believe that we are supposed to like and dislike things, so we start creating an imaginary persona with likes and dislikes around food, clothing, behaviour, weather conditions, cultural aspects and almost everything else we perceive around us. We start giving quality and value to each "thing" around us, we compare them with other things and start categorizing everything into likes and dislikes, favourites, and we rank them as what is best and what is worst. 

As our body-mind grows into adulthood, we start associating ourselves with our educational degrees, our relationships, our salary, our job titles, our possessions, our life stories, our traumas, and our happy stories. We continue to take on these micro identities on and on. Over time, we cement a belief to be this imaginary person with hundreds and thousands of Identities/Beliefs and continue to act on this person's behalf. 

Our culture, our education system, and our language fully supports this division and with the support of them we freely continue to mould this imaginary person with never ending identities/beliefs. 

This bubble we create around an imaginary person becomes vulnerable when the reality of its existence is questioned. Most of us never question this core belief whether there is a person in us or not. But for those who start investigating this belief, it becomes clearer and clearer over time that the imaginary person is nowhere to be found. 

If there is no person in us, and we are not our body, our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our perceptions, our sensations or our images, then who exactly are we? One thing we are sure is that we are aware of our emotions, feelings, perceptions etc. The only thing we can say for sure from our experience is that our Awareness is the only real thing, everything else comes and goes. 

In that case, is Awareness our true identity? More about this in upcoming blog posts. 

Peace! Aum(OM)! Amen! Inshallah!  

#trueself #whoami #awareness 

 

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