For years, when I have dabbled with enlightenment, I heard the kind of story where a person goes to a wise man and asks advice. The wise man’s response goes something like “Who are you that asks the question?” or “First you must know you?”.
My response has always been “Stop dodging the question, saying annoying phrases and get on with being wise!” To me this was all part of the smoke and mirrors that being a ‘wise man’ was.
For crying out loud, I would think, I know who I am – ask me any specific questions you need but get to the answer.
It was like Deep Thought in The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy saying “I don’t think you really understand the question.”
But the truth is I was just like everyone else – looking for solutions that could be spooned up in 5 minutes and anyone who was held up as a ‘wise man’ but couldn’t do this was a fraud of sorts.
Only when you can accept answers can’t always come instantly – which is even harder in today’s society where social media suggests solutions are only a phrase away – can you move forward.
So what are these ‘wise men’ driving at when they ask “Who are you?”
This is the first (but gigantic) step towards your answer because you are two entities. You know this because of the constant chatter in your mind and your awareness of that chatter. You are ‘I and the self’
Who is I?
I, in these terms, is the part of you that lasts your lifetime. Not your current job, not your current marital status, not your current sexuality. Anything that can be changed is part of the ‘self’ or the ‘me’.
This means the ‘self’/’me’ also includes the physical body because our cells are constantly renewing. The physical you last year is completely different to the physical you today.
Your thoughts come and go, your mental health changes over time, none of these are your ‘I’.
I is simply the observer. The one who can watch the ‘self’, without judgement, and see it for what it is. Not good, not bad, just what it is.
Defining who you are by what you are not
This process is sometimes explained as “It is easier to discover who you are when you consider who you are not”.
You are not any of the things which can change during your lifetime:
- You are not your job
- You are not your marital status
- You are not your sexuality
- You are not male/female
- You are not your opinions
- You are not your body
- You are not your emotions
- … and so on.
It all leads to the same place. I is just the conscious observer of your ‘self’ or ‘me’.
Once you realise this you have an instantly useful tool by which you can step away from yourself and reconsider what your ‘self’ is . Be warned though, it can be a very painful process.
Who is my ‘self’ and why
By looking at the ‘self’/’me’ you realise its transient nature:
- Me did not always want to be rich so why does me want that now?
- Me was not always religious so why is me religious now?
- Me did not always want to help others so why does me want to do it now?
Easy … but potentially awful … because you are questioning the very foundations of your belief system. A belief system that you have built up through your entire life, that you thought you had done with intelligence and that you have created your social world around.
The honest answers to these questions could have what (at first) appear to be very painful consequences because they can mean all the people you know are the wrong people. They can mean that what you ‘believed’ wasn’t actually true so you have to admit you were wrong, you were a fool and you were duped.
So difficult, and so painful, is that realisation that most people retreat right here. They may be in a painful place right now (say working long hours to keep up with the jones’s) but this step is even more painful so they’ll just stay where it hurts less.
As De Mello points out it is often the people who are suffering immensely from the pain of their belief system who find it easiest to escape it. Yes, getting out is going to be painful … but what do they have to lose?
Did you make it? Then meet your Ego
Now although most people will buy into what I have said so far they will have also, deep down, realised that to follow it any further signals trouble ahead and maybe it would be better to just go and take in a movie!
Yes, tomorrow they will worry about what others think of them but its the easier road in the short term.
If you’re not busy flicking through your local cinema offerings but still here then its time to meet your nemesis in this process … your ego.
Your ego is the part of you that wants to be flattered and in taking time out to look at your ‘me’ you are going to expose yourself to a great deal of unflattering aspects.
You thought your charity work made you a ‘good’ person? No, you did it in your own self interest to feel good and/or receive praise from others. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it – just you should understand why you are doing it and be strong enough to accept that.
Your ego will be constantly trying to derail you. “Can you really live without those people?” it will whisper to you. “What is this nonsense you’re reading, go out and buy something and you’ll be happier, its always worked before” and on and on.
Our Ego is fragile so it takes a hit when people say bad things about us. It even takes a hit when we think people say bad things about us or might say bad things about us.
Society has been set up for the Ego. If you have a family you are a ‘good’ person. If you get a promotion this is a ‘good’ thing. If you’re wearing last years fashions that is a ‘bad’ thing. And so on.
The things we do that benefit others are done for the Ego. We feel good to help others so we benefit. The Ego feels even better when other people tell us how good we are when we are helping others.
Taking on the Ego
So if we know who I is and we can use it to observe ‘me’ then we can get to know ‘me’ a little better. Lets consider some of the questions I posed earlier.
Me did not always want to be rich so why does me want that now?
This is perhaps the least complex one to know. You probably understand it already but buried this understanding somewhere out of the way because you knew the answer was awkward.
Many want to be rich because that is the way their society brings them up. I’m using ‘rich’ to mean material wealth here but we could also define ‘rich’ by respect from others because of wisdom/bravery/strength/etc. and it wouldn’t make any difference as I’ll come to explain shortly.
Its an important differentiation to understand though because it shows we were not born instinctively hankering after either cash or the respect of others. These are imposed on us by the society we grow up in.
Western society pushes two main concepts:
- The more money you have, the more things you can buy and the happier you will be.
- If you become extremely wealthy those in society will look up to you as a role model.
The first point is fairly easy to see. Just listen to the adverts on the radio, commercials on the TV or what people are trying to sell you in the printed media.
Notice how many of these adverts are trying to sell you happiness via something. “Look at this family who are so happy because they are on holiday”, “Look at this woman who is so happy because she is eating these tablets”, “Look at that man who is so happy because he is driving that car”.
Once you look, it is startling to see how brazen they are. “Our product or service will make you happy”. Not “Our product is a good product”. No it is a doorway to happiness.
A commercial for a car might reference its reliability or safety but the overriding imagery is a person (male/female/couple) who are beaming with the joys of owning their new four wheeled machine.
Then there is mega wealth. How well respected you will be the more you have and the newer what you have is. Neighbours will notice in awe and the medium level and magazines/TV/radio will want to feature you at the higher end.
You have become very rich and so you are ‘successful’. This is societies definition of ‘success’. I guy who farms a plot of land, is 90% self sufficient and very happy is interesting … but not a ‘success’!
Think about what you currently want. Look at the ‘me’. Why does ‘me’ really want this. You may well have an ego attack here!
“I want a promotion at work so I earn more and can provide better for my family”. Clever but unless your family is wanting for basic food and clothing then you just dressed up what you want as an altruistic act.
If your family is better off people will say how ‘successful’ you are – not just at work but as a family provider. Here is the ego at play. Why not stop chasing the promotion, do your job well but spend more time with your family?
Take the wealthy parents who buy their daughter a new car the day she passes her driving test. Aren’t they ‘successful parents’ because they worked hard to afford these things.
The next day she drives excessively fast, crashes and dies. Now her parents are ‘unfortunate victims’ of a terrible accident.
But why was she driving so fast? To get a thrill. To get somewhere on time because she was taught she would not be respected if she was late to meetings. If she had understood that none of these mattered as much as the safety of her and others it would not have happened.
The parents bought her up in the same chained system as they themselves had been bought up in. They are not to blame because they were brainwashed and how can someone who is brainwashed know how to bring up a child without brainwashing!
But to realise how your drive for material wealth / respect has come about is hard to admit in many ways. It means:
- You have been wrong for most of your life
- You thought you were clever but you actually allowed a system to brainwash you
- Can you really face life without the constant respect of others praising you?
Somewhere around we all know someone who suddenly dropped out of the system. A friend of a friend of a friend who gave up their top city job to go and run a two-bit beach bar.
We might say ‘how jealous’ we are but we’re not really or we would drop out as well. We like the idea but our ego makes excuses as to why it is ‘not really us’ or the absolute disdain it might cause from family and friends because we are not being a proper father/mother.
But these are extremes. We don’t have to drop out and start serving coffees on the beach. We just need to recognise things for what they are. If we stop chasing money/respect because we understand many of the things it buys us are completely unnecessary then we’ve taken a step forward.
If we stop letting the praise or criticism of others make us happy or sad we can be far more content. It does not mean the praise or criticism should be ignored. We can consider what can be learnt from it. We can spot what is simply others playing with our ego to get something.
We can see through it but we can see the value of it when there is value. We can see when we are actually wrong without feeling depressed by that discovery.
If you have got your head around this it should be no surprise that when you ask a ‘wise man’ how to become very wealthy they will ask “Who is asking the question?”
Because when you understand who is asking you will then realise you have no need become very wealthy and suddenly your original question is irrelevant.
Me was not always religious so why is me religious now?
When you consider this you realise that you were educated to be religious. It was never a natural part of you. Someone told you about it and told you it was good. They then praised your Ego because you believed them.
Such is the strength of this that you let all logic and sense go to the wall and started to believe in something that has no solid proof of existence beyond an awful lot of other people believing the same belief system!
You then surrounded yourself with other people who shared the same belief system. Deep down you live in fear that the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down.
For a Catholic, just to take an example, noticing how many Men of God are also men who sexually abuse children can shake the foundation.
Religions are quick, however, to plug undeniable holes in their house of cards. Jehovah’s Witnesses use a concept known as ‘New Light’ to explain why their views on some aspect or another has suddenly changed but all religions have escape hatches.
However at a subconscious level believers know they are just that – believing and hoping (this is the fear part) that they are right.
So now you are in a real fix because to realise religion is not real has such massive implications they are difficult to imagine.
- You are admitting to everyone that you were wrong
- You are admitting to everyone that you were fooled
- You are likely to lose friends and perhaps even family
- You have to get your mind around the fact that you do not know many of the things that religion had provided you the answer for and be comfortable with that.
Ouch!
But if you have separated ‘I’ and ‘me’ in order to understand who you are this is the inevitable point you will come to.
No ‘wise man’ can advise you while your ‘I’ still hangs onto a belief system that is simply an illusion. That is why they first ask “Who are you?”