Who Am I?
I am actually asking this question. For real. What does it mean to be nina? Who are you? What does it mean to be you? What is identity?
Are you your name? Your face? Your body? I like to think I am my soul, however, I am not even sure if I know what a soul is. So therein lies the dilemma in which I don't know who I am.
The easy way out of this is by simply stating I am a woman, I'm a writer, and yada, yada, yada. It is true that I am all of those things. However, if I say could not write for some reason, like the writing part of my brain stopped working, would I still be me? I like to think so.
I am not what I write or what I say, or even what I think. I think some crazy stuff sometimes. I'm glad that is not who I am. I sometimes think about the most frivolous, embarrassing, boring stuff in the whole world. But thankfully I am something else.
Am I the one who thinks? Maybe, that sounds a little more accurate. "I think therefore I am." I am not my actual thoughts but I am the thinker. But even more than thinking, I am what I feel. I am both what I think and what I feel. I am my experience. I am what I have experienced.
What I have experienced is different than what has happened to me. I was in New York on 911 for example, that is something that happened to me. However, what I experienced was an uplifting unity between New Yorkers that I had never seen before. That was my experience. Other people experienced something different from the same occurrence.
Michael Singer in his book, The Untethered Soul, claims that we are the one who is aware. We are the one being aware of life. We are not necessarily what we are aware of, but the person who experiences awareness.
For me, it works better to think about it as I am what I experience. It is pretty much the same thing as awareness, but I'm not sure I understand the term awareness as well.
In the spiritual community, the word awareness has the connotation of a person who understands their true spiritual nature. The one who is aware knows what is up, metaphorically, in the universe. Awareness is noticing life, experiencing the moment and using our inner wisdom.
With that definition in mind, I think Singer may be right. We are what we notice and experience and know. We are nothing else at all actually. I like to think, on a regular day, that I am a person who did particular things in life. But if I had done different things, I would still be myself.
I am this particular idiosyncratic mix of feelings, thoughts, and experiences that
I think the debate that we could have goes something like this: we are all individuals, however, we are also one with the entire universe. We are both of these things at the same time. We are ourselves and also just a part of a bigger self.
The next question I have after this is, was I ever not a self, I mean was I ever not in existence? Was I created out of nothing? The idea that I was once nothing scares me for some reason because it means I could possibly become nothing again. What does it mean to be nothing?
I like to think my soul or my spirit has always existed since the beginning of time. But was there some time before the beginning of time? Was there a time when there was nothing, including me, when I was nothing?
I like to think there has always been something, an over spirit, an entity in the universe and I have always been a part of that oversoul. I'm not sure I believe there ever was a void where there was absolutely nothing. A time before
But this again, is just what I consider my inner wisdom speaking. I have no proof that we are not just human beings that become nothing after we die. I have no evidence that we are not just chemical experiments that exist and then cease to exist.
However, there is a part of me that feels eternal. If you are a non-believer you could say that part is just my optimistic imagination. It is OK for us to believe different things. I am convinced that my existence is eternal, whereas you may think you are just a mortal who comes and goes.
Whether we are permanent or not, our self is here. What shall we experience, know, feel and think while we are here? That is what makes us who we are. I have had some difficult experiences in this life, but overall I still think my experience has been positive.
In my awareness, things are good even though they can be bad. In my world there is negative so I can notice the positive.
I am that I am.
We are that we are.
nina