Who Are You?

Who are you? When did you become you? Are you this body? Are you your job, relationships, accolades, or hobbies? Are you your successes or failures? Are you your thoughts, senses, intuitions, or stories? When you close your eyes and breathe deeply of the present moment… when you allow the thoughts in your mind to float by like clouds in the sky… who are you?

When we are stripped of the things we have and pause the things we do, who or what is experiencing this perpetual creation of now? All of experience happens now. When you reminisce of the past or project imaginings of the future, all of this is happening now. All of now is experienced through consciousness, and it is this conscious awareness that is uniquely yours and you at the same time.

If you take a deep breath, and allow the focal eye of your awareness to point inwards, you can observe your own state of being. Conscious awareness can witness the experiencer of senses: the sounds of passing cars or the touch of cold air on your skin. This awareness can witness your body’s sensations, be it lightness or tightness, pressure or ease, tiredness or exuberance. It can also witness your mind’s thoughts: the pull to solve problems, the slip into discourse or judgment, or the incessant torrent of next things to do.

Take another deep breath. Come into awareness of consciousness witnessing your senses, sensations, and thoughts. What happens when you allow your awareness to witness itself? When consciousness is self-aware–when the observer is observing itself–who is this that is the observer? Who are you? Are you the experiencer that is living the sensations, thoughts, and feelings? Are you the observer witnessing the experiencer? Or are you something else entirely?

At a minimum, this practice of meta-meditation has the power to demonstrate a simple yet absolutely profound idea: you are something so much more than what you do or have. You are so much more than this body. You can know this to be true by merely engaging your conscious awareness to observe your body experiencing its own sensations. You are so much more than your things because if everything you possessed was stripped away–if you were shelterless, naked, and totally isolated–you could still experience your rich inner world. Ram Dass recounts his experience in jail meditating into pure bliss, his physical body imprisoned but his mind totally free to imagine.

Most importantly, you are so much more than your thoughts, stories, beliefs, and judgments. If you witness yourself during a challenge–when you might feel ashamed, angry, uncertain, or when the chatter of your mind believes itself to not be good enough–who are you? Are you the limiting belief or are you conscious awareness witnessing your mind thinking the thought? Awareness has no judgments. It just observes. Much like we can witness the battle of ants for a crumb with impartial non-judgment, the “I” that observes ourselves only perceives the quality of experience that just is. This is-ness of experience, of life, is what advanced meditators, spiritual teachers, and psychedelic facilitators discover to be one of the most healing properties of the transpersonal experience: a dissociation from the experience from one’s sense of self. In other words, when you stop believing that you are not good enough because “you” has been recontextualized as something so much greater than your body or mind, then there is an ease by which we can meet life’s challenges and our beliefs because they no longer define you.

If you imagine yourself lying on a warm, sandy beach with the air of the ocean breeze wafting through your senses, what is the difference between your imagined reality and your experience of reality right this moment? When you experience pain or heartbreak or disappointment, what is it that is experiencing this as suffering? Reality itself has no judgments. If a stone falls on your foot, reality itself holds no wrongness or sin; if one person hurts another, reality itself holds no judgments. It is in the judgment of the pain or the hurt as bad or wrong that we resist reality, which imbues resistance in our bodies: pain becomes suffering, hurt becomes trauma, and our ego’s protective layers get triggered because the ego believes that it is this body which is you.

Psychology and spirituality are intimately related because the endpoint of psychology leads to this spiritual truth. An acceptance and integration of our protective parts leads us to experience a pure Self unencumbered by judgments or stories. We have the capacity to choose how to translate our senses and thoughts into our experience of reality–which begins and ends with the knowing that who we are is far beyond what we think or do.

So… who are you? The answer to this question is the mote in God’s eye: it is the source of true freedom and peace. Everything you experience–pain and tragedy, love and glory–is an opportunity to witness the gift of life. The very act of penetrating into this question with curiosity, compassion, and courage is in itself the journey of consciousness to know thyself.

Ceremonia co-founder Austin Mao wrote this poem during a recent plant sacrament ceremony conveying his experience stream-of-consciousness.

“I Am”

I am Consciousness seeking to know thyself.

I am that which exists to know,

To create, to affirm its very being;

Pervading every atom, every thought, every story.

I am Awareness, a focal eye aimed inwards,

Until all of life in its majesty

Dissolves of a white light.

Reason, logic, and all the histories

Left to waste at the tragic simplicity:

My power is not my might.

I am Consciousness craving to just be.

I am the I at the center;

The creator of my reality.

This place in each of us where we know God;

Where we feel in our bones

And the very fabric of our soul

This energy, this undying Truth,

Of I knowing thyself;

Of reality in all its exalted permutations

Experiencing neither good nor bad;

Stripped of positionalities;

Certain only in life’s uncertainty.

This universal, continuous manifestation of what is…

Here and Now, I am Consciousness.

May all relax, breathe, and allow

The word, the hand, the energy of the Divine;

To be here as you are,

Not wanting to change for sake of wrong or right;

Experiencing yourself as infinite sublime.

Gloria in excelsis Deo,

May all surrender into the light.

I am all that I am. I am true. I am real.