Inner Work

For the week of: January 27, 2003

Being Yourself

            Who am I? This small question leads to layer after layer of mystery and revelation. It subsumes all the important questions framing and defining life. Its answer would reveal all. Yet without knowing the whole answer, without knowing who I am, we can still be more or less ourselves.

            In the spiritual pursuit, we move toward being more ourselves. The most basic approach to being ourselves requires that we actually inhabit our own body. Who is here? Who lives in my body? Who is reading these words? We sometimes materialize as this indefinable and elusive “I” that lives here. But more often we do not appear, we do not inhabit this body. Rather, a haphazard, habitual and motley collection of impulses, thoughts, reactions, and desires lives as if they were who we really are.

Some modern psychologists hold that conscious will is an illusion. This correctly assesses our usual in-the-moment incarnation as an unrelated bag of impulses and the rest.  But when we feel ourselves to be wholly present, when we feel ourselves to be the tangible agent behind our actions, the source of presence, choice, and decision, we stand closer to the answer to “Who am I?”

            For this week, notice where you stand in relation to who you are.

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