Who Do You Think You Are?

Do you find yourself constantly questing for your deep down true self? When I was a teenager I used to really wonder who I was and how it was possible to find myself changing over time. I decided that who we are can shift from one identity to another over time, and that it was ok to change your style of clothing, the music you listen to, the friends you hang out with. It's ok to learn new things and develop as a person. I kept being told how important it was to study and understand yourself, but how could I study something that changed over time? Would my current ideas and beliefs be totally different in the future? Would I be a completely different person in ten or twenty years time? Would the future me even remember who I used to be? Would the old me be long dead and forgotten? And what would happen when I died altogether, would I be totally forgotten and lost to the world? Would I be staring into the abyss of nothingness for the rest of time? Could I somehow preserve myself? Maybe I would be cryogenically frozen and brought back to life in a time when death had been medically defeated? The idea of some day not existing terrified me. What was the point of living, if it's all erased at the end, and nobody remembers your name? I wanted to be concrete, to have a solid identity that would be remembered, and which might live on forever. This was all my Ego speaking. It took a long time to realise that I am not my Ego.

When people hear the word "ego" they tend to think of over-inflated self-importance and arrogance. What does ego really mean? It literally means your sense of individuality, being a distinct and separate person to everyone else. As an individual, you have private thoughts, private feelings, private dreams and private memories. These things are all stored in your head, like a precious treasure chest of secrets. From whence do these thoughts and feelings arise? From somewhere deep within the centre of your being? Are they your creations? Do you have any control over them, or do they flood your mind like they have a life of their own? 

I often struggled with controlling my thoughts, feelings, memories and imagination. They would run away with me, sweep me up in a storm of emotions, and drop me back down to earth again. I felt like I was lost at sea, at the total mercy of these intangible forces. I studied meditation and visualisation techniques to try to control the things in my head. I remember when I first came across Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. What he was speaking about blew my mind. Never before had anyone described the mind like he did. You are not your thoughts. You are the silent observer. You are the stillness beneath. 

From Eckhart I went on to Alan Watts. His humour and eloquence engaged me in a profound realisation. You are something much greater than "poor little me". You are the universe, experiencing itself. Suddenly my mind opened up to the fact that I am not a tiny insignificant individual. I am part of this infinite whole that we call universe. I am not just "part of" I am "one with" the all. The thoughts and feelings which bubble up in my head are just reactions to the senses of this human body as it observes the universe from one of its infinite perspectives. The universe looks upon itself from all these different angles, reaching out to itself, touching and tasting itself, thinking about itself, studying itself. You are one of the neurones in the cosmic mind. Neurones die, but the big brain lives on. This one big organic being is your true self, your deep down self, the silent observer behind every eye.