To the question who am I? I find myself pondering whether I am a single entity or a composition of entities. I have a brain, a mind, a heart, feelings and awareness, I wonder which these is the real “me”. The brain as we know is the physical matter that holds information and interprets, the mind offers the capability to process information, think of the brain as a hard ware in a computer and the mind as the software. We can then say the brain is the resident address of the mind. The two are sometimes confused but biologist will tell you in the brain they can find where memory is store but they will never be able to show you where decision between two thoughts are made!
It is said the brain coordinates movement, functions, transmitting impulses etc. and the mind is used to think, thinking which we can be defined as the interpretation of information and formulating of ideas, enabling conclusions be reached. “Make your mind up”, Is the sole function of the mind.
What is needed here is to look at ‘thinking’ is it internal or external? When I look at a tree, I know light is bouncing from the tree to my eye and the brain interprets that it is a tree I see. But where is the tree? Is it now recreated in my mind or am I reflecting back to the tree object? If the tree is recreated in my mind then the “thinker” is internal but if the tree is still out there, then the “thinker” must also be out there. We have seen on some level of thinking out there. When we observe sterling birds fly together, the speed at which they change direction in unison negated time for an individual bird to think and process the change in direction in unison to it’s neighboring bird, there simply is no time to think, and as one they fly, high, low, west and east with ease. Schools of fish also do this, they swim in unison without any bumping into the other. The thinking here is not individual but communal, not internal, external.
Are we also the same in that the thinking is outside us? Am I like a magnet in that the magnetic fields spring out rather than be in the magnet? Is that why I ‘control’ my ‘space’, feel myself being observed or talked about, know or dream things I possibly could not explain other than call them “hunches”, “gut feelings” ?. The connection we have sometimes shows this up especially between a mother and baby, twins, or people with very close bonds, they feel and know each other as if they ‘read each other thoughts’. If this was the case then we can start to find that the “I” we think in here is out there and then the “Thinker” of those thought is out there as well.
The heart has been said to be the holder of all my feelings, my intuition which if truth be told needs not be justified logically or with any data at all, People say “I just know” “I just felt it was right/wrong” We attribute the heart with the holder of love, hatred and empathy. We say “I love you with the whole of my heart”, “from the depth of my heart I hate”, “my heart goes out to you” .These feelings do make me who I am. But am I my heart? I have been told when we focus in our heart the mind goes silent and we touch our touch our Divine essence. Divinity which is the state of things that come from a supernatural power or deity, such as a god, supreme being, therefore regarded as sacred and holy, hence we say “To err is human, to forgive divine”, meaning that everyone makes mistakes, but we should try to be like god and forgive one another.
Here again we appear to look on the outside of my heart for a ‘divinity’. I cannot then say that the “I am” is the heart. The “I Am” the real ‘me’ the “Thinker” is not there!
Where then is my ‘awareness’ that is unexplainable, that makes me alive, assists me to relate, think, feel and move. Am I put together like the books of the bible or am I more complicated in that the true me is hiding behind all these, like the “true power behind the throne?”
It is this elusive “I” that moves “my” hand, leg when I move, the “I” that decides to have a steak or chicken for lunch, tea or coffee, the one that says “I” love you, “I” hate you, that says “my heart goes out to you”. It is this “I” we seek when we ask “who am I?”
As it has been endlessly discussed by many, it is now safe to say we are not just a bag of flesh, bone and blood. We are more than this. Just as people finally realized the world was not flat even though their senses tell them it is, we have started to think all is not what we assume it to be, that we are all contained in this little bodies and that is all, we think, move live and die with the body. Some have looked to religion for answers when they feel a void in this explanation, other look to science but no matter where we look it is appreciated we start to look because we feel we need answers outside ourselves.
Is this need to look outside ourselves a clue that we might actually be in here and out there as well? To capture this thought of being in here in the body and out there outside the body think of a house. When inside the house we have space and air around us and space outside the house. If the house was demolished what happens to the space that was ”inside” the house? Nothing, is the answer because all along even when we perceived that “space” as inside it was all along the same as the space outside the house, the house walls only divided the space up. When the house is torn down the space remains as it always was ‘the same’.
Are we the same, our bodies just divide up the awareness, consciousness, and we are not in the body but inside and outside? That would put the body in us! As we would say the space is not in the house the house in the space! So the awareness is not in the body the body is in it!
We can offer examples of this, take for instance energy, when I flip the switch where is the energy that lights the bulb? Is in the switch, the wire or the bulb? Or is the switch, the wire and the bulb in energy themselves? When I breathe is the air in me or am I in air. Why would it be easy to say I am swimming in air but my consciousness is well and truly locked within me?
To pull back a bit, I will try to lift the cover a bit more on “awareness”. When I am pressed to offer an answer of who I am, the real me, the only answer I find suitable is to say “I am energy” I control all my actions and movements, to the beat of my heart, are all controlled by impulse –impulse in its simplified term is just ‘energy’.
We also know that when I die it is as if the switch is flipped to off. My whole body, the heart, the brain and all grind to a halt! All organs and parts could be intact and whole but I will be dead and limp– my consciousness, awareness would have departed me.
This shows us we are all more than the body and all in it and as such, we can now say we are getting closer to “Who I am” as the awareness, the energy can now be seen to be important for my me to be the way ‘I’ am. But where does this energy, awareness come from or go to? What or who controls it to come and go from my body at will, whose or what’s “will” does my awareness dance to? Identifying this will finally draw the mask off the real “ME” and identify the “Who I am”.
I know that my body changes every year because I see signs of these changes in me, my hair grows, I cut my nails now and again as they grow, I see scars covered by new skin. I see my body change from thin to fat or fat to thin, from an infant to an adult body, nothing today as an adult remains of the body I was born with, not even the brain cells in my head! But I know me, I have continued without a gap to identify ‘myself’ as never changing. What part of me is continuum? It is the little voice in me. The part I call ‘my awareness’ it is this that never changes or grows old. Before I look in the mirror I have an image of ‘me’ and I must confess on most occasions it is not what I find looking back at me in the mirror! But all the same, I do recognize ‘me’, no matter how much my body or face changes!
It has always been explained that all we perceive with our senses including our selves can be traced to the big Bang that happened millions of years ago, from where all sprang forth. But what was there before the big Bang and what caused it? These are question that the very noble minds wrestle with and sadly to date, no conclusive answer has been put forward, and I suspect there will not be one for quite some time, but for the purposes of our discussion here we can offer that “energy” was there before, during and after the big bang. We know this because energy cannot be made or destroyed and if it is, then it was. The same energy today transformed into various forms, made my universe, my world and makes me, for I am nothing more too, than energy!
I eat, sleep, rest to build up energy, when I work, I waste or use up my energy, when I am sad, I drain of energy and when I rejoice or love I feel refreshed. All along we were and are.
The “I am”, is the same power that created planets and universes, the same that makes up a pebble and planets, the same that hold ‘me’ as ‘I am’ and the huge planets in place. “I” the thinker behind my thoughts, feelings, awareness, is the master to all inside and outside my body, the everlasting. In finding the “thinker” we see we need to look outside and inside. Appreciate “I” am connected to everything and everyone, in the world and the universe at large, because the “I AM” has no boundary, limit or end.
I leave you with a quote from Mihaela Pirjol poem:
Who am I? …I am. I am my Heart, I am my Soul Unique, yet one with you I am; I am energy vibrating and even more, I am the part which makes The Whole And I myself, I am The Whole.
I am a frequency you reach, Sometimes, yours with mine they interfere; I am emotions on vocal pitch You feed on them then I sense fear; And when weak, absorbed of energy, I lose touch with Love’s Divinity. Who am I? …I am. I am illusions in glimpses of Heaven, When can’t explain my overwhelmed…I am! Two Webs connected of fields and levels; I am the past, the present and the future Constantly in the Universe of future.
Next we will expand this topic and discuss what thoughts are and do they manifest into matter.