To learn how to be your Self, you will first need to know for sure who you really are. However, asking yourself ‘who am I?’ is not going to help you much.
Most of us don’t know who we are, so we come up with answers that include our name. “I’m Frank”. “I’m Teresa”. But those are just names someone else gave us. If parents are more ‘exotic’, perhaps they come up with less common names, but they would still be just the cover and not the content. That is why we add all kinds of distinctions like “I’m John… Elisa’s husband… from the house with the green door just down the road. We met at Peter’s birthday party last week. Remember?”
They probably don’t remember, because there are many Johns in the world, they were a bit drunk at the time, and they don’t actually care. But that is precisely why we add so many extra information to our names. Things like “I work at [this very important company]” or “I am a lawyer/doctor at [this or that big firm/hospital]”. The more important, the better because that way someone might remember who they are. But who are they really, apart from their connections and jobs? Do they know who they are? Does anyone?
All the names and add-ons tell us is a story about our past. My first name says something about my parents, more than about me. Were they boring, or inventive, conservative or daring, wise or… not so wise (see: “61 of the worst names parents actually gave their kids”). This story we tell others is an embellished (or downplayed) version of the more complicated story we tell ourselves. But why do we tell ourselves a story about ourselves anyway? What do we gain from that?
We tell ourselves the story of our lives (the story of ‘me’) because it offers us a sense of Self. Does that mean we know ourselves through our story? We certainly believe we do, but the only answers it produces are of the kind we already saw, and that does not seem to answer the question adequately. Am I my name, my job, a husband or wife? And what if no one had ever given me a name, I would not have a job, and I would never have married? Would I be someone else? Would I be a nameless, single vagabond? Those are only my circumstances over which I have much less control than I might like to think. It is not who I am.
If you are not your circumstance, perhaps you are what you do with the situations that you encounter? “I ‘did’ college, high school, university”,” I ‘did’ some acting in my time”, “I walked a marathon”, “I wrote a book”, “I played football”, “I work at a software company”. What does that say, other than what you did? Perhaps you did one of those things, and you were amazing at it, but it means little more than that by itself. Your actions still need interpretation before the motives behind them become clear. We often don’t even have a clear picture ourselves of why we do what we do.
Motives make it a lot more interesting. What gets us out of bed in the morning to do anything? People usually have but a vague idea of their true motives. If our answer to the question ‘who am I’ lies there, it’s not surprising that we don’t know the answer because we are often unclear or mistaken about what motivates us.
Most of our motivation originates in our subconscious mind, which makes them very difficult to understand. But what’s more disturbing, is that those subconscious motivations aren’t entirely our own. How can we possibly be ourselves if the majority of our motives are not ours? Whose are they, and why do they motivate us if they are someone else’s?
As to why they motivate us, that goes way back to our childhood when we were yet unable to make conscious decisions about our lives. In those early years, we created all kinds of patterns within our subconscious mind that we would never have created as adults but that we, unknowingly, still live by and apply every day. (For a better understanding on how that works, also read “The truth about reprogramming your mind”.)
It should be obvious now, that to be ourselves we will at least need to free ourselves from the dictatorship of the subconscious mind that only plays back our past. If we remain slaves to our subconscious childhood interpretations, we will never be able to be ourselves. If only there were a way to go back and unlearn those lessons so we can relearn them now as an adult. Right? Well, perhaps there is something like that….
I am a huge fan of Eckhart Tolle’s teachings. He has made accessible and recognizable to many people what so many others have tried to explain but often could not. Eckhart offers us a roadmap to a state in which you can truly be yourself and he does it with humour and compassion.
For those who are not yet familiar with his teachings, Eckhart Tolle helps us get away from the mind’s prison and into a state that is not unlike when we were little children, but with all our adult faculties intact. In that state of ‘presence and awareness’, as Tolle often refers to it, we can experience directly who we are, without the need or even the possibility of naming it.
It’s not easy to describe the state of ‘being in the now’ (another term Tolle uses for it), and it may take you some investigating and experimenting to achieve it, but it’s accessible to everyone, and it’s worth every second of your time. Believing is seeing (and not the other way around), for good and for bad, as it makes us see the truth in a lie and lies in the truth.
To honestly know and be yourself, it is necessary to cleanse all you have accumulated that is unnecessary, untrue, and half true. In my book “You can be the Guru!”, I build on this state (of presence and awareness that Eckhart Tolle describes), as part of the process of ‘The Liberation of Self’ to not just apply it sporadically, but instead use it to systematically clear the mental clutter, and trim the ‘Tree of Beliefs’ that has been growing in your mind since your childhood. Don’t deny yourself any longer the freedom that is rightfully yours…
