Who Are You, Really?

You might answer with your name. While names possess a degree of power and influence over our identity and our lives, they are not who we inalienably are. You might answer with what you do, your profession and how you enjoy spending your time, or your beliefs and prejudices, but these are all subject to change throughout the course of your life, and often do change and evolve. 

So then the question becomes: is there not some deeper identity under the facade of who you are being? You might find yourself saying to others that you are not yourself, or you can be so much more, or this isn’t you, etc. This suggests the idea that this ‘you‘ or ‘me‘ has a fundamental, authentic identity beyond what we are doing and being.

So what is it?

One of the more promising candidates for understanding who you are and communicating this sense of identity to others is your personal story, i.e., your life narrative. This is closer to what is meant by personal identity in the 21st century and centres around meaning. That is to say, a meaning emerges from your life story, and this meaning is considered to communicate something significant and essential about your identity. I find this idea quite appealing, and I have some experience with it. One of my interests is storytelling, and in particular, narrative storytelling. In the form that I have learned this technique, a story is prepared about some or other personal experience, and it is told in a ten to fifteen-minute oral form. (In other words, you tell the story, rather than write it down.) And in my experience, the story can be very meaningful and often quite moving.

I spent a few years writing a dramatic memoir, An Existentialist’s Dream: A Jungian Novel. This started out as an attempt to assimilate a period of great personal change in my life, from the year 2000 to 2007, and to come to terms with a life changing dream that I had in 2003. But by the time I finished writing it, and after numerous edits, it was, roughly speaking, the story of my life. This too was a very satisfying, although painstaking at times, form of expression which helped my unique and personal sense of identity to emerge; at least for me, as yet I haven’t had the courage to publish the book.

The above acknowledgement of the power of personal stories notwithstanding, I am not convinced that this is the final word on who you are. For one thing, the story is a product of culture; it is, in a sense, unnatural- like all culture, and it is an abstraction. How on earth can a story, even your life story, be an accurate and complete description of identity? You could say it is an emergent identity. But that it is the final word on who you are, I’m not convinced.

This is a Buddhist idea. That, in the final analysis, what you are is simply consciousness. And not the contents of consciousness, such as identity, which is always going to be a construction, and an imperfect one at that. Despite the idea of a Unitarian religion which captures the essence of the different religions and does away with the minor details on which they differ, I cannot agree with the idea of Buddhism, in this sense, being compatible with Christianity.

Simply because the ‘good news’ of Christianity is not really the eternal salvation of your soul, but rather the eternal salvation of your ego. Meaning your sense of ego identity. This is what makes Christianity and Islam distinct (Judaism as well, although less so) from the Eastern ideal. The idea that you personally can go to heaven is a quite literal idea; it is not a metaphor for some deeper philosophy. In order for this idea to hold water, there needs to be a distinct sense of ego identity and an identity which has permanence to it.

As you can see here, this question of who you are is not an unimportant one, not if you belong to the Western religious tradition anyway. The Eastern tradition is very different; it is the exact opposite. It is the obliteration of the illusion of ego identity which leads to Satori (personal and absolute redemption from suffering). In the Eastern tradition, it is the very idea of personal identity that is the cause of all the suffering in the first place; once you transcend this illusion, you are liberated from suffering.

So there is a slight disconnect in these two traditions.

In this sense, I am a Westerner. I believe in the possibility of eternal life. The idea that the ego can transcend the existence of the body, that it is not inalienably linked to the physical plane. Nevertheless, there is something of tremendous value in the Buddhist conception of attention. And I would say it is something which you need to understand if you are to have any shot at redemption in the Eastern or Western sense.

Who you are can be understood as where your attention is. That which you focus your attention on is that which you are and increasingly become.

The possibility of creating a real sense of identity, a self, if you will, requires a lot of attention, attention directed in a very specific way. Every thought you have creates a mould of the future, and then you step into that mould. And eventually, you become that mould. Or maybe a better way of saying this is that mould becomes an expression of you, without necessarily reducing you to the mould.

Your attention is limited, what do you focus it on? This is an important question to consider. Attention is amongst our most precious of commodities, maybe the most precious. Actually, I would say the three commodities, attention, time and energy are our most precious and limited commodities.

Children and animals instinctively know this. The way a child perceives your love is directly proportional to the attention you focus on them. To such an extent that even negative attention is preferable to no attention.

Whilst your attention is fragmented across too wide a sphere of activity, it is difficult to achieve anything meaningful. Meaningful achievement in any area of life, including establishing your identity, requires sustained attention.

A friend of mine, Leo Babauta, blogs exclusively on this topic, how to declutter your life at Zen habits. To the extent that this is an important question in modern life, Leo is among the top 10 most popular bloggers in the world at the moment.

Let me leave you with a story.

My brother Michael once made friends with a Holy Man who had spent his life studying the various religious traditions. One day, Michael asked him, ‘What is enlightenment? Is it really possible?’

Holy Man, ‘Do you really want to know?’

Michael, ‘Yes!’

Holy Man, ‘Turn your attention to it.’

So with that, I leave you. If you really want to know the answer to the question: who are you really? Turn your attention to it. And I hope that this blog has, to some small degree, begun that process for you and given you some ideas of where you might look. It’s up to you to take it further.

Until next time.

Warm Regards,

Stephen