Who Are You?

Who are you?

   I want to talk to you about the intangible, about energy, about our internal universe, which mainstream science more and more confirms is what our reality is made of. Consciousness. We can easily lose track of this as we live our lives by the five senses, identified with our bodies, which sit in solid chairs and walk upon the concrete streets of our lives. Our culture seems to validate us more for what we “do”, and how we look, rather than who we “are”. How many times have you been asked, “So what do you do?”, rather than “Who are you? What are your deepest impulses, knowings, morals, thoughts, and feelings?”. This leads us to be externally focused, we become obsessed with doing, acquiring, and how we look doing it, rather than our level of being. We give our attention, our most valuable spiritual asset, away to work, authority figures, family, the TV, the news, celebrities, the list goes on. Spend that much time giving your energy away, and you are going to be incline to escapism based activities during your "free time", instead of making our masterpiece who we are on the inside.

   When we tune into ourselves on a being level, we are faced with the recognition that we are so much more than a body which does things. We are made up of thoughts, feelings, visions, desires, judgments, beliefs, spirit, intuition. What is a thought, a feeling, or a spirit? It is an energy. Most of us are believing our thoughts and dismissing, or denying, our feelings (particularly our “negative” feelings), generally speaking. We take on our outlook from what we learn in our environment, ie our parents, neighborhood, religion, our culture, and society at large. Few of us question this and lead our lives from this programmed perspective. Why? Because those around us validate us for taking on their information. It makes us feel included, accepted, and loved. It is easier to function in a world where we share the same ideas, than to go against the grain and be something radical, like our true selves. As children, our very survival is at stake, so we learn early on to behave and believe in a way which pleases our parents and or our peers. It becomes a subconscious survival mechanism.

   The human race is faced with insurmountable number of problems. If we look around the world, it is easy to find more things that aren't working versus people living in harmony with each other and the environment. It is safe to say that the human race is suffering from mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual sickness/trauma. In fact, this sickness is so prevailing, it is largely unnoticed at it's fundamental level, and is instead considered normal. When we take this into account, we see that the average person is programmed to serve a way of life that takes them away from their true selves and perpetuates this abnormal norm. We are taught what to think, not how to think. We are taught the value of things and hence how to feel about them. Rarely are people given the freedom to discover what is truly going on inside for them and therefore never fully discover themselves, their potential, or their natural rhythms. Unless one gives that to themselves they are doomed to be a cog in the machine that is our sick society.

   So how do we heal this? The first step of course, is to acknowledged that this approach isn't working for us. The first step is always admitting we have a “problem”. How else can we change if we are in denial, if we are unaware of our “dis-ease”? Our interactions with our external environment stem from the status of our internal landscape, so we must start there. Of course there is no one path to ourselves, but one way is to get in touch with the energies that are currently creating our programmed selves, and as we shed these away, reawakening what is truly inside us. As we begin to see our programs clearly, we sharpen our sight, our ability to see what is, versus the story we have told/been told. As we discharge our emotional backlog, our emotional center can more clearly reflect reality. As we truly get into our bodies, we learn its natural rhythm as apposed to using the body as an instrument of “doing”, regardless of its needs and messages. This will free us up to act upon viable new ways of shaping our world. Meditation is helpful here. It trains us into this state and can be a way of transforming our internal landscape.

   
   For centuries, the great mystics have told us the importance of the space within referred to as the witness. Here, there is no judgment, no belief, no preconception, it's simply neutral. As we strengthen this muscle it allows us to see clearly. The word clairvoyance, which refers to your third eye, simply translates to “clear sight”. We simply cannot see clearly, or think critically, when we view life through the programs given to us by external means. We view ourselves and the world through the story we have been told and then retell it. We exist in a prison we cannot touch, yet the walls of our lie filled lives eventually cave in on us, causing stress, grief, fear, shame, anger, and frustration. When we see things as they are, then we can act accordingly, and can avoid a life of perpetually hitting our head against those invisible walls, wondering deep inside “whats wrong with me?”. We can distinguish truth from lies, programs from reality, our false self from our true being. This emboldens us to live a richer life, engage more fully, connect more deeply, find understanding and clarity. To do this we must go within. We must. It is the only way to engage with the world in real time, in the moment, in a real way. We cannot build anything sustainable “out there” if our internal foundation is held up by smoke and mirrors. So we must investigate ourselves honestly and sincerely.

   As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day, and this applies to this process as well. It takes time to deconstruct our false self and to let our true self emerge. We also can't do it alone. And while we can learn from others who have walked this path themselves, we must be careful to not to fall into the guru trap. It is important to come to these understandings deep from within ourselves, and not just adopt the understandings of others in a conceptual way. Even if their understandings prove to be true, all information gathered from the outside must be put to the test within ourselves, and be lived.

   You can start by simply taking stock of what you were told growing up, realizing what stories you adopted, locating them in your body, noticing the feelings that are keeping them in place. When you get "triggered" about what is going on in your life now, ask yourself: "when is the first time I felt this way?". Look at what behaviors the family members, teachers, or friends in your life validated and which ones they did not. Feel the emotions that come up around what you were told and dig deep, layer by layer. One way of looking at it is when you adopt the beliefs of others, you could say on an energetic level, they are in your space. When other people are in your space, you are not able to utilize that energy for the benifit of your true self until you let it go. So in essence, you are giving that away. 

  When you are giving your energy away, you are not you in that moment, you are what they want you to be. This is going to cause stress in some form, consciously or unconsciously, because you are not living according to your own information, to what is right and healthy for you. Before you can know what is right for you, you have to deconstruct that which isn't, and find out who is in your space. Allowing your emotions to move freely throughout this process releases them and creates the space internally to move beyond the old way. In addition to this, once again, it is important to witness these stories from a place of neutrality, without judgment. In this way you release your attachment to them and can then see beyond them. Let your self love fill this new space you have created.

   I find that when we acknowledge ourselves as energetic beings, it frees up something inside. It allows us to access movement in what was once fixed. Clairvoyance is the ability to see these energies in a way beyond the five senses which deepens the spiritual connection within. Since we have been programmed to ignore this capacity and give our attention away to external information, it has limited our capacity to know things for ourselves and have real certainty or intimacy with ourselves. When we see the energies around and within us, it gives us the power to transform them for ourselves, and seats us back in the power position of our own being. No longer dependent exclusively upon external means to relate to our own lives. We live our own way, according to our own knowing, in responsibility to ourselves.

   If more people around the world were to discover themselves in this way, our world would automatically transform. Personal responsibility would provide the world with the freedom most of us are craving deep down. But if we continue to buy into what we are told by the “big daddies/mommies” of our patriarchal world, we will fall under their spell and be enslaved by their story. It is clear by looking at the state of the world, their story is a nightmare, so we must wake from it by embracing our true selves if we want to better our lives. We are the ones we have been waiting for. The path to a better life, within and without, begins with where we place our attention. 

We clean everything, right? You wouldn't dream of using the same dish twice! Most of us anyways ;) We must have the same attitude and vigilance when it comes to clearing our internal home, claiming that space for ourselves. Tending to our true selves and letting go of the rest. I invite you to reclaim your space, to see yourself and the world, as it is. You are worthy of your own attention. It's ok to love who you truly are. And as they say, "Be the Change You Wish to See". 

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde

Who would you be without your story? 
Who are you underneath the conditioned self? 
Who would you be, if no one had ever told you what to think?
Most people live their lives without even knowing to ask that question, which saddens me, because it is perhaps one of the most crucial questions to ask, for mankind.