Something Is Missing - Who Am I? (No. 2 in Series)

This is the second in a blog series that will help you discover your spirituality and experience more love and happiness in life. Previous blogs are available via the index to the right.

In the last blog I helped you to identify what is most important to you in life - love and relationships. I also asked the question, why if this is so do we so often push love away through relationship problems? I suggested that it is because we are afraid of love. In this post I will start to explain why this is by looking at how we develop our self-concepts (how we see ourselves). I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.

Who Am I?

Human beings have probably been asking themselves the question “Who am I” since the beginnings of conscious thought. The fact that we are aware of our own existence creates an intense curiosity about the nature of self and our relationship to the world and the Universe at large. Although we may assume that these are just philosophical musings, the conclusions that we draw from these questions has a profound impact on our psychology, particularly the amount of fear that we experience.

Your view of who you are is likely to be largely influenced by your sense of sight. Your eyes tell you that you are separated from the people and objects around you. Your other four physical senses then reinforce this belief and confirm that you are an independent being who thinks, feels and acts in isolation. Of course you will interact with other people through the relationships that you have but you will retain your sense of separation and self-determination.

You are not alone in this self-concept. Most people have exactly the same understanding of who they are. It is possible to find some measure of success and happiness in life in this way, particularly when you are young, but what you probably don’t realise is that your belief in your own separation will ultimately damage your relationships and cause you to suffer emotionally. The reason it does this is because it is not an accurate description of who you are. Your sense of separation is an incredibly powerful illusion that has evolved to help you find food and water, protect yourself and survive in the physical world, but it hides you from a deeper truth about yourself. You are in fact intimately connected to everybody and everything.

Although you lead your life on a daily basis as if you were a separate entity, unconsciously you do know that this is not your true state of being. Deep within you is a memory that tells you that you are connected and at one with all that exists in the Universe. This memory is triggered when you either choose or are forced to let go of the material aspects of life. That was why in the earlier death-bed exercise it was so easy for you identify what really matters to you. When all the physical distractions that have preoccupied you in life have fallen away you naturally return to your authentic state. You know intuitively that this is about being re-connected to the people who have meant the most to you in life. It is like trying to get back to your true home; a place of heartfelt bonding and love.

Clearly we have a problem with perception. Our conventional senses tell us we are separate from the people and things around us but our hearts tell us that we a connected. So what is real? To understand what might be going on we can look at what science has discovered about the nature of matter. I will focus on this in the next blog...

 I will publish the blog progressively so please subscribe at bottom of blog if you would like to follow all of them.