The problem with answering the question of who you are is that you cannot be and think about being at the same time. There is very little overlap between those two circles, if any.
Our ancestors woke up trying to make sense of the world around them, desperately trying to shed light onto things. We’ve found out so much since, but still we are haunted by all the unknowns. What is this? Where am I? For how long? Who am I? When is it? How come, and why?
We got lost in the reflection, in the echo of our questions. The world of thought and words, a world of abstraction that we have bound ourselves to. A prison of symbols that allows us to decipher the world and communicate it to others. But words are a thin veil, a best fit line. Words and what they convey are buoyant. They betray you, they betray the truth, in a valiant put pitiful attempt to encompass it.
The best things happen in silence. Talk less, do more. Do something that requires your full attention, so that every fiber of your being is doing that one thing. You’re exclusively here and exclusively now. You’re not rummaging through the past, not planning for the future, not thinking about something else, not listening to a podcast, not wondering, questioning, rehearsing, rehashing… You are fully immersed in the one thing you are doing. Working, reading, mopping, praying, walking, gardening, bricklaying, breastfeeding… Does it matter? Let’s be real; can you even?
The part that acts, we call the Self. It is the deepest, truest part of you. Spontaneous, as the breath. Your Self has been covered up by a sort of shell. A skin. A membrane. An envelope that interacts with the world, measures it, and processes it. A boundary that creates an inside and an outside. It interprets, communicates, and questions. It is the part of you that is shaped by the things it encounters. Your shell is what you mean when you say “I”. We call it the ego. The ego is who you think you are.
There are countless colorful stories about students rushing to their Zen masters, dying to know the meaning of it all, only to be met with a bowl of soup thrown at their face (or whatever else happens to be at hand). It always ever means what’s right in front of you. Stop your frantic existential search. Stop asking stupid questions.
It always ever means what you are doing and the only place that allows for spontaneous action is the here-and-now. The only place that allows for movement and breath. An intersection in which space and time, having fully merged, disappear. You are totally immersed in a pool of potential from which all things emerge, upstream of all sources. Waters that will quench your thirst for a million years. You will never be more alive than in the here-and-now. And yet we spend our lives dwelling elsewhere, somewhere in the projection running inside our heads, going in circles and their tangents. A maze that drains us.
There is no secret. Take life at face value. Maybe you just wash your bowl, and use it, and wash it, and use it. And that’s good enough.
