Who You Really Are?

Who You Really Are?

Let’s discuss!

The quest of philosophers throughout centuries of human existence has been to find out the answer to “Who am I”? Most philosophers and spiritual gurus profess that the first question that struck the chord in them is when they found out the answer to “Who am I?” And only when they started working on it did everything unfold for them which they put in their volumes of texts of intelligence and wisdom.

I wish to find out and define the simplicity of every concept in life in spiritual terms.

Through this discussion, I wish to discuss in simple terms the perennial question of “who you really are” that has kept scholars, philosophers and spiritual gurus thinking for years. In fact, the urge to find this answer is innate in every human being since birth.

Frame the RIGHT QUESTION to get the right answer

In my quest to find ‘Who I am’, I came to the realization that instead of looking for the right answer, we should look for the right question. However, we focus on finding the right answer, and in searching for that answer, we go far away from the right question.

Likewise, we must be able to frame the right question to get the right answer as if we think about it even Google cannot answer our questions correctly if we don’t ask the right question. It is our ability to frame the right question that makes Google a helpful tool. Hence, we need to frame the right question that we need to ask ourselves.

To be able to ask the right question we need to unlearn what we’ve learned over the years.

MY JOURNEY to SPIRITUALITY

My own journey to spirituality involved following various paths.

And in my journey, I understood the biggest shackles were my learnings: learnings from my religion, parents, friends, sisters, school, and college.

They were not letting me go free as I had so many lenses to look through, comparing other people’s experiences with my experience. That’s what we all do.

We have a shield between the other person and us. The way you know yourself, the next person doesn’t know you in that manner.

Everyone has their own definitions and if asked to define themselves, they will tell you innumerable things about their individuality. People have all these lenses through which they look at their existence not realizing that this takes them away from their real selves about who they really are?

Differentiate between the ‘Artificial You’ and the ‘Real You

Any definition of ‘who you are’ limits people.

In their lifetime, people follow particular beliefs or missions and change their spiritual or religious beliefs or school of philosophy. This makes them learn innumerable lessons, which they follow and believe throughout their lives. Continuously learning new things makes people change from moment to moment, from morning to evening. They learn so much that it is very hard to find the real person in them.

Do you think it is easy to talk to someone whose mind has been subjected to these excessive lessons and knowledge throughout his life? No, it is not. This is because whatever they talk or think about, they go through those learnings they have learned over time.

What happens if they were to leave behind the beliefs and lessons they’ve learned from the philosophy of life they have followed for years? How do they feel if they stop following it completely and no longer identify as part of the group that practices that philosophy? We must contemplate the extent to which we will be impacted if the dependency that we’ve been leaning on is taken away from us. Will we be able to survive?

ARTIFICIAL YOU

I believe that it is time for us to stop following any such beliefs that take us away from ourselves. I call this the ARTIFICIAL YOU. For instance, the way my mother understands me, I am not that person; it is how she thinks I am or the way other people know me; that’s not who I am. People’s perception of you is according to people’s own lens.

And, at the same time, you know how they’re perceiving you and hence as soon as you meet them, you become like that with them. But that is not the real you, the understanding of whom have become very complicated over a period of time.

This is because we have not unlearned anything and have preconceived notions about everything in our life due to our mental conditioning.

As a result, we are full of so many concepts of how one should live. I have moved on from that path because I believe that all these things start becoming limiting factors that keep you in the inner circle. In the inner circle, we all interact with each other with some identity and we are never able to find out who we really are.