si dawson

For years, I've fig­ured that if I thought about who "I" was, it would look some­thing like this:

Food in, every­thing else out. Input, Out­put, all pretty straight forward.

Thing is, there are some obvi­ous flaws in this.

I can observe my thoughts hap­pen­ing, so obvi­ously, I am not my thoughts.

Noth­ing new or star­tling to that par­tic­u­larly revelation.

Also though, I can see my emo­tions hap­pen­ing. Often times, as a direct result of the food I eat for exam­ple. The key ques­tion is — "how often do I choose which emo­tions to express, and how often is it more like they're just hap­pen­ing to me?"

So maybe I'm not my emo­tions either.

Now sure, I can def­i­nitely change both my moods & my thoughts by alter­ing my envi­ron­ment — the peo­ple I sur­round myself with, the food I eat, and so on. I can also alter both con­sciously, but there's a huge dif­fer­ence between 'auto­matic' or back­ground thoughts & using my mind as a Ratio­nal tool. There's also a dif­fer­ence between the vast major­ity of emo­tions I have (since I can't speak for any­one else here), which more or less wash over me on a daily basis, and if I very delib­er­ately "choose to be happy now".

Most emo­tions & thoughts are things that are hap­pen­ing to me, not things I'm nec­es­sar­ily con­sciously choos­ing. So maybe 'Me' looks more like this:

Of course, as Tolle points out, any use of the words 'I', 'me', 'myself' etc are gen­er­ally just our ego try­ing to assert con­trol. There is, how­ever, an impor­tant ques­tion here:

Who am I?

A while back, I stum­bled across some Yogic talk like this.

Which really got me think­ing about what that core, that real essence of 'me'ness actu­ally is.

It's pretty obvi­ous this isn't a novel idea — Hin­duism (which has been around for ohhh, 5–8000 years or so) has this con­cept of Advaita Vedanta — that your atman is part of Brah­man. Very roughly, this trans­lates to our soul is part of God/The Universe/whatever. From a quan­tum physics per­spec­tive, us as indi­vid­u­als being part of a uni­ver­sal whole is (more or less) pre­dicted by Bell's The­o­rem (more read­able expla­na­tion here — under 'The Physics of Inter­con­nect­ed­ness'). For the moment let's ignore the inten­tion­al­ity or not of a uni­ver­sal whole (ie "Is the meta­phys­i­cal 'God' the same as the quan­tum phys­i­cal 'Uni­verse', or even 'All pos­si­ble uni­verses'"), since it's largely irrel­e­vant to this dis­cus­sion. Hav­ing spent wayyy too long in the Catholic church, I'm also hes­i­tant to use Chris­t­ian ter­mi­nol­ogy in a dis­cus­sion like this, since it brings an enor­mous amount of bag­gage with it too, but we'll let that slide for the moment too.

All this talk of souls & God, atman & Brah­man was merely a cat­a­lyst. It got me thinking.

I can change my speech, my actions, what food I eat, my thoughts & emo­tions. This is more or less what I've been doing exten­sively for the last few years now. While this has caused me to change enough that it's pulled me away from cer­tain ex-friends and ex-girlfriends, my pri­mary fear was that I would lose myself altogether.

Oddly, almost the com­plete oppo­site has happened.

If any­thing I've become more 'me', but the best of me. Many of the emo­tions, thoughts & behav­iours that I had thought were 'me', sim­ply weren't. I'm just the 'me' that's been there at the core of my life — now more con­sis­tently, and with less bag­gage stacked around the out­side. For­tu­nately, I guess, it seems that the actual 'me' is less of an ass­hole than I'd always fig­ured I was. Chang­ing the inputs on the above dia­gram has really helped with that (gigantic-hint-to-19-year-old-Si: min­imise caf­feine & booze. OMG yes!)

So maybe there's some­thing to this "We're spir­i­tual beings have a phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence" thing. Maybe we really are just here as 'spir­its', 'energy beings', 'souls' (whatever-the-hell ter­mi­nol­ogy works for you), hang­ing around here on earth in meat-sacks, our bod­ies, doing what we do. Hang­ing out, hav­ing a beer (or a green juice), get­ting to know one another & gen­er­ally palling around.

All the things I thought were me aren't, and the more I clear away, the more truly I seem to find who I really am. And the really good news? All of the neg­a­tive crap? That was never me. The mis­er­able emo­tions, thoughts, eat­ing habits, speech & behav­iours. All those I can (& mostly have) let go of, and I'm still 'me' with­out them.

No, it really does seem — from watch­ing myself change — and from see­ing those who are fur­ther down the path than I, that the more you change, the more you remain the same — except now it's just the best of you.

There really is noth­ing to fear, & it feels just like com­ing home.