Aquamens

There are questions we ask because we want answers.

What should I do? Where should I go? What do I believe? What kind of person do I want to become?

And then there is:

Who am I?

Sometimes I wonder whether this is a question at all.

The obvious answers arrive easily. I could give my name. I could tell you where I was born, what I do for a living, whom I love, what I believe, what frightens me, what I enjoy, and what kind of person I think I am.

But those answers describe me. They don’t seem to answer the question.

So I begin removing them.

My profession is not me. I existed before it, and I could become something entirely different tomorrow.

My possessions cannot be me. Everything I own could disappear and, however devastated I might be, something would remain to experience the loss.

My nationality, culture and ancestry tell the story of where I came from. They have shaped me deeply. But still, they seem to belong to the circumstances of my existence rather than whatever it is that says I exist.

Personality seems closer.

Perhaps I am my kindness, impatience, curiosity, ambition, fears and peculiarities. Yet these aren’t permanent either. The person I was ten years ago thought differently, wanted different things and understood the world differently. Ten years from now, perhaps I will look back at the person writing these words and barely recognize him.

And yet I will say:

That was me.

Then perhaps I am my memories.

But memories disappear. They distort themselves. There are entire days of my childhood that once constituted the whole of my existence and of which I now remember absolutely nothing.

Was I less myself during those forgotten days?

Perhaps I am my body.

This feels harder to dismiss. Wherever I go, my body goes. Whatever happens to it happens, unmistakably, to me.

Yet I instinctively say my body.

My hands. My eyes. My brain.

The language itself creates an uncomfortable separation between the possessor and the possessed.

So perhaps I am the mind.

But thoughts arrive without permission. Sometimes I deliberately think, but often I simply discover that thinking is already happening. Feelings emerge before I decide whether I want them. Dreams construct entire worlds without consulting me.

If thoughts can be observed, then perhaps I am the observer.

For a moment, this seems promising.

There is something here witnessing everything: thoughts passing, emotions changing, the body aging, memories accumulating and disappearing.

Perhaps that is me.

But then another question appears.

What is the observer?

And suddenly I am back where I started.

I could spend a lifetime stripping things away, hoping eventually to uncover some irreducible self underneath it all. But even if something remained after everything else had been removed, how would I know that what remained was me?

Perhaps the assumption itself is wrong.

Perhaps there is no small, permanent object hidden somewhere inside us waiting to be discovered. Perhaps “I” is the entire changing phenomenon—the body, memory, consciousness, relationships, history and experience continuously becoming something else.

Or perhaps there is something beneath all of it that our minds are simply incapable of comprehending.

I don’t know.

And strangely, that uncertainty makes the question more interesting.

Because Who am I? seems to have an unusual property.

If I don’t ask it, nothing happens.

I can wake tomorrow, make tea, go to work, speak to people, come home, eat dinner, laugh, read, sleep and live perfectly well without ever thinking about it.

The question demands nothing from me.

But if I stop and seriously consider it, something changes.

The familiar idea of myself becomes strangely unstable.

It reminds me of trying to understand God.

Not necessarily the God of any particular religion, but the idea of something so fundamental that the instrument attempting to understand it may itself be contained within what it is trying to understand.

How does the mind stand outside itself to examine the mind?

How does consciousness investigate consciousness without using consciousness?

How does the person searching for the self separate himself from the thing being searched for?

It is like asking an eye to look directly at itself.

A mirror might show it an image. Science might describe its anatomy. Another person might describe its appearance.

But the eye doing the seeing can never simply turn around and become the thing it sees.

Perhaps we encounter something similar when asking who we are.

And maybe that is why the question can become haunting.

Not because the answer is frightening.

Because there may be no form of answer capable of satisfying it.

Every answer becomes another thing that can be examined.

I am consciousness.

What is consciousness?

I am the observer.

What is observing?

I am a soul.

What is a soul?

Every answer opens another door.

Eventually we may discover that we haven’t been walking toward an answer at all. We’ve simply been removing answers that were never sufficient.

And perhaps that is what makes Who am I? different.

Maybe it isn’t a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Maybe it is a boundary.

Most of the time we live comfortably without approaching it. We have names, occupations, families, preferences and stories, and these identities are real enough for everyday life.

Then, occasionally, we wander too close.

Something makes us stop.

We look inward.

And for one strange moment, all those familiar descriptions fall silent.

There is still something here.

Something reading these words.

Something experiencing this moment.

Something that says I.

But the moment we try to turn toward it and ask what exactly that I is, it seems to retreat another step into the darkness.

Perhaps philosophers and spiritual seekers have spent thousands of years walking after it.

Perhaps some found an answer.

Perhaps some discovered there was nothing to find.

And perhaps some simply became comfortable standing before the mystery.

For now, I think that is where I am.

I don’t know who I am beneath everything that can be said about me.

I don’t even know whether there is a beneath.

But occasionally, among all the questions concerned with what I should become, what I should accomplish, where I should go and how I should live, this older and stranger question appears.

It doesn’t ask for anything.

It doesn’t promise anything.

It simply waits.

Who am I?