Who are you?
Are you a summation of your past experiences, some of those being traumatic and some of them being beautiful and loving? Are you who you imagine yourself to be, that woman praised for standing up for equality or the man landing a lucrative contract with a wealthy client? Or do you see yourself as being held back by the pain inflicted upon you by a neglectful father or a verbally abusive mother?
Maybe you’ve had nothing but a long string of broken relationships, all of which seem to take on a similar form with similar struggles and end in strikingly similar fashions. Perhaps you had a cold father who never expressed his feelings to you or let you speak openly with your opinion, and so now, who you are is distant and defensive.
What if you’ve had a perfect upbringing with perfect parents and loving and supportive friends around you your entire life? Are you then perfect? If you didn’t have those but believe this is what you have now, along with a tribe of like-minded people striving for perfection?
Are you simply a vision of your future desires? If you’re hopeful, does that make you a positive person? If you envision the worst-case scenario coming to pass in every situation, does that make you a negative person? Is that who you are?
The answer is just below in this article; however, if you’re new to meditation and what it truly means to be ‘spiritual,’ the answer might surprise you.
In as many years as you’ve had to live and listen, have you heard your friends talking about or maybe someone writing a book about ‘finding themselves’? Things like, “John just took a 10-day trip to Argentina to go backpacking so that he could ‘find himself.'” How about, “Anna has been seeing a therapist for six months now, working with her psychotherapist and making progress on discovering herself.”
Drumroll, and let this sink in. I’ll begin by weeding the figurative garden:
You are not what you have experienced, accomplished, seen or discovered, created or envisioned, suffered, heard or believed, nor are you what you feel or even think. You are not successful or a failure. What may be more shocking, but give this article a chance to reveal and explain. You are not also a son or a daughter, mother or father, nor are you an employee or a boss. You are also nothing you have seen or heard or anything of which the body’s senses could sense.
Now, with those weeds out of the way, with all that is remaining, what are you?
Who You Are
We’ve just stripped every title you may have earned. Every badge of success. We’ve even removed your familiar relationships, so what can there be left over after all that?!
According to Eckhart Tolle and many other spiritual leaders, faiths, or religions, you are something within, an essence, or the conscious awareness of your experience.
Back to our earlier examples of what you have done or accomplished. You have experienced the events in your life that have impacted what you think and feel, but they are not you. You are at the center of each of these, the spark of conscious life sustained through your body but not the body or experiences themselves. At the figurative heart of all of this, or maybe a better term, is the soul, a conscious extension of the greater force of life itself.
Okay, back to understanding how we are separate from our bodies, experiences, and familial titles. Meditation is an excellent example of a discipline that allows you to create a separation between the form of the world and peel free the ‘distant observer’ that is yourself.
You are the being that sits on the one side of the space of awareness that is consciousness, and on the other side, your body and all the things mentioned above. Those things are what the Christian religion calls the world. You are not of the world but instead abide in it.
I won’t go any further into the spiritual aspect of this article other than to say that when one truly finds oneself, true spirituality, and what is meant by “to know thyself,” which is written on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the true meaning, is to be conscious and present with your essence.
Chew on that for a bit.
Now, back to Fear, Ego, and You. We have discussed you and who you truly are. With that known, at least academically now, until you have had a chance to let the concept sink within, we can quickly identify the other two, fear and ego. Also, remember these are important distinctions to understand because to have a relationship with yourself and others, you must be able to distinguish between who you are and what you do or your beliefs are.
Fear
Fear is learned conditioning. It is emotion. It is thought. It is a reaction that stems from understanding the harm caused to either the body or the soul. It doesn’t have to be yours. You can have fear for others. Does a child know not to take a bone from a dog’s mouth? No, not until the dog has nipped at the child’s hand is there a state of fear instilled. Does a young girl know the pain of heartbreak before she has experienced love for the first time? She does not, but she’s experienced and cautious after that.
When pain and suffering are experienced, thinking connects the experience and the emotion. Those emotions continue to live deep within our subconscious until we experience a separation of self from that fear. When it arises, it maintains a hold on us, providing conditioned reactions for similar experiences as we encounter them. We can overcome our fears only through new experiences or by reconditioning the mind by reprogramming the subconscious mind.
You, however, are not fear. Fear itself is a conditioned response, and you are separate. It may be that worldly things you are afraid of, such as relationships, still have a grasp on your Life. This is because there is no separation between who you truly are and the thoughts, feelings, or experiences you identify with.
Ego
Ego is similar to fear in that it is a form within our minds we identify with. Typically, ego lives within your mind as an image of yourself and your expectations of other forms around you. For example, if you were driving in traffic and another car pulled into your lane without blinking and cut you off. You may react out of anger or frustration. This is an example of your ego being offended by your expectations of the other driver.
Ego is who you imagine yourself to be, but it is not you.
How often have you heard from relationships, either from something you may have experienced yourself or heard from stories, that a person was made to feel as if they weren’t good enough for the other? Often, this is because of the ego of one of the partners, or both, with the form of the other not meeting the former’s expectations they had for themselves. You may have also heard the phrase “It’s not you,” but there isn’t enough definition behind the separation because ego refuses to self-identify. Instead, the ego has convinced the host that it is who they are.
The level of consciousness within a person can be measured by the power of their ego and how blinding it is to them of reality and the behavior they are exhibiting towards those around them. The ego believes itself to be flawless and creates a version of the truth that satisfies this belief in itself. While this vision of yourself can be used for improvement and even personal performance, as in the case of visualization, without humility, it can also act as a crutch, pinning someone to a false belief of their reality.
Again, Ego is an image of yourself but not who you are. In the case of a relationship where both parties separate due to ego’s presence and if you’ve ever felt like you weren’t ‘good enough’ for another person, your form and titles within life have nothing to do with who you are and just the same they do not have anything to do with who the other person is. Our forms are not our essence.
Unfortunately, you can not directly confront the ego because it is rooted in belief. A confrontation will result in immediate blame, anger, and defensiveness. Let me enlighten you a little, too, as you may be reading this and imagining confronting your boyfriend, spouse, or mother by helping them identify their ego. This desire within you is none other than your ego. Believing you see what is right vs what is wrong and how they should change instead of letting them decide for themselves is a belief in your self-righteousness, which is also ego.
The only proper way to love another is to allow them to self-discover, to be patient and kind, void of envy and resentment.
Or you may have heard it put, ‘to let go.’
This is also similar to what the Christian New Testament says about love. To love another means to allow the spirit of their own free will in decision, from consciousness, to bear itself. This is humility. Humility is the beginning of separation of ego, or a vision of false self, from true self.
In relationships, fear and ego clash like titans. The ego preys upon fears and fears strengthen and grow in the presence of the ego. For example, suppose one partner within a relationship has insecurity, let’s say weight. In that case, they are constantly highlighting that insecurity, then the ego of the other person will slowly begin to slither its way into the mind, and soon that is all the ego of the second person sees, the weight of the first person.
You’ve heard it said, “I don’t care what you look like,” or “It doesn’t matter what we’re doing; I just like being with you.” These are examples of love where the essence or soul of a person has disconnected itself from the identity of the form, and neither ego nor fear has a hold on the relationship. Fears are amplified in a relationship where judgment by the ego is present. The ego amplifies in a relationship where fears are revealed. Each of the two feeds upon one another and toxicity is bred. Remember, however, neither is true. Fear exists from the past, and the Ego exists because of a belief about the future. Neither is present. Neither is real.
The path to healing a relationship begins in the path to healing the self. As discussed earlier, a separation must be created between your being and the form you identify with. This can be created through meditation and creating an awareness of self in the present because the present is devoid of fear and ego altogether. Both your ego and fear create behavior that is not true to yourself. These behaviors will continue to swirl and react to the present because they live only within your mind and manifest themselves in relationships.
When Are You Ready?
You must find and love yourself before you are ready to love another. Only by being whole and present with yourself do you have the capacity to show that same grace to another soul. When you are whole in ‘self,’ you will have the strength and humility to move past your fears and dampen your ego to allow love to abide.
