WHO AM I?
The true purpose of the question “Who am I?” is to serve as a pointer to diving into the unknownness of this unbounded moment. It’s a question without an answer, a koan, a signpost to the edge of mind, where you are invited to take a leap.
Here you have a choice: to go running back to the relative safety of the story of “me” or to let go into the unknown.
If you let go, you open up to the possibility of total annihilation of the scaffolding that defends all your ideas and concepts about who you think you are.
It’s a free fall into the abyss of being that literally stops the mind.
In this momentary stopping, there is a shift in consciousness to a deeper dimension of being, a coming home to your true nature.
Coming home is what each of us yearns for.
It’s the ultimate fulfillment, a sense of completeness, and a feeling of being totally at one with yourself and with life.
Any addictive behavior, whether it be compulsive smoking, the satisfaction of sexual impulses, getting high on recreational drugs, eating for comfort, or shopping therapy, is driven by a hardwired desire to lose ourselves in the primordial oneness of the womb.
Most people understand intuitively what it means to yearn for the undifferentiated consciousness before we are born. All addictions are an unconscious yearning for this. It’s our deepest longing for absolute union, an ancient pull toward innocent oblivion.
It’s the innate memory of that which exists prior to form: pure being.
But when this desire is unconscious—in other words, when it is owned by the ego—we look in a direction that can never bring fulfillment.
It’s like looking at the waves and trying to catch hold of one that takes your fancy: as soon as you attempt to possess it, it slips through your fingers and you go on search- ing for another wave again and again.
The same is true with the search to fulfill your deepest longing, because this longing is never-ending. Anything you imagine that might bring you true happiness and lasting peace is simply that: an imagination, an idea, a hope.
