Who you are

Who are you? Your first answer will probably be your name, But you are not your name. You have a name.

Perhaps you will say that you are a human being, but there are billions of human beings on this planet, but only one of them is you.

Maybe you will say that you are the result of everything that has happened in your past up until this moment. That doesn’t make sense either. It’s like a teacher asking a student “What do you get when you add 2 + 2?”, and the student responding, “Well, duh. The result.”

Then who are you? Or, more appropriately, what are you?

At your essence, before you are your life’s history, your name or even your body, you are awareness.

You already know this to be true. You use the term “my thoughts” because, instinctively, you separate yourself from your thoughts, as if to say, “Here I am and these are my thoughts.”, consciousness, the “I am” that comes before I am this or I am that.

The “I am” in that sentence is you.

Once you grasp the knowledge of who you are, you start to understand your relationship and your importance to the universe.

We don’t know, and may never find out if there are other aware beings in our universe. Our earth, however, is filled with sentient beings. Their awareness is of the world experienced through their senses. What makes human beings different is that we are also self-aware.

We know that we are not our body. We have a body. And although we sometimes mistake ourselves for them, we instinctively know that we are not our thoughts. We have thoughts. Without self-awareness, we might have a body, but we would no longer be human. Without a living, functioning body, awareness could not exist.

We can study the brain because it is a thing. But no one can look at the brain and point out our awareness, because it doesn’t exist in the physical world.

The essential you does not exist in the physical world.

Quantum physics now suggests that, at the quantum level, reality does not exist if is not observed. If this is true (and it makes sense to me), then the universe as we know it could not exist were it not for awareness.

You allow the universe to exist.

In this way, human awareness allows awareness to become aware of itself.

In your time here as a human, you make your own reality, one moment at a time. You will have many desires and will do the things that you think need to do to achieve them. Whatever you do, however, will only be in service of these desires. They will not change the primary reason that you exist; to be.