First
recognize who you are. This is the root of it all. Without this, you will
assume that whatever is said here is a suggestion that you should or could
actually do something out of your own separate volition. This question ‘who or
what am I?’ is the most basic and fundamental question. It is a question that
most children ask in some form or another. It seems that we come into this
strange world and we have no idea what is going on! Perhaps we ask our parents
who innocently feed us their limited view of life. Perhaps we just learn how to
pretend that we know who we are in order to fit in and survive this crazy game.
So with this question ‘who am I?’ we come back to before we started
pretending. What is underneath, before and after all that pretending, trying,
running, chasing, hoping and fearing? Who am I really? Self enquiry is not
meant to be a practice to make you feel good or to be more aware. It is not a
practice to help you stop thinking or worrying or to take away the pain.
It is not a practice that will lead to an improvement in your experience or
some kind of final goal of awakening. It is an investigation into what you
actually know right now. I am not suggesting that you practice self enquiry.
This very idea suggests that you have a problem that self enquiry can solve. I
am suggesting that you might investigate what you can know beyond thought right
now, not that you practice something to fix yourself or in order to avoid
feeling bad. Chasing good feelings that you hope to have, and running from bad
feelings that you fear, is an endless torture.
‘Waking
up’ actually means waking up out of the dream of what you hope for or fear and
actually seeing reality the way it is, whether you like it or not or whether it
fits into how you think it should be or not.
Waiting
for a definite sign that you know it or have got it, is only continually
overlooking what is actually here already. When you don’t refer to your hopes
and dreams, fears and beliefs, there is some space to recognize what is already
right now. It is nothing like what you may have imagined. It is not special in
the way that you may have imagined. It is nothing like anyone else’s awakening
experience that you may have read about and compare yourself to. Anything
that thought can come up with is not it. In fact it is not an ‘it’. It is not
any kind of object or experience (no matter how spiritual!)
Are you
willing to lose all ideas and hopes of what you would like ‘it’ to be, in order
to see that way it actually is?
Who you
are is already all that you long to become. If you believe that you are a
separate person who has to find a way to complete yourself in some way, then
you will imagine that ‘awakening’ is something that you need to achieve one
day. Forget about awakening for a minute, and without any expectations, just
check what you really know right now. Ask the question ‘Who am I right now?’
and see what happens. Does thought spin around trying to know the answer? Does
thought assume that there is a ‘correct’ answer? Does thought come up with one
definite answer that is always absolutely true? Or does it change depending on
your mood or what concept you are regurgitating in that moment? Do you know who
you are without referring to any thought or concept, memory or
imagination?
Are you
expecting to have a major spiritual experience when you ‘get’ the answer to
this question?
Are you
expecting that ‘getting’ ‘it’ will change your life? Are you expecting to
get enlightened and to float off on a cloud? If you have some kind of nice
peaceful experience then that is totally irrelevant to the investigation. This
is not about you getting anything, but simply about investigating the nature of
reality. Not needing or expecting anything to happen and then see what actually
is known (or not known) beyond thought.
Getting
the joke of this question is simply the beginning...
