Who you are.
When you ask yourself ‘who you are’, who answers? Do you know? At what point does your self stop becoming yourself.
Are you your brain and body, the part of you that takes up the physical space. Are you ‘the soul’ the so called spiritual energy controlling your body. Or are you something more something more powerful, however, never usually noticed.
The physical? Body and brain?
There’s an analogy about a magical ship, each yeah another piece is broken and replaced until every part has been replaced. Is that ship the same ship your body and brain could be considered you. However everyone still refers to the brain as ‘their brain’ not me or myself. It’s still ‘my arm’ or ‘my leg’, stating that it belongs to you, but who is ‘you’?
Your brain would be the best case in terms of a physical you. The brain just contains a lot of electrical energy and neural connections that all are constantly growing and changing. This network could be the you, and scientifically it is, if we were able to replicate your brain exactly as is, connections and all. What happens now, are there two ‘yous’? Physically you could duplicate yourself but from that instance you will be perceiving reality from two different perspectives now creating two separate individuals.
Are you the spirit? the soul?
Then is there something controlling your body that makes you, you. Is there a soul, a spiritual energy that has a connection to your body. There was an experiment done to see what happens when people die, if there was something that disappears like a soul. However results were inconclusive, there are rumours about bodies losing 21 grams of weight after death, however there is much speculation around those numbers and a lot of variance in the actual weight lost.
People can talk about emotions like ‘I feel this in my gut’ or love and they talk about that being the soul. Although they’re literally just different chemical reactions and neural processes going on in your brain to create those feelings, consciously or sub-consciously.
Then some also talk about connections to lost loved ones or signs from people that have already passed away and that this is their soul continuing to live on. There is no evidence to back these theories and often people that say they have these abilities are just doing simple mind tricks. People start to believe in them so much they start to believe in themselves.
Then what makes you, you.
It’s something more and a large percentage of the population is never usually aware of what it is or are unable to grasp the understanding of it.
Put simply, you are awareness. You’re not your thoughts but your awareness of the thoughts. You aren’t the body or the mind, you’re the awareness of the two. Your actions create your past and can construct your future however you are still the awareness of those actions. The awareness of your body. This could be taken to be your soul, but the soul is such an abstract and largely undefined concept.
At a time everyone has had thoughts like; “How easy it would be to just turn into the other side of the road while driving” to “Should I go talk to that attractive person”. You aren’t these thoughts, you’re the awareness of these thoughts. What you choose to do with your awareness becomes your reality. So what you consistently think or manifest you become, In the words of Earl Nightingale “You become what you think”. However this is a topic for next week.
This can be a hard topic to understand, Eckhart Tolle has some amazing teachings on this topic and an even better book; The Power of Now.
