Who am I?

Who am I? Everyone, I believe, has asked themselves this question a time or two. So how do we find the answer? Most often we "echo locate" who we are by who our friends are. Who the "popular kids" are, who is in power and so on, determine who we believe ourselves to be. We're taught to feel this way by our media. Reality television only serves to bring out the worst in us. The internet,”social networking" sites, and especially online forums, provides an air of anonymity and removes our embarrassment by disconnecting it from us personally. We're all capable of becoming a keyboard cowboy and typing bigger than we talk if it were to take place in person. They say that familiarity breeds contempt and I would agree.

Why does familiarity breed contempt? I believe it is because as we get to know someone we see them take the same shortcuts we do. We know that their outward personae is just like ours, faked. When we watch someone from afar we see nothing but the beautiful or engaging façade they put up front. We can start to believe in it, use it as motivation to better ourselves; even if all we do is get close enough to them to associate ourselves with them. Just like the slightly less popular kids in school gravitate to the most popular to be associated with them and therefore be “cool”. Then as you get to know them you finally see their darker side. We all have one and the fastest way to help it grow, it seems, is to ignore it, run from it, or delude ourselves by associating with someone whom we wish to be or be like. Then as we take our own shortcuts, just as they did, we see how many people we step on to get there and suddenly it doesn’t seem to shiny or perfect.  We watch them delude themselves into putting up this false front and see it in ourselves too. Then we take the easiest step to correct it, we blame them. The contempt begins to build. Funny how we never blame ourselves for acting like someone we knew all along to be false.

There is this sense of familiarity on-line as well. Yet it isn’t really us, it’s only on-line. We want everyone to be passionate about what we are passionate about and ignore what we feel must be ignored. It’s really all about me when I go on-line. My social media page shows everyone what I like about me, be it true or false. I post photos, but only the ones which cast me in the light I want to be seen in. I post my carefully thought out status updates to put myself in the proper light. In all aspects on line I’m manipulating the truth to make everyone see me in the light I want. They can’t see my face which can’t hide my lies. This is on a social networking site where I know almost everyone who is going to see it, not an on-line forum which will hide me. Maybe I’ll post comments on photo blog sites, or on news articles, or some on line forum, but you can bet that since no one there really knows me that my true perspective will be shown. If you sift through it, any of them, you’ll see the ugliest side of us which shows no guilt about calling someone a horrible name, or threatening violence if they don’t see it our way. This is probably the truest view of the people we are. It is who we are when no one is watching. We act this way from the anonymity of our computer, but is it slipping into our everyday life? Does it affect the mask we’re wearing?

How do tell if it is slithering into how we behave is tricky and if we’re already so smooth about deluding ourselves do you really think we’ll be able to tell by looking at ourselves? This is especially true when we consider that we don’t actually look inwards, we view ourselves from the outside, from the part of ourselves which witnesses it all. We choose a comforting perspective and force it upon that witness. We are puppet masters who only look at our puppets, never seeing that we built them specifically for that purpose. Everyone is supposed to see this puppet. Just look at any “reality” show and you’ll see. You can watch as they interact with each other one way and behave differently when they’re alone. We see how everyone has an agenda and it helps us comfort ourselves when we do the same thing. We watch as they build their puppets, change their personae to adapt to the situations at hand. We learn to do the same thing and then we wonder why we can’t find real happiness. Those “actors” on those shows help us by giving us an excuse to act worse, so long as we’re a shade better than them. They’re bringing the curve down and we’re all following them.

They say art imitates life, but I’m with Oscar Wilde when he said "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” in his essay “The Decay of Lying”. That is, of course, if you consider modern media art. I do because it sure isn’t truth.  We’re watching so we move steadily onward towards the lowering of the curve of us. The characters on television inspire us to act like them. They’ve got it going on, their life is full of drama and action and we all want it. We are preprogrammed to emulate what we see as “right” We’re taught from an early age to adapt to, conform to, a specific mindset and our culture dictates what we are to conform to. That is; we are shown a set of behavioral patterns which we are to conform to.  Many of these are for our own safety and all of them early on are from our parents. Politeness, for example, is defined by our parents and if you think about it every behavior we have is related to what we were taught in our youth unless some dramatic life experience has caused us to examine our behavior again. My life had been all bout me. Sure I had children, but they were a reflection of who I was, not their own beings. I was taught this by my parents; everything they did for me was because they wanted to be good parents. There seems to be nothing wrong with that except that it really had nothing to do with the child. It was all about them being “good parents” which is a view from the outside and they were taught this by their parents. The definitions of this are almost always what they’re against. Be a “good parent” because there are enough bad ones out there; “bad” according to whom? Do the “right” thing, but “right” is determined by opposing what isn’t right. I believe we were all taught how to be by being shown how not to be. How many of us were taught by positive reinforcement? How many of us were taught only when we did something wrong?  What is “wrong”? It is all subjective and all of it comes from our popular culture. So take a good long look at our pop-culture right now. I could go on and on about this but then I’m doing the same thing I’m writing about; trying to get you “against” something and “for” what I believe.

I only have one person’s perspective, I am only one person. I make my choices by what I believe to be right. I broadened my perspective enough to see the big picture, just as I said earlier; by some dramatic life event. I realized that I’m not the star of the show; that life isn’t about just me. I realized that we’re all equal when you take away all the physical things which can so easily be taken. I realized that every person, every being is essentially equal. I realized that what I see is colored by who I believe myself to be. Take a person from the country and drop them in a big city. Leave them there for a year or two and then take them back and see how their values, ideals and essentially who they are has changed. I believe this is because we simply echo-locate who we are. I believe so few of us determine who they are by themselves. So we end up being a copy of a copy of a copy and so on. The morals and ethics get diluted by simply being better than the most wrong among us. There is nothing noble in that, nothing worth passing on.  So who am I? I mean really who am I? If I am what I am against then I am always living in the past and never living here and now. To live forward, to be in the moment and move forward in your life; be you, be what you believe in. Take the time to examine yourself and discover who you are. Those moments when you looked away and did what was easy, not what was right; really examine them. Take a good hard look at it and come out the person your heart knows you to be. You see those moments are jewels, though they may not seem like it. They hurt to look at, but they are jewels for the recognition of a moment where you witnessed yourself making an excuse to yourself for your own bad behavior is the call to enlightenment by establishing the source, action of and only escape from your own karma.

It determines your own starting point, it contains who you are and it maps the road to happiness. If it doesn’t make sense, then we should really sit down for tea.

Namaste

Perspective

 I saw this quote today in an "inspirational" picture/ quote gallery.


"In life we do things. Some we wish we had never done. Some we wish we could replay a million times in our head. But they all make us who we are and in the end they shape every detail about us. If we were to reverse any of them we wouldn't be the person we are. So just live, make mistakes, have wonderful memories, but never ever second guess who you are, where you have been and most importantly where it is you're going."

I thought to myself "What a destructive thought pattern, it's all about the single person". This quote is uplifting and empowering to a person and it is also wrong. Let me ask you this; If this were my perspective my life would be all about me, and only me would you want to be in my life then? It doesn't talk about shared memories. It doesn't talk about where we have been, no, it speaks only in the first person and so it is dangerous and destructive to a persons life. This single perspective is the one we must adopt while looking inwards, not while we live our life outwards.

This perspective, the one taken in this quote, is of one persons view point, which is all well and good unless you share your life with someone. The old saying "there is no I in team" holds true here. No one wants to commit to a team in which there are prima donnas. That is the destructive force within a team which will destroy that team. We've all experienced this situation, whether it was in a class where we had to work in a group, or a job we held in which we saw how just one person not working, not pulling their weight, eventually caused everyone to adopt the same attitude and the team fell apart.  It could no longer function.  No one wants to do the right thing while everyone else is taking it easy. No one wants to feel taken advantage of. This perspective doesn't work when it's taken from theory to practice.

If we can be honest with ourselves, we can see how we bring this attitude, however minutely, into our daily lives and we can see how destructive it is. Everyone wants to be the star, that is what movies and television and all marketing has taught us, we all want to be the star. If we look at the dynamics of that what it really is we will find that it's really a want for others to be supporting cast. That is how it works. When everyone is a star no one is a star, so what we're asking of the people in our lives, our loved ones, is to sacrifice their life to be our supporting characters. I would never agree to that. I would never say "Ok, you be the special one and I'll just support you".  We were taught that when the television became our babysitter. We were taught that when those who learned it fast put it to use in Junior High school and became the popular kids. We were taught this when we made it to the "real world" and had this technique, because it's been mastered by this point, used against us because we were a threat to someone's  position. We all perpetuate it daily and our actions are what teach our kids, not our noble words, the words our actions don't reflect.

Yet I'm surprised when someone tries to put me in this dynamic and I react in a volatile way. Why? Because I see in them the same bullshit I'm trying to pull in my life and I don't like it. I don't want any light shed on my own crap, what I want is for someone to tell me how to delude myself from other peoples bullshit in a way which makes me feel better about myself. Hell it is such a need anymore that we have built a market for "self-help gurus" which really only give me a bridge of the river of shit I have crapped out into my life. Real happiness, real tranquility, comes from cleaning up the shit. It is a thankless and tiring job that takes the whole of our lives if we don't take it seriously.  We may peek at it during those dark times in our life when things come crashing down and we always seem to find some other thing to focus on instead of just getting to the job of clearing out the skeletons in our closet and actually being a good person instead of finding new way to fake it or new shiny things to take the focus off the person we are, the person we now feel is unworthy. We hide that person inside and so if we fool someone into loving us we can't believe it because we know who we really are. Who are we fooling? "Three things are not long hidden; the sun, the moon and the truth." - Buddha. The bible taught us "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". If I am a fake, I have to assume they are fake too and it will all be illuminated eventually. So why go through that when it is so much easier to be real?

This attitude of "me & mine" is really only useful when examining our true selves. But how can we do that when we've been a different fake version of ourselves for such a long time. It's like trying to remember your original hair color when you've dyed it for so long. My answer is meditation, but all boils down to introspection. The key point to that is how honest we are prepared to be with ourselves. Have you ever been drunk and said "I'll never do this again, and this time I mean it" haha, no you don't, none of us do when we say that, if we meant it we would do it instead of saying it aloud so we can fool ourselves. Because really? Why say it out loud like that instead of simply doing it? That is what I'm talking a bout, how honest are you prepared to be? because if you're only going to take a brief peek at only the surface stuff, why bother at all? To illustrate the point I'm talking a bout I'll share my moment of clarity. You see my wife left me and took my kids. I don't blame her; I was an asshole to put it mildly. There I was my life had been yanked from under me like some cheap carpet. I was all alone on my couch contemplating just giving up when I saw it. I saw myself and all the jacked up ways I manipulated the people in my life so that I was the star. I saw all of that fade away and it was just me, alone in darkness, in nothing. I was experiencing this, not simply observing it. Then the thought occurred to me that I was really all I had, everything else could change and go away. Then I realized "I'm an asshole, I don't want to spend eternity with an asshole!" I reached a point where I could be honest with myself because I saw how serious the situation was. Then something someone told me when I was young came back to mind. I can't remember who it was but I remember the words clearly "All you have is who you are, all you own can be taken away; even your life so all you have is your character". I realized the full weight of those words in that moment and I saw the inky tendrils of my own bullshit slither into the lives of those I loved and I saw how my tendrils of manipulation caused reactions. Then I saw it, like a field of dominoes falling and how I was responsible for it all. I saw how I could simply be honest with myself, clear out my own crap and then show compassion to those who were still fooling themselves. It is all me going inwards, and all US coming out. I don't want to be taken advantage of, so I won't take advantage. I don't want to be lied to so I won't lie and so on.

So I reach a point where I realize that I can only be happy when I'm being fair and equal, so I search for it always. None of us want to be less than, condescended to, taken for granted, taken advantage of. I say to you this: Fix yourself first, because just like the example we just worked though, no one wants to be first when it means carrying all the weight and expecting them to is the first step to the destruction of that team. I've experienced it so many times in so many settings, I'm sure you have too. So look at this example, take it in intellectually and really turn it over in your mind. Think critically about it and see if it uncovers the truth within your heart. Then you own it, it was your thought. It was simply inspired by other words on a page. Nothing matters unless you believe it for yourself. I mean really believe it, because the difference between believing and wanting to believe is action and the action makes or breaks it. At the end of the day all we want is to relax because we've been on guard all day. We've had out mask on all day and what we want is someone to love us for what is underneath. I find it so absurd that in order to get this what we do is build such a contrast. We make them believe what we are not, what we cannot be, what we wish we were.... what we want to believe.

Happiness is living in harmony with everyone all the time and we always seem to want to find that place by echo-locating them to find out who we are. We start with the solution and attempt to work backwards when all along all it took was a slight shift in our perspective and it was there all along. I went within and cleared house. I owned what I needed to and it saved my marriage, provided a happy home for my children to thrive in and it brought to me immeasurable happiness because they love me for who I actually am because I uncovered it and shared it with them. It's all about your perspective; is it ME? It is US vs THEM or is it simply we? I believe in the power of we, which is essentially love. What do you believe?

Don't Act; BE

"Never try to ACT like someone you're not, because it's acting and that is just a shortcut to being... so in the end you'll just be faking a new person but taking the same shortcuts you are now. Don't act; be."

All of us want to improve who we are; our media, from screen to print, tells us so. So how do you go about change or improvement and make it real? You have to ask yourself "How far am I willing to go? How much do I want this change?" and the key question you have to ask yourself "How honest am I prepared to be with myself?". Otherwise you're just going through the motions again, and aren't you sick of fading change?

Have you ever heard the phrase "Fake it until you make it"? I can't think of a more destructive path to self-improvement. All of us are aware of our inner-most place, the place our consciousness seats. It's the place you talk to yourself non-verbally. It's your inner space. I call it the cave. It's the place, I believe, we understood first as children. The day we understood "I am" as coming from within not what your parent was pointing at from the outside. Later on, it will become the place we can think and not even God can hear us. It's a refuge we create from the world. It's the place we where we know we're just faking it and even if we get really good at it, we will know we're still only faking it. It's the carrot called "make it". Faking it will never bring us happiness, true happiness, which won't fade.

So there you are, sitting inside yourself, lost and wondering what to do next. Life isn't working and every change you've made backfires or does nothing to help at all.  It's time to get real with yourself. The phrase "I won't do this ever again, and this time I mean it" wouldn't be pop-culture if it wasn't true on some level. How many times have you said it? I don't have enough fingers on my hands for how many times I have said it.  Ever notice that when you say that you're in a different place inside yourself than you are right now? It's like you're some slick car salesman pulling the wool over your own eyes. So, how seriously are you going to take this? You have to silence the salesman; you have to know better, and do better. You have to consciously turn away from the easy road and start the real work. You know, that truth you've been doing all you can to get away from? It's now time to hoist that on your back and take care of it.

The very first thing you have to do is some housecleaning of the cave. You, like all of us, have skeletons to clear out. You may be thinking that you already have cleared those out, and so only you know if that is the truth. So we come to: Just how honest are you willing to be with yourself? To me, there is only one level of honest; absolute. So the way I look at it, you're not throwing those skeletons out, instead you're facing them down and accepting them. You have to be able to both stand against the deed and love the doer unconditionally. That is you have to be against what you did, fundamentally and completely against it, while still having understanding and compassion for the you which did it. You have to be able to love yourself, after all; you're stuck with you for your entire life.

What is left when you’ve cleared everything out? After you're done fighting your demons and wound up loving yourself more for the process, what is left? It feels so, empty. The first urge is to define who you are by everything around you. Your likes, and your hates. "I am a pacifist!" "I am a father." "I am a professor" and so on. Or, "I'm against violence" "I'm for the sanctity of marriage" "I believe in Socialism". Stop, stop, stop! None of that matters anyway. They're not definitions, they are what you make your decisions by. They are your values, not you. Now that you've cleared everything out, what you're left with is you. Not the fake puppet you that you've spent your whole life crafting into a super cool adult, but the real and actual you.

So, who are you? Do you even know? Can you tell me without leaving the perspective of your cave? Can you tell me without looking out and echo-locating or looking in an judging? Can you simply be and know who you are? It's an intangible thing isn't it? You are in a constant state of flux, ever changing and growing, ever the student. Be-ing is now, act-ing is a plot for future being which projects the mind to an imaginary state in the future and excuses any behavior of how you got there; it's a short cut. That is faking it until you make it, but you never do. "Make it", that is. You'll always know that you're lying to yourself and what ever you were trying to be; you'll always know it is a sham. You need to find the center of yourself which doesn't change while you're constantly changing. I've often thought of it as the overall intention of your life. It's what all those "I am" and other definitions compiled and averaged out are. So you end up being the intention of all of your choices, like some giant flow chart leading to one person that you cannot be and witness at the same time. There can be only one! You either are or you're examining yourself. There is nothing wrong with that as long as you recognize that that is you and what you're witnessing is really only your memory of  what you were.

You've discovered the secret. That change comes only from making the choice to be that good person, every choice, every day with conscious purpose. Then faking it to making it becomes a delicate dance of imperfection. It becomes accepting yourself as you fail while not accepting failure. It's strict self compassion. It's life, one day at a time. It is nothing more than simply being the change, and it turns out Gandhi was really on to something so deep we may never hope to fully understand it. You exist, so go and be who you are and you'll find that happiness & love were all around you all the while and it was really you who were getting in your way and selling you a load of bunk. You'll find that change is hard work and it resides in our minute to minute choices which add up to be who we are. Go and BE!