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