What or Who Am I?

In my own life, what I am primarily interested in is waking up from the dream state of identification to the truth of oneness. As a spiritual teacher, that's what all my teaching is centered around. So I suggest that people use meditative self-inquiry as a tool to help cultivate the energy of awakening, the awareness of one's true nature. However, many people I meet are actually looking outside of themselves and asking questions that are outside of their own experience. Everybody has heard the teaching 'look within,' and yet many of us are still looking outside of ourselves. Even when we have spiritual questions, they are often focused outside of ourselves. What is God? What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? These are questions that may be relevant to the personality, but they are still not the most intimate question.

The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I? Before I wonder why I am here, maybe I should find out who this 'I' is who is asking the question. Before I ask 'What is God,' maybe I should ask who I am, this 'I' who is seeking God. Who am I, who is actually living this life? Who is right here, right now? Who is on the spiritual path? Who is it that is meditating? Who am I really? It is this question which begins the journey of spiritual self-inquiry, finding out, for your own self, who and what you truly are.

So step number one is having a spiritually powerful question, such as 'Who or what am I?' Step number two is knowing how to ask that question. Again, I have noticed that very few people know how to ask a spiritually powerful question. If we don't know how to ask, then we'll just end up lost in our minds. We can sit around thinking forever about who we are. We can read spiritual discourses, philosophical discourses, religious discourses on who we are and why we are here and what this is all about. We can do that forever, and what we end up with is more thoughts, more ideas, more beliefs-not what we really need, which is a flash of insight, a flash of recognition into the truth of our being. Spiritual inquiry actually helps cultivate that flash. So how do we ask the question? How do we find out what we truly are?