Have you ever asked yourself, ‘What am I?’ Have you ever really felt the answer to this question? It is one of the most important things that we have to meditate on. In fact, I would think it is the first thing one should meditate on. Not answering it with words, but simply becoming conscious of the answer.

Have you looked at your body and asked yourself whether this body is really yours?

At some point in this life I have been implanted into an organic machine called ‘the body’. I never caught the moment of when it happened, but at some point I became totally oblivious to my true nature and concluded that I am my body. At one moment in time I became oblivious to my past as an eternal essence, and I “became” my body. 

Then I learned to see my hands as mine. My feet as mine. My face as me. However, if I were to change the time scale and look at my soul’s evolution from the bird’s-eye view, I would see this eternal essence, incessantly changing its physical structure. A mineral, a plant, an animal, 108 different human lives, and that’s just one of at least 3000 cycles? In this context, unbelievably insignificant become all these details, all this structure, all this Maya. How I look, how I walk, how I sound – how can this possibly be me if I have taken so many forms? Do we ever stop to feel this? How miserable became our state of being, because we identified not with the God within but with the form It took.

Even if reincarnation is a foreign concept for you: look at yourself right now. Try to truly, deeply acknowledge that every movement of the hand, the face, and the feet you now do automatically had, at some point, to be learnt and mastered when you were a child. How none of this bodily existence is a matter of fact? How everything you simply do without thinking (walking, chewing, brushing your teeth) was, when you were 1 or 2 years in this body, a struggle? Because the essence is not a body. The essence is not of a humanoid structure. It is a frequency. It is a vibration. It comes from sound. Observe how little children learn to be human. They do not know it, because they are not human. There you can witness a frequency from the Absolute striving to master a structure. A magnificent structure, given to us by God, with everything we need to self-realise, but nevertheless a structure. A home. A house. A temporary lodge for something that needs nothing to exist.

How much empathy can flourish within us if we see everyone as this essence? If we see our partner, our beloved, not as a body but as this light which we truly are? And that the same substance that enlivens us breathes life into all of creation.

How does this change the way we live our lives? How many fears and attachments can fall if we place them aside this marvellous truth? The fear of losing youth, for example. Or the preoccupation with how we appear to others. How many of our mechanical patterns become ridiculous, ready to die, in the face of this magnificent impermanence… Can we be constantly and continuously aware of this? If we understand that what we lived until now was a hypnotic trance of false assumptions, we can. 

How miserable our state is, because we “learned” we are our body. But who indoctrinated us? It was not the political state, the mother, the father, or our peers. It was our own ignorance, our egos, that trapped such a marvellously huge amount of our consciousness that we lost the strength to emerge from illusion. For now. Because each ego we kill is an inner birth of light and a higher quality of existence. In every moment we can either strengthen the false sense of self or the true impersonal, eternal SELF. It is our choice.

We have to constantly, incessantly come back to the question of who we really are, to experience that which will lift us from illusion. To constantly drink from the well of truth. We must strive for this state as a drowning man struggles for a breath of air¹ . This light will save us.

1. _{^{(as Gurdjieff says)}} ↩︎