How to Discover the Real You (Not Who You Think You Are)
By Sunil Saxena
I wish someone had told me that I am not what I think I am. For decades, I believed that my identity came from my name, from my family background, from the education that was imparted to me, from the cultural mores that I picked up from my surroundings as I grew up.
It is only now that I realise that I could not have been more wrong. My parents gave me my name, and that became my identity. My school and college education prepared me for work, and that became my professional identity.
My family, my wife and my children gave me another identity when they came into my life, and they became my most cogent identity.
It never occurred to me that my body was nothing more than earth. I never realised the miracle that was happening. Every morsel of food that I consumed became a part of my body, and I put on weight and size as I grew.
But where did this food come from? From earth. From plants. Or from animals, who too derive their bodies from a food chain whose starting point is soil.
In Hinduism, the body is referred to as mitti (dust or earth) once a person dies. “Returning to dust” is also a metaphor for death in Bible.
Yet, we pamper our body. We feed it, we clothe it, we wash it, we dress it. We never think that the body is nothing but an earthly manifestation that comes from the earth and goes back to it.
Our mind, in which we take so much pride, is also nothing but a grand repository of sensory impulses — sound, taste, smell, sight, learning, knowledge — that have been stored meticulously from our childhood onwards. Our intellect presides over these sensory impulses that are stored in the brain and makes us what we think we are.
But is that who we are? A body that comes from earth and a mind that is nothing more than a gigantic mesh of sensory impulses.
Have we ever thought that there is something more beyond the body and mind?
For me, this realisation dawned very late. We are so obsessed with taking care of the peel (body) that we forget the fruit that lives within us, and which is the true us.
The day the “fruit” goes away, the peel just shrivels and dies.
The question is: how do we nurture this “fruit”, which is the real us? Hinduism calls this “fruit” “atmaan”. Christianity refers to it as soul.
This “fruit” comes from the divine universe and goes back to it.
Moving closer to the Real You
Yoga offers a pathway — meditation. Since the ancient past, yogis have turned to meditation to get closer to this divine truth. But this is not an easy path. You need to be a true ascetic to succeed.
Another way to reach the truth is by constantly trying to figure out as to what we are ‘not’. By denying all our identifications mentally by telling ourselves …not this body, not this mind, not this position…. neti neti (not this, not this).
By eliminating everything that we are not, one day we find that what remains is what we are.
There are different doorways to enter this mansion of truth or realisation.
A hath yogi uses his body, a gyan yogi takes the path of contemplation and mindfulness, while a devotional person uses emotion.
It is for you to decide how you find your true self. Only then you will know who you are.
(This article was first published on Medium.com.)
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