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Man has been eternally asking the question “Who am I?” Man is a seeker, a seeker who is in search of himself. Many seek, however, only a few find the answer.
Whenever someone asks us as to who we are, we give, in reply, our name, qualifications, age, position in life and sometimes our religion, our caste and the state and our country.
We give our visiting card which gives our name, education qualifications and organisation to which we belong and the position that we hold in the organisation. But the issue still remains: What are we! This is because even if all these are taken away, we still remain.
‘I’ is the word we use more than any other word in our day to day living. We say: I slept well. I said this, I did that, I enjoyed my meal; I like my work. It is always ‘I’ and ‘I’. I prevails our life and yet we never pause to enquire: who is this ‘I’: what is this ‘I’. In other words, we fail to enquire: Who am I.
“Know Thyself” is the message Socrates, the great philosopher gave to his pupils ages back. Bhagwan Shri Ramana Maharshi asks us to undertake a self enquiry as to “who am I?”
“I am that” Brihadaranyaka Upanishad thunders. It says. “That in whom reside all beings and who resides in all beings, who is the giver of grace to all, the supreme soul of the universe, the limitless beings – I am that.”
“you are that” says Chandogya Upanishad “That which permeates all, which nothing transcends and which, like the universal space around us, fills everything completely from within and without, that supreme non-dual Brahman – that thou art” – says Shankaracharya.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj says
“give up all questions save one: Who Am I. After all the only fact you are sure of, is that ‘you are’. The “I am” is certain. The “I am this” is not. He teaches that to know who you are you must first investigate:
what you are not. In our younger days we used to play a game of “Ten Questions” – The group was divided into two teams. The first selected some eminent personality and the other group had to find this out. This was done by asking ten questions. The answer was only to be given in terms of ‘Yes” or ‘No’ – By asking right questions, one went on eliminating possibilities, to find out the person selected by the first team.
The scriptures adopt a similar art of reasoning. We have to discover our self by finding out what we are not. The key to understand is : What is mine cannot be me. Your bungalow, your car, your diamond necklace are not you but they belong to you. Similarly it is true about our body. We speak of “my body”. The question is whose body? The moment we say that the body is mine, we accept that we are not the body. Whatever can be perceived or felt is an object. What perceives or feels is the subject. That is I. Similarly a thought also is an object, the thinker is the subject. Who is the perceiver, fetcher, thinker? We have to discover ‘him’ within us.
Reading that we are a soul and not the body, is one thing, understanding and accepting this is another thing and realising this is still another thing. For example – reading that Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world and seeing Mount Everest are relatively easy but climbing Mount Everest is different. It is difficult and only a few courageous, adventurous persons can achieve this – the same is with finding: Who am I.
Let us be amongst the few who understand and accept that we are “not a body having soul but a soul having a body. This realisation will lead us to know : Who I am and experience true bliss – the bliss which lies within us. As Brahmakumaris teaches us “I am a peaceful soul”.
Bhagwat Gita explains in very simply terms:
“I am that which will still remain even when my body is cremated and reduced to ashes.”
Let us yearn, pray and succeed in searching and finding the answer to the eternal question: who am I? I conclude by quoting from Shankara’s Nirvana Shatakam:
