How much of you is actually you? I ask this because in meditation recently I have been struck by how much of my ‘personality’ seems to have been given to me, rather than created by me. I realize that’s a hard line to draw, and maybe most of what I consider to be ‘me’ might actually be a discordant reaction against something that occurred to me, but still I’m struck by a single idea…
If being me is the pathway to finding true peace, how can I know what is truly me, and what is an echo of something else?
Of course, if you’ve followed this work for any length of time, you’ll understand that in my philosophy, the only true ‘I’ is the consciousness having this experience; but existing as consciousness alone, purely observing a state of awareness, doesn’t get me through the day. I also have to find ways to resonate within the state of ‘me’, the human being experiencing a human reality.
And yet ‘me’ seems to be made up of so many echoes.
My attitudes towards peace and its counterpart of violence could be considered an echo of the frequent verbal and occasional physical violence I experienced both in my birth family and in my community as a child. Likewise my thoughts on money, wealth and the balance between the individual and the community maybe an echo of the times and financial status of the town I grew up in.
Sometimes there are so many echoes within me that I have to wonder what is truly a note of pure thought rung from the depths of my soul.
I once heard genius described as the ability to understand snow having never lived outside the desert, as if the ability to comprehend a reality without having seen it is the hallmark of the truly elevated mind. However, since most of our comprehension of reality comes from an experience and a concept of its counterpart, I find it difficult to accept that to be truly a ‘part’ of me a thought must come from an absence of a precursor thought.
Rather, I am beginning to accept that to be truly ‘of me’, a concept has either been accepted as is, or modified according to what I feel it should be.
As children we are taught so many things. Reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also what is considered to be ‘right’. Yet if you and I were to spend hours around a campfire, talking endlessly about a myriad of situations, I wonder if we would ever reach a perfect consensus as to what ‘right’ truly is. I think we might agree about the broad principles, yet struggle to find absolute agreement on their applications.
Yet the ‘truth’ that each of us would come away with would, I think, be a true part of each of us, having been thought about continually, refined in the fire of debate and tempered through the application of expansion and contraction. What was once an echo of a thing taught to us would become our own by the virtue of the application of awareness and consideration.
Which I think is how we finally get to be who we truly are.
Yet to become who you really are requires a tremendous amount of thought, and very often a great deal of silence. Combined with an understanding of how to tease out the true tones from the echoes, we can begin to discover the sounds of our actual selves from within the noise of all that we have heard and seen.
In case you have any illusions, I will tell you that it is nowhere as easy as I just made it sound.
Because in order to learn to disregard the echoes of all that you have been told, you may have to give up so many things that you wish to be so. There’s nothing more addictive than a thought that makes you special, or gives you a sense of comfort or community. A picture of yourself that tells you who you are will never bring you as much peace as a process that allows you to discover who you are for yourself.
And that identity is only truly possible by combining the awareness that is ‘I’ with the paradigm that is ‘me’.
Because it is awareness that allows us to sift the sands of time, emotion and circumstance in order to understand the person we are underneath all that we have been taught and told. The more that we are able to let go of the echoes, and find the truth of who we are inside, the more we will know peace in our souls, and transmit that peace to the world.
The lower percentage of echo that you carry, the higher the percentage of yourself you will truly be.
And the more you will know peace.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
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