Do we know who we are?
Do we know who we are?
I invite you into a world of stories, where the line between thought and feeling, self and other will merge and separate. I offer you the opportunity to delve into what is true to you.
Is this the right question?
Sometimes, the wind winds its way almost imperceptibly the woods, whispering to the trees its gentle life-giving breath. Sometimes, it whips and wails, railing against some unknown force in the world with which it appears temporarily displeased, decrying – with its gails – the poisoned gal which exists within the hearts of men and women towards their Mother, and their mother. Sometimes the wind is just wind, it simply blows because that is its nature.
Wind is the father who will not let us forget him, the old man in the corner by the fire. His pipe is alight, and he gently puffs upon it. He may encourage us gently in a way which lifts our hearts, or reprimand us with stern solemnity so that we cower at his words, but he is all the time speaking, speaking, speaking wisdom that we can choose to listen to or not. We alone decide whether we stop to feel the wind caress our skin, hold our arms out to the smashing gusts of life and welcome it. We alone decide whether we turn our back to the wind, run to find shelter within our comfortable modern and near airtight dwellings and refuse to leave ‘until it’s over’.
Wait until what is over? Until the storm is over? Until the wind does not blow? Until this beautiful dance called a human lifespan has brought us to the final bow? It is but three short steps from the former to the latter, and they are all sections of the continuous thread that humanity embarked upon from the moment it began to use the word ‘I’. For we are not separate from our mother and father, our brother and sister. We are not separate from the man down the street who lives on a shabby mattress of cardboard and carries his total worldly possessions within a single plastic shopping bag. We are no more separate from the woman in the private jet who spans the whole circumference of the world with little thought for the hungry children of that same world or the emotional hunger of her own children who wait for her at home with the nanny who is not their mother. We are no more separate from the young, troubled soul who straps a bomb to himself and says a prayer than we are from the young, troubled soul who straps a bomb to himself and believes there is no one and nothing to say a prayer to. We are no more separate from the Eurasian lynx or the bumble bee, from the liberty cap spore, the towering oak or the influenza virus. We are no more separate from the shingle beneath our feet than we are from the rain, the sun or the pages of a book.
The man in the corner by the fire whispers this all to me, because I have asked him a question. I want to know, I said, how people can remember who we truly are. I have asked him, and he is pleased. He is slow and ponderous in his deliberating. He is wondering, I know, what I am ready to hear. What I am willing to hear, as yet. His rocking chair slows to the most gentle swaying back and forth, and now his voice carries in through the open window of my bedroom as I sleep.
The question of who we are has been a mainstay of western philosophy, and has contributed vastly to the quest for personal self-actualisation which appears under the different cloaks of capitalism, sexual liberation, religion, spirituality. Arrayed and presented differently, at the core, it is the quest to discover who we are which has kept humanity running its course in the wrong direction. The question is not only ‘who are we?’ but also ‘who are we?’ Spiritually speaking, it is impossible to progress with one unless we address the other, and practically speaking, it is impossible to progress with one unless we embrace the other and know it as ourselves.
Are we it?
The process of remembering who we requires a deep dive into all that is within us and outside of us. I cannot, with today’s connotations, use ‘without us’ since it implies that there is something which exists that our lives don’t also belong to, and this would be leading you towards a grave error. The grave error being that, come the time of your death – the passing of your physical body back into earth and melding once again into the milieu of matter from whence it came and from where it is inherently immediately put to good use – you might not know the simple fact that we are both ourselves and not ourselves. We are us, and we are it. The singular ‘it’ which both comprises, manifests and changes all seen and unseen phenomena.
And yet the word ‘it’ is itself too cold. It is simultaneously too vague and too precise for my liking. It cannot do justice to such a colossal concept as the universe and all its phenomena, and whatever may be beyond. And yet, the microcosm contains the macrocosm, and – in this way – ‘it’ will do.
The cosmic soup
As much as we are all that is beyond us, it is important the we do not get lost in the cosmic soup. Knowing the oneness of all things has led many to demonise our singularity. The wind, they may argue, is at one with everything. Yet this is not true. The wind is manifest in this dimension as wind. None of us can say whether wind will evolve into something else, whether the molecules of N2, O2, Ar, CO2, Ne, He, CH4, Kr, H2, NO, Xe, O3, I2, CO, NH3 that comprise the atmosphere will ever be pushed further by the thermal energy to become anything other than wind in their collective form, yet we do know that this is possible, since every one of the individual molecules which comprise the phenomena we call wind shift and move. Take CO2, one moment it is part of the wind, and the next it has become fuel for tree cells, human cells, or a fire extinguisher.
If what we need to realise is that we are us, and we are it, then what we must experience is what it feels like to be both, to learn from both, and welcome both with openness.
Are you ready?
I will be posting thought-provoking, or rather feeling-provoking content and prompts which invite you to feel into your authentic response. I will offer guidance for how you can tell what is a racquet emotion, what is spiritual bypass and what is a genuine feeling.
So you can start to feel into WHO YOU ARE. All for fun.
Psychotherapist, Teacher & Woman of the Wilds
Jessica Eve Body Psychotherapy
