Claire Villarreal: what am I not?

[Claire V]

“What am I?” This is the fundamental question of the spiritual journey, muc more basic than “Who am I?” To ask “Who am I?” is already to assume a “who,” a discrete individual set against a backdrop of non-“me” phenomena. “What am I?” on the other hand, leaves the door open to unconventional elements. That’s unconventional as in we don’t already have a pat definition at hand.

A real answer to this question can only come experientially and after a lot of open-ended questioning and leaving open of cognitive loops, but here’s what I can render into words at this stage in my own journey, and I have to start with what I’ve discovered I’m not:

I’m not a marvelous carbon-based machine that processes input to produce output. I’m not a living being whose life began with a birth certificate and will end with a death certificate. I’m not the sum total of my economic transactions or my net worth on someone’s balance sheet, not even cosmically speaking.

It’s more difficult to phrase a positive answer. I would say I’m an unfolding energetic dynamic with a specific associated physical signature. Really, even the word “I” is pretty clunky when “I” dig down deep enough. “I” am a dance of energy with itself, perpetuated through time by various so-called independent entities. I’m the latest ripple of a wave that started on who knows what shore when the sun heated somewhere else’s air to make a breeze. And this ripple is responsive to all the other ripples in the great Ocean, some moreso than others, some at a barely perceptible level. The boundaries of my personhood are much more fluid than I would have believed five years ago, fluid to the point of near-unfindability. Am I the same as my parents and genetic ancestors or different? Am I the same as the cultural institutions and individual influences that have shaped my mind, or different?

In these questions, “who” isn’t so much a factor as “what.” What provides the continuity I experience? What allows “me” to experience “not-me” at all? Each of us is one nexus in a tapestry of energetic patterns, and I’m not even going to speculate on how the whole big picture works. But one thing does seem certain: Buried deep in our energetic matrices, we all have a sense of our own vastness, and that very sense is what must be overlaid with social conditioning if we’re ever going to be happy little worker drones who are content to consume products and ideas and whole systems of thought and self-identificiation that are fed to us from outside. What am I? A particle of what is. What are you?