When reaching for your spirit, all shadows are lost, and ending up in unfamiliar surroundings is a small price to pay for tuning in and listening to your inner self. Who are you? Consider this: It’s not your appearance, your sex, or your origin; it’s not what you do, what you make, which place of worship you go to, your social status, the people you surround yourself with or your possessions. Now, do you still know who you are? For me, the search for self started ever since I was born, I just wasn’t aware of it. Then I “grew up” and went to college – I picked a major, and I felt like I had a real sense of who I am – I had an identity – or so I thought.
It recently dawned on me that the closer we get to putting ourselves into a box and defining ourselves, the further we get from our source of being. When I say source, I mean that which we are – we came from source and we are source – source energy. This is as far as I’m willing to go to “define” the ungraspable, limitless, infinite oneness. When I picked a major in Finance my sophomore year in college, I said “Aha, now I’m going to be a financial analyst. This is who I am, I have found “me.”” But what I was really doing is letting my ego tell me who I am. The ego loves attaching itself to labels because if I can say I am (this), then if you’re not “this,” then I’m better than you. This is a perfect tactic for the ego to succeed in separating us from each other, it makes us forget that we are really all one and there is no one to compete with. It loves making a person feel superior, and this causes a person to fall into a dream.
This dream is an illusory state painted by the ego where getting ahead and being number is one of the few things that matter. The ego – or our shadow self, is really our servant – one we can simply dismiss as a bratty five year old if we’re present and aware, but when it takes over, we lose ourselves in it and it becomes us. This is how ignorance, fear, one-upmanship and arrogance arises. In reality, there is enough to go around for everyone – the universe is an unlimited source of abundance. If you treat the universe as such, you will see miracles, and if you treat it as a place of scarcity and lack, that will become your reality.
Getting back to my college days – at one point I decided to drop my Finance major and move onto something else – “Ah! I have found a new identity,” and, each time I assumed a new identity, my sense of self solidified even further, further taking me away from my truth. The difference between truth and illusion is that truth never changes. All forms are unstable and subject to change – thus the tangible is really not real, it is transient and will fall away when we retreat back to our true form as spiritual beings. Labels are illusions – they are not who we are. So, think about it again, who are you? And if you find yourself having difficulty coming up with a definition, you’re on the right track – now simply bring it back to I AM. OM.
By Olga Shkolnik