Who Are You, Really? 

If you can find out who you really are on a soul level, you’ll uncover the unique being you were always intended to be,  before the world and its conditioning inflicted its wounds on you,  and made you ashamed and afraid to reveal who you really are. You’ll also discover your unique place in the overall scheme of things, because in finding your true self,  you’ll also find your unique gift, and the contribution that only you, with your unique combination of characteristics, experiences and abilities,  can offer the world. 

For this to happen,  we need to go in search of ourselves. We need to remove the layers of the false self we have spent years constructing over and around our true,  authentic self: our soul.  So deep are these layers,  and so thorough the conditioning and the wounding we have received, that sometimes just the smallest gathering of threads  of our original,  genuine identity, remain in expression.

When this  is the case,  it’s because our soul has been brutalised almost beyond recognition, so brutalised that it has withdrawn from showing itself, and fallen into deep unconsciousness,  leaving an almost empty space where a strong, confident and unique identity should be. This space, which the false self attempts to fill with a ramshackle  collection of hazy notions about who we are,  leaves us not only uncertain about our identity and place in the world,  but equally uncertain about the kind of treatment we deserve to receive from other people.  In short, we have lost our sense of who we are; we have lost our soul.  So the question we all need to ask ourselves,  is, Do I know who I really am?

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One  of the most common mistakes people make when they embark on a path of spiritual progress is to believe that they have embarked on a journey of self-improvement.  The reason for the misunderstanding, in my experience, is that in most of us, there seems to be a deeply held, though often unconscious conviction,  that who we  are now, right at this minute, is a defective, inferior version of who we ought to be, or should be. In fact,  many people on the spiritual path seem to think their task is to become saintly or “perfect.”  

In other words, there’s a belief that if they aren’t completely unselfish, self-sacrificing,  and caring all of the time,  aren’t always  wise, patient, peaceful, compassionate and understanding (to mention but a few of the virtues many people  imagine an enlightened being possesses) then enlightenment will forever elude them. This insistence on becoming perfect, however,  is one of the biggest hurdles we need to overcome if we  are ever to attain spiritual maturity.    

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