The Revelation of “Who Am I” – An Immense Source of Life and Being

Sunlight filters through a dense forest with tall trees, creating rays of light and throwing shadows on the forest floor. The scene is lively with green tones and seems to glow with a certain light of life, emphasizing the deep essence of nature.

Who am I? This is a question that preoccupies many people and is generally considered a sign of depth. But it is actually quite normal not to know who you are because you are constantly changing. The search for “Who am I” is superficial as long as it means that you are preoccupied with listing the qualities and characteristics that you regularly recognize in yourself at any given moment.

You then analyze yourself at a particular moment in your development and tend to call these conclusions “yourself.” Actually, you have not yet really connected with who you truly are. At most, you have seen how you behave or react to things in certain situations or periods of time.

If you really want to know who you are, it is not about “who you are” as a manifestation. After all, you are doing something in a certain way now, and because you are developing, you may be doing the same thing completely differently in three years. If you also identify with “I am this” or “I am that,” it will hinder your (free) development.

So I invite you to stop attaching yourself to “who you think you are” in any way, positive or negative. If you want to connect with who you truly are, open yourself to the area within where you experience yourself. Try to connect with “I am the one experiencing all of this” and then feel who or what that “I” is.

The sunlight shines through the tall pine trees in a dense forest and casts shadows on the ground covered with green foliage.

Don’t look for words or terms to answer this question, but spend some time considering how that “I” feels when you say, “I feel all of this.” What emerges from that “I” when you are open to that “I”? What begins to flow when you are fully open to the quality that is released when you feel what you call your “I”?

Connect with it deeply without naming what it is or what you are feeling. Just allow the flow of the emotions that arise from it to enter you more and more. As you allow the substance of what you call “I” to become more and more an experiential quality in your body, emotions and consciousness, you give the value of what you are experiencing as “I” the freedom to go beyond all of your familiar identifications of “I” and be in your truth. When you identify with something, it narrows you down and you want to make it mean something. When you are open to something, you do not want to define it, but let it surprise you.

When you truly want to experience “Who am I”, you ask the substance and value of that self if it is willing to reveal itself to you so that you can feel and experience it. You are asking for a kind of revelation. “Who am I” can then be birthed in that openness. As you sit there and allow all the value that arises from your openness to the “I that feels,” you will experience who or what “you” really are. Do not try to model or name what you are experiencing, for then you will get stuck on something and the essential flow of the living “you that feels” will stop.

By allowing it more deeply and fully, you come into greater contact with the value and its origin, and experience who or what you essentially are on a deeper level. This then turns out to be of a completely different quality than what you thought you were in terms of behavior and reactions at a given moment.

The sunlight shines through the tall trees in a forest and takes a look at a tree stump and the surrounding greenery.

When you identify with certain traits or behaviors, you do not have a realistic and holistic self-image, but a fragmented one. Then you are not in touch with the living, ever-changing reality, but with a fixed belief. Then you believe in who you think you are and there is no room for further development, because what you believe about yourself keeps you stuck as if in a sculptured form.

Life is living, and so are you, so everything is constantly changing. When you identify with forms of behaviors, you think you are “this” now, and three years from now you think you are “that.” But you are neither, for they are merely behaviors that indicate stages of development and processes of change.

A tree is not the little sprout with only one leaf coming out of the ground, nor is it the shrub of three years or the bush of ten years. It is not the leafy tree in summer or the bare tree in winter. All these are truths of the mystery of the “living tree”. All of these aspects are true in manifestation, but none of them is essentially what the tree is.

So what do you open to when you feel the longing to know, “Who am I”

Do you open to the form, or do you open to that from which all these forms arise?

A small tree grows on a large moss-covered tree stump in a wooded area.

May I invite you to take the liberty of feeling “Who am I” in this way as well? I invite you to feel deeply into “Who am I” and invite the truth of “Who am I” to reveal itself to you and become real and tangible within you. Take the time to open to the substance of the “I that feels.”

Allowing this value opens up your experiential space, and because you do not have to name or recognize anything, it automatically becomes quieter within you. In this stilled perception, the nature of “Who am I” can unfold for you. Can experiencing the value of who “you” are bring you into contact with the deep value of your Self, which underlies all forms of your development and connects you to your inner wholeness? When you no longer identify with anything and are no longer bound by a self-belief, you give yourself the space to live, to grow, to develop, and therefore to change, every moment anew.

And during all these changes, there is always the “I that feels,” the “I that experiences.” The more you become attuned to this, the more freedom you will have toallow change to occur in your manifestation without inhibition, and the more deeply you will experience that you are the living, undefined mystery that gives life its value and depth.

Then you will live and move like everything in nature: free in manifestation and inwardly connected to wholeness. In this openness, all change will bring you into deep contact with the authenticity of who you are. Then you will feel who or what you truly are, and that the “I that feels” is an immense source of “life” and “being.”

* Translated from Dutch using DeepL (AI)

Book cover 'Bezieling door Inzicht - 200 levensthema's voor innerlijke groei' by Anandajay

Translation of the text: Bezieling door Inzicht - 200 levensthema's voor innerlijke groei, thema: 127. Wie ben ik? (Only available in Dutch.)

Anandajay dressed in white and with white cap, sitting outside on a reed braided chair

Anandajay (which means “blessing from the heart”) has been dedicated to integrating the spiritual essence into daily life for over 50 years. He has developed twelve teachings (spiritual practices), 50 music albums (mantras, pujas and ragas) and twenty books (written in Dutch) to bring you closer to the natural basis of your existence, your spiritual authenticity, and its wholesome, joyful essence, so that it can also be your shining, spiritual guide in your life. He expresses the core value of his work as: The Light of Being.