“Who am I,” he asked himself.
“Who am I?”
Such a strange question,
uttered endlessly,
by weekend seekers of the Lost Psyche.
Feigning amnesia,
they blather about their true selves,
their Grand Soul lost somewhere outside their petty lives,
hidden away and blocked by fleeting fleshy passions,
stolen away by the finite soma and mundane mind.
Their Real Self: pure, eternal, blissful, free, true, wonderful;
right around the supernatural corner,
waiting for them like a blind date.
You know who you are!
You are a unique body - interdependent with the watery world;
a boxcar of moving memories - a rich history;
known from the fruits of your work;
meshed with some family, holding somebody dear;
Somebody - unique as the fingerprint of your DNA;
named, spoken for, listening, and …
Your search for “yourself”, your anxious questioning,
makes no sense.
A stale mantra,
a face before you were born koan:
“Who am I?”, sterile, silly,
Pointless.
Yet, following an irrelevant spiritual advisor’s advice,
You try to figure it out, for hours and weeks,
befuddled, awed by your confusion, thinking
It’s your puny powers of meditation or belief or determination
that keep you from discovering
The Holy Grail of the Genuine Self.
You know who you are!
You might want to change who you are,
or forget who you were,
or tell others about who you are,
or learn why you get tricked into asking yourself this foolish question …
but those are quite different issues.
- Mike Garofalo, Above the Fog
“Who are you? Who? Who”
- The Who, Who Are You, 1978