Who am I?

    

The Subject is the unknown, since it is the knower, and it is closer to me than the blood that circulates through the veins of my body. Who is this entity? Who I am?

The first time we hear this question, in our deep childhood, it is someone else who asks it. The expected answer is a name: mom, dad… Someone answers it for us and awaits our mimetic action, rewarded by bursts of joy. We have imprinted into our deepest memory that being is having a name. The question is, from the first moment of our life, the basis of our relationship with others, of the recognition of identities from names. We learn our own name at the same time as the name of another relative, of another person who speaks to us, and thus we learn to objectify our parents and ourselves.

    The answer to "who am I?" with a name, only makes sense in the most basic social identifications, indeed, my own name, the one that has been assigned to me, is nothing more than a label, and it has little meaning if we ask the question reflexively. What is the point of asking myself any question? Don't I already have the information that I could give to myself? In principle, it would seem that it is only a starting point for a reflection on its content, for a philosophical inquiry.

    The question is as simple as it is fascinating and fundamental, perhaps the most fundamental of the questions that a human being can ask. Any other question must take into account the result of the answer we arrive at... if it really has a definitive answer. No one can answer it for me, or for you. If I were not able to answer it, the meaning of my existence would dissipate like a summer cloud. I could go on living, but unable to avoid feeling like a machine completing scheduled tasks. We always have to have a ready-made answer at hand, some kind of standard response, elaborated by our human group or fabricated by us based on the best opinions of others.

     So I say: I am a human being, a very common response that seems to leave the matter settled but does not say anything about the part that has to do with my own existence, my feeling of being someone with a mind of my own relatively independent of others. On the other hand, the very notion of being human is at the same time as foreign and as inherent to my vital feeling as my very act of being, what's more, the question and my existence cannot be independent things, in fact, I suspect that to be human is to be able to ask such question. 

    Our question already entails an answer: I am a "who", something substantive, and I realize that I am being, although I cannot specify the nature of my being, of my being alive as an individual being. Thus, I say of myself that I have the capacity for movement, action, and reaction, and in this, I discover myself as other objects that I perceive and understand as "not-me". However, I am not an object. I am not my body, because when I see it there is no full and unequivocal identity with it, neither when I feel pleasure nor when I feel pain do I attribute it only to the body, there is something that feels that pleasure and that pain, and that from sensory impressions and memory builds up an experience. The body does not exhaust my identity. In a sense, the body is alien to me, because it is not an extension of my will, and it follows cycles and impulses that do not depend on what I want. I am me and I am not me at the same time. This is interesting because the body is showing me that what I call "I" and what I call "not-me" have an intimate connection. I then realize that the air in my lungs is an intimate "not-me" that is automatically transformed into "me" giving life to the cells, and so it is food and the sun that activates my organism and my spirit in such subtle ways ...

    So I feel that I am life itself, a continuum of material forces that interpenetrate complex processes. But this observation arises from a mental process that was already embedded in my whole feeling the connection of myself with the "not-self". I cannot separate this mental component: it was there from my first inquiry into my identity, like the emotion I feel when perceiving the intimate connection of my body with what surrounds it, the world. I see that body, emotions, mind form a network that I share with higher animals, some large mammals, and birds. They too live within that complex framework, however, their sense of life and vital action, although they start like mine from that intuiting continuity with the world, from feeling at home in nature, understanding it intuitively, they are not capable of the reflection that I am doing. My mind is more complex than theirs and its functioning allows it to turn on its own actions as if they were objects to consider and ponder, to examine and judge, to direct those actions to purposes that are not in the pondered actions. Let's say, I have an intellect and they only have an animal mind. I also have an animal mind, and emotions, and a body, but there is something in me that is not limited only to that: I have an intellectual capacity and I examine myself and wonder about my identity.

    The identity that I discover is not limited to being a process of analysis and philosophical synthesis. At each step, these insights are linked with subtle forms of emotion, far removed from the most basic animals and linked to the very process of understanding my identity. They are emotions of sublimity and harmony fused with intellection, and they open up new fields of my identity. Sublime emotion sustains intellection as much as intellection follows the paths of this sublime emotion. With roots in the intimate matter in which I am based, the one that I breathe and dances in my chest, propelling me in yearnings, the one that shoots arrows of sublimated vital representations following trajectories of reason and imagination towards an existence increasingly subtle and broad. Yes, rooted in this here and now, my being emerges already far removed from the animal experience, not limited by terrestrial movement. I think about galaxies, and the immensity of the dimension of these light sources produces a joint emotion of harmony, peace, purity, infinity, strength, beauty, and joy. The new emotion is a compound that includes those previous emotions neither as separate emotions nor as a partial combination of them, but rather acquires a different nature. I call this emotion "ananda", a Sanskrit term from the Vedic tradition that has, to my understanding, a similar semantic field to the one covered by the agglutination of such prior emotions. The galaxies immerse me in ananda. I look at their photos and shapes, I read about their formation, I even see with my naked eyes, in the clear night, one of them, our sister galaxy Andromeda, and the cosmic emotion grows and dissolves me. Astronomical numbers tell me nothing compared to what I feel when knowing them to be my house, my space, my light, myself. The atoms of my body reverberate with their distant light, with their invisible and present energy, and I have no difficulty in recognizing myself in that vibration as much as I recognized myself in basic emotions. This recognition is produced through the emotion-intellection of ananda: the ananda absorbs my other identities, which disappear into it like salt in water. And not even such an answer satisfies the longing that energizes the question, the spontaneity of its flow in my experience. There is something other than the most sublime emotion of ananda that throbs in my question.

    Who am I? No other living being asks this question, nor do the gods. The gods have answers: "I am who I am" - that is- "I am the I am", my identity is being, but that answer, although it clarifies things and breaths ineffable charms, is not enough for me. The verb "to be" points out to a mystery, and yet there is nothing more obvious, more common, more here.

    I ask the question again without allowing it to become a mantra as if it were the first time it has been asked: who am I? Only silence responds. A full and superabundant silence, pregnant with the unthinkable.