Yoga – The Truth of Who You Are
When one is on his spiritual journey, he realizes at some point that he is far away from the truth, and comes to the understanding that he cannot answer the question “Who am I?” Such a wonderful and simple question yet without a simple answer to it. One can live his whole life without addressing this philosophical inquiry, and becomes so occupied with so many life events without ever wondering about it. Even more so, he lives his life from a state of mind that is unaware of the truth of the real self. The true, genuine, authentic ‘I’.
There are a few ways in which we become accustomed to not thinking about the source of our behavior. There are a few psychos –physic-conditioning that is rooted deep inside us and they cause us to overlook the reality as what it is and cause us to function from a false self without being aware. Unfortunately we identify with the false self and therefore we miss the inner most sacred essence of our being.
A common act in our daily routine is to identify ourselves with our possessions, our status in society. We approach life as if we are the clothes that we wear, the house that we live in, the cars that we drive. We judge ourselves and others according to what we have and we make conclusions about one’s life depending on the price of his t-shirt, the amount of money he has in his bank account or the type of cell phone he uses. This is a very limited prism on reality, like lenses that only see the dollar sign. It is ridiculous but very common in our age. We see this demonstrated throughout the media, which constantly ranks people by this external dimension and encourages a very deep conditioning that leads people to the illusion that the “I” is merely a pile of possessions that belong to them. However it does not stop at this superficial level. It might be identification with our school or college, the people that we hang out with or our partner. All of these are external to us and not connected to our true essence. Despite our possessions, our friends or the groups and places we feel we belong to, we remain the same inside.
Another identification which is very common is the identification with our own body. We are attached to our body, thinking and acting as if it defines us and we put so much effort into looking like a certain image we desire or how we think others want us to look. It is so common to see people starving themselves just to appear according to the unrealistic fashion standards. Eating disorders have become an epidemic in our society. Many people find jobs or work out in the gym just to shape and perfect their bodies. It is a deep obsession because we mistake and think that the body is who we are and that the way that we look like is connected to our being. This issue doesn’t stop with the superficial level; on the contrary, the obsession with appearance continues into the spiritual realm of life. Manyyoga practitioners are occupied by the level of their flexibility and the appearance of their asanas. So many posts and profile pictures on Facebook show “yogis” performing advanced asanas, as if their body symbolizes their whole being and spiritual state. But we know that the body is only a vehicle, a physical space for the supreme soul. It is an unfortunate mistake to narrow ourselves to this limited dimension.
The last identification I want to deal with, which is the deepest one, is the identification with our personality. Our personality is a combination of our thoughts, emotion and beliefs. The way that we think, feel, speak and act gives us some definition of a self, which we call our personality. We may define ourselves as right or left wing followers, religious or secular, kind or cheap, logical or emotional and so on. But if we look closer, we can certainly observe that each one of those definitions is actually a mask that we wear, and this demonstrates how frequently we change the masks. In our short life we play hundreds of roles; according to the situation, environment and circumstances, we change our costume. Even more so, the word persona in Latin means a ‘mask’- just as the body is only our vehicle, the personality is only our mask, costume, outfit. It is a tricky concept because we do need to have some anchor to our being and we find it in our ego. This happens even in the spiritual world when we define ourselves as enlightened or not enlightened. We want to be acknowledged and respected, we want to be important and significant, and therefore we attach ourselves to some identification that appears to us as an attractive option.
By doing this, we lose the endless divinity inside of us.
None of these identifications are the truth; therefore when we identify ourselves with one of them, our actions, our speech and our emotion will be driven from a false self. Our thought itself will be an illusion.
The path of yoga and meditation is to strip all these layers of illusion that causes our false identity of ourselves. To reveal what is already inside of us as the shining truth. The only “problem” is that the truth is unspeakable, indefinable and most importantly, the truth can only be experienced. No one can tell you the truth; no one can tell you who are you. This is an experience hidden within every individual and when it is experienced, it is realized as the stable anchor that is always there. The truth, the self, is our unlimited consciousness. It is infinite. It is the divinity within us.
Vagabond Temple Cambodia Advanced Yoga and Meditation Retreat in Sihanoukville, Cambodia
