Many of us harbor deep-seated negative ideas about ourselves that nothing we accomplish out in the world seems to shake.  No matter how much money we make or possessions we accumulate, how many degrees we earn, or how ideal our lives look on the outside, we’re plagued by the nagging suspicion that something is wrong with us.  In fact, what we do in the world often feels like an effort to disguise what we really are—“worthless,” “losers,” “disgusting,” and so on—and we worry that some day our true natures will be “exposed” for all to see.

What we don’t usually consider is who we’re talking about when we think something like “I am worthless.”  In other words, what do we really mean by “I”?  I’ve found that regularly asking myself this question has done much to give me a sense of peace and composure, and quiet my negative thinking.

To many people, this will seem like an absurd or meaningless question.  “’I’ obviously means ‘me,’” you may be thinking.  “What’s unclear about that?”  But if you probe a little deeper, I think you’ll see that the answer isn’t quite that obvious. 

To illustrate, see if you can physically pinpoint who you’re talking about when you say “I.”  Take your finger and point to what you mean by “I” when you have a thought like “I’m incompetent” or “I’m not good enough.”  The people I’ve done this exercise with tend to point at their chests, or perhaps their heads.  (This is based on an exercise described by spiritual teacher Richard Moss in The Mandala of Being.)

If you, like most people, pointed at part of your body, let’s take a closer look at whether you actually have your body in mind when you say “I.”  Try raising your arm and putting it back down.  Notice that, when you did this, you had the experience of causing your arm to move.  You may even have had a thought like “I am moving my arm.”  You didn’t have the thought “I am moving myself”—in your experience, you were moving something outside of yourself.

In other words, you experienced yourself as the controller of your arm’s movements.  And if you’re in control of your arm, you must be separate from it—just as the driver of a car is in control of the car but separate from it.  You are not your body—you are in control of it, in the driver’s seat.  You can also grasp this point if you imagine how you would think and feel if you lost your arm.  Even if your arm were gone, you would still think of yourself as “I.”  You wouldn’t think of the lost arm as “I.”

But even the idea that you are the “driver” of your body doesn’t completely express the truth.  After all, there are functions of your body, like breathing and circulation, that you don’t have the experience of controlling at all.  So really, you are not in full control of your body—you are something with partial responsibility for your body’s activities, and something else takes care of the rest.

Some people, as I said, point to their heads when doing this exercise, and say that they are their brains, or at least some part of them.  However, this idea doesn’t fit with our experience either.  The brain, as we know, is an incredibly complex organ, with more than 100 billion neurons that constantly interact through the exchange of chemicals called neurotransmitters.  But these things don’t come to mind when we say “I.”  For example, when we say something to ourselves like “I can’t do anything right,” we don’t mean that our neurons or brain chemicals are incompetent.

The truth is that it’s very hard to pinpoint what we mean when we say “I”—most of us, myself included, can’t do it in a satisfying way at all.  At first, this uncertainty about what we really are seems frustrating.  But when we hold our attention on the uncertainty—when we allow the fact that we don’t know what we are to simply be—we start to feel inexplicably calm.  It’s actually comforting, I think you’ll discover, to accept that you don’t know who and what you really are.  Personally, when I allow this uncertainty to be without judging it or forcing it away, I sigh or laugh with relief.

Accepting this uncertainty leads us to peace because it helps us see how ridiculous the things we think about ourselves are.  We have all these negative beliefs like “I’m not smart enough,” “I don’t relate well with people,” and so on, but we don’t even know who we’re talking about when we say “I.”  To really get how meaningless and comical this is, try making up a nonsense word, and then making some negative statements about that word.

For instance, you might try saying something like “Grum is a loser,” or “Grum is worthless.”  This statement is, of course, laughable, because in saying it you’re putting “Grum” down without even knowing what he, she or it is.  And if this statement is absurd, the beliefs “I am worthless,” “I am a loser” and so on are equally so, because you are just as unaware of what “I” really means.  In short, you have no business calling yourself names when you don’t even know who or what you are.

I’ve found that holding my lack of knowledge of who I am in my awareness gives life a sense of freshness and adventure.  The possibilities open to me no longer seem so limited by negative beliefs.  When I keep in mind that I don’t know who I am, those beliefs can have no power over me.  In some ways, it’s as if I’m a child again, full of curiosity and wonder at the world and unrestricted by harmful ideas about what I can’t and shouldn’t do.  As Lao-Tzu wisely put it, “to know that you do not know is best.”

In The Intuitive Way: The Definitive Guide To Increasing Your Awareness, Penney Pierce aptly describes the sense of freedom and awe that comes from being willing to accept how little we know about ourselves and the world:

Truly successful students possess a natural “beginner’s mind” and can temporarily suspend what they know to listen, act, receive, and process new data with childlike innocence and directness. With a beginner’s mind you will not be threatened by not knowing or by having personal experiences that vary from the norm. You’ll feel fresh and sincere. You’ll trust yourself, trust the process of learning, and trust that whatever you need next will be revealed in a way you can understand.

The next time you start beating yourself up, I invite you to see if you can return to this calm, receptive state of “beginner’s mind.”  Simply ask yourself “who is this ‘I’ that I am being negative about?”  Who is the “I” that is supposedly bad, unattractive, unsuccessful, and so on?  Notice, and cherish, the blankness and emptiness that come up in response to this question.  Regularly bringing this question into your awareness can gift you with a deep sense of peace and freedom.

(This article appeared in the Carnival of Positive Thinking, located at http://www.widowsquest.com/carnival-of-positive-thinking-62/.)

Related posts:

1. Who Were You Before Your Identity?
2. Why I Don’t Force Myself To Be Happy
3. Going On A Mental Diet
4. Switching Off The “Mental Radio”
5. Entering The “Inner Body” To Quiet Painful Memories