I Am

I am not the body
I am not the emotion
I am not the thought
I Am

How can you say "I am not the body?" After all, each time you cut yourself you find how real this body is to you. In the same way, each time you have amazing sex you realize how this body gets you in a state of ecstasy. So how can you say that you are not your body?

And how can you say that we are not our emotion? Is not true that we sometimes on a roller coaster, such as when our partner suddenly calls it quit because he found someone younger and more attractive? Or experiencing the sheer joy of seeing our baby for the first time, or finally getting that promotion that we have always dreamt of? And what about that emotional pain when a loved one passes away? How can you say you are not your emotion?

Or take our thoughts instead. We hear endless commentary in our head from the moments we get up to late at night when we finally fall asleep. All the impressions we receive in the day get evaluated, we acknowledge and interpret our feelings and emotions and we plan ahead or conjecture other people's intention. How can you say that you are not the voice in your head?

Let's start with the body. It is a delicate machine that has its own wisdom and reactions to the different stimulus it receives. A body is born, will die and certainly can get quite sick. If we don't take good care of it, our body will crumble over time. Or if we have diseases that somehow seem to be beyond our conscious control (like cancer that runs in our family and some day is just programmed to strike) our body may whither away. Lastly, aging alters our body functions and often reduces it. In essence, our body has often its own rhythm and rules.

Similarly, our emotions can have a life of their own and certainly experience their ups and downs. We read self-help books how to put ourselves into a positive frame of mind but then events happen that are seemingly beyond our control and we are sent on an emotional roller-coaster that takes a while to get under control. If we live our life with a stoic philosophical mindset, so somehow we want to convince ourselves that we are not our emotions, all we will do is to repress them. But we can certainly monitor our emotional state and in some ways even manage to consciously put ourselves in a more positive frame of mind; but it is a fine balance. In the end we always have to be in tune with our emotions in the same way, as we have to learn to listen to our body.

We have a very similar experience with our thoughts as well. We think "we" are in charge, but then, after a bad night's sleep or a nasty cold, we find out how cranky we can become. But we can monitor these strange mental exchanges that we have with ourselves. For example, we hear that voice that encourages us to go out and "live a little" only to find a stern voice afterwards that beats you up over our indulgence. The voice in our head can be on autopilot. A negative event triggers a negative emotion and our voice just takes off. What may have started as a small faux pas of an insensitive colleague ends up, after stewing over it for hours, as a big conspiracy theory how the entire department is out to get us fired!

All these examples tell us not who we are, but rather who we think and perceive we are.   All these happenings actually are the life energy flowing through us.  Hence they have a fleeting nature.  Perhaps we can think of ourselves as a sky with different cloud formations, or like a lake that at times can appear muddy and at times crystal clear.
So as you identify yourself with the clouds and not the sky, you will be carried away by the wind. Either you manage to do or you don't, but if you do pleasure as well as pain will come your way, exuberance as much as depression, and lust as much as fear. It is an art as well as a science to experience the sunny sky while the earth is getting drenched in rain, and it can be learned.

Most of our suffering comes from fear of losing or harm to our ego.  When we are struck with a life-threatening illness we are worried that “I" is going to disappear, and this notion makes us depressed. When we experience professional failure our image feels threatened, or we fear material losses when we think we loose our jobs. Why do all these fears occur? They come from a false sense of who you really are. Are you the clouds, are you the blue sky, or are you both? Buddhist monks have a practice of building sand castles just to remind themselves of the fleeting nature of the "I". If you build a sand castle you will probably not surprised to see that the rain has taken it down the next morning. How different your life would be if you could remember who you really are and experience your life energy flowing through in tune with your life's events. If you know that you are an eternal spirit, why would you ever be scared?

 It is the interplay between the events in our life, the reaction of our body (the brain chemicals, the hormones, the heart beat, the blood pressure, etc.) coupled with our interpretation of what it means and what to do about it. We can be mindful about many of these happenings. We can literally take a step above our body, our emotions and our thoughts.   With this distance we actually can figure out some rules about the interplay. Such as whenever we are hungry we get cranky and whenever that happens the voice in our head tells us to go out and beat up somebody over it. The solution sounds simple, just go and eat something and everyone will thank you for it. Yet, find out for yourself how many reactions and counter-reactions in your life are a simple interplay between your environment, your body, your emotions and your thoughts.

You may have seen the movies Avatar, or The Matrix, so perhaps you can picture a scene when your divine being is asked to experience a dream in which a body is mentally projected, emotions are generated in an interplay of virtual reality scenes and body chemicals and hormones, and how this interplay with other people creates the thoughts in your head as well as your own perception of identity. It feels very real but as you wake up you understand that these dimensions are simply not real from this new perspective. The point is that you can see as many movies describing this set-up as you like, or read as many books on spirituality claiming this fact, it will be always an academic discussion until the day when you glimpse that you really are not your body, emotions and your thoughts. In the meantime, all you can do is to observe. You are the consciousness behind all these phenomena. You are neither your body, nor your emotions or thoughts. You are "I Am"!

By Christian and Su Zhen