Finding Yourself in Transition
The Quest for Wholeness
Birthing a Greater Reality
First Edition 2010
Copyright © 2010 by Robert Brumet. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from Unity Books except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews or in the newsletters and lesson plans of licensed Unity teachers and ministers. For information, write to Unity Books, 1901 NW Blue Parkway, Unity Village, MO 64065-0001.
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Bible quotations are from the New Revised Standard version unless otherwise noted.
Cover design: Jenny Hahn, cover painting Innerverse ©2010 Jenny Hahn. www.jenspaintings.com
Interior design: The Covington Group, Kansas City, Missouri
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010933801
ISBN: 978-0-87159-347-4
ISBN: 9780871597922
Canada BN 13252 0933 RT
To my dear friend,
Nancy Hiscoe Clark:
Wherever you may be
in
God’s Grand Universe
I am indebted to my many teachers who have—directly or indirectly—been influential in the creation of this book. I honor each of them: Ken Wilber, Hameed Ali, Rodney Smith, Jack Kornfield, Andrew Cohen and many others too numerous to name.
I deeply appreciate the love and support I have received from friends and family members who have given me guidance and encouragement during the long process of writing this book. I particularly want to thank Shellie Bassett, Michael Maday and Leonard Scotto for their diligent research and constructive feedback, all of which was essential for this work to be what it is.
Prologue by Michael A. Maday
Introduction
1. A Brief History of You
2. Evolutionary Trail Markers
3. A Case of Mistaken Identity
4. Embracing Our Wholeness
5. Waking Up
6. Birthing a Greater Reality
Epilogue
Permissions
Endnotes
About the Author
I’ve known Robert coming on 20 years. He first became my tennis partner, then my friend. Soon he was to become my author as I worked with him through his first two books, Finding Yourself in Transition and The Quest for Wholeness, as his editor. Now I have found myself doing that again with this work.
I’ve also gotten to know Robert as a masterful teacher, having volunteered to sit in on many of his classes over at Unity Institute. I enjoyed how skillfully he would introduce and explore psychological themes along with the pastoral principles he was charged to teach. I give him full credit for raising the psychological awareness of an entire generation of Unity ministers! I saw him present integral philosopher Ken Wilber’s No Boundary, a book and a class that challenged everyone, and certainly pushed the envelope of Unity’s teachings. It was exciting to be part of it, and I have even been privileged to substitute teach for him on more than a few occasions.
In essence, what Wilber says is that there is a spectrum of consciousness that can be seen as a kind of map, and that like any good map, it can be used to help us locate where we are, and help us find where we are going. Practical as that sounds, it is also brilliant because it carefully addresses those perennial philosophical questions: Who am I? Where am I going? These basic questions are so often overlooked in our spiritual teachings because we often assume we already know the answers. “I” am my ego/personality. Where I am going is usually answered by my religion. The traditional goal is to be going to heaven, thank you very much.
In Unity and New Thought circles, as well as in many others these days, “heaven” has ceased to be a location after death, but rather a state of mind here and now. In a real sense, our goal then has become to create heaven here on Earth, and a number of techniques are taught to accomplish that, including positive thinking, intentionality, affirmations and visualizations. Self-improvement and self-growth have become ends unto themselves. All this is fine, of course, but the journey seems endless, like we are the Israelites who fled Egypt in pursuit of the Promised Land only to find ourselves in a desert wilderness. Aside from mirages that disappear as we enter them, there is no end in sight. In this wilderness, the perennial question re-emerges: I am getting healthier, I am growing, yes, but still where am I going?
Robert and I have often discussed the idea that spiritual teachings, including those of Unity and New Thought, are usually presented within a “flatland” perspective. This term is borrowed from the E. A. Abbot novel Flatland, in which a two-dimensional world is visited by a third dimensional being. In a world of only length and width, no one can imagine, let alone see “depth.” Yet depth is real. Similarly when we only perceive our growth in a horizontal plane, without a vertical axis, we are severely limited in our perceptions. What is desperately needed is a vertical shift to our understanding.
Through Brumet’s earlier works, and through his teachings, he has addressed this need. In Finding Yourself in Transition he spoke to the evolutionary “cry” that calls us to go beyond our limits despite the very human desire to build fences and keep ourselves safe and secure. In The Quest for Wholeness, he introduced many ideas from Jungian and transpersonal psychology to help us understand that there is more to us than just our personality and ego, and the divinity we tend to call “the Christ” or “the God Self.” He spoke to the dark side of our lives and the need for us to integrate it. Without traveling through our darkness, feeling it, and releasing it, we cannot receive its power into our psyche. Without it, we cannot know our wholeness, and without that, our divinity.
Now in this new book, Brumet has more fully developed his map of consciousness, revealing to us the depth as well as the length and width of our journey. He speaks much more to the evolutionary cry that has most of us under its spell, whether we call it that or even think of it in those terms. The importance of this map can hardly be exaggerated.
Life is confusing. This brings to mind the ancient Chinese curse of “May you live in interesting times!” A while ago the United States of America elected its first African-American president under a wave of optimism and hope that had to be experienced to be believed. It was a call for change, and many could feel its evolutionary underpinning. Yet what happened next is that this optimism and hope quickly changed to pessimism and disappointment. Without arguing the specific issues, what is going on?
In developmental terms, change takes place in two major ways: translation and transformation. The flatland perspective conflates the two, and treats them as just one force, the popular term “transformation.” Once again, I will rely on Ken Wilber’s understanding. Translation is what happens when we have a powerful experience and some penetrating insights but then essentially go back to living our lives the way we were. We say we are changed, but, in practice, we cling to our habitual comforts and adapt, and return to what we know. In true transformation, however, our lives are altered, like the butterfly out of the chrysalis, and we can no longer live as the caterpillar.
Translation has its role to play. It tests ego boundaries, and it challenges us to a degree, much like a good Sunday lesson can cause us to reflect on our lives. Yet true transformation causes the death of the ego, or of an aspect of ego, and is, I’m sure, what Paul had in mind when he spoke of following Jesus by “dying daily.” What constitutes this “ego,” this sense of self-identity, is who we think we are and it does not surrender easily, leaving a lot of what we call transformation, in reality, mere translation. When we do transform, we evolve, and we are dealing with a true alchemy, not merely shifting surfaces. We are becoming new people, not just changing our clothes.
None of this happens quickly. We have become so accustomed to change being instantaneous that when it takes its time, and is part of a larger process, we become confused and disoriented. We need a larger view, a bigger map, as well as patience and perseverance. The issues that confound us and touch our deepest feelings, including our anger and fear, are actually part of the developmental process.
I’m reminded here of Teilhard de Chardin’s description of how new species are born in nature. Pressure builds up in a phylum—a life system—until a point is reached where a new peduncle—a new life form—bursts forth as a new bud of a whole new phylum; or the pressure subsides and the system regresses back into itself, stabilizes, and remains the same, at least for the moment. Yet the urge to grow, to create, to move upwards in evolution, will eventually cause the system to try again at a later point.
The pressure is on, and we all feel it. Robert Brumet’s book is superbly timed to give us the necessary perspective to see our challenge and our opportunity. The change we can believe in is our own evolutionary journey. Pregnancy is rarely easy, and yet, here we are about to give birth to a greater reality.
Michael Maday
Michael A. Maday is an ordained Unity minister, adjunct faculty at Unity Institute and Seminary, and former editor of Unity Books. Michael has a master’s in transformational psychology.
About 100,000 years ago a gradual, but very powerful, shift was occurring on our planet. For the first time since the origin of life on earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, the leading edge of evolution shifted from biological evolution to the evolution of consciousness. Since that time we have changed very little physically, but look how far, and how fast, we have come in just 100,000 years. (This is a long time for us, but it’s only three-thousandths of one percent of the history of life on earth.) Evolution has shifted into high gear!1
About 200 years ago another profound shift occurred. At that time a few individuals began to see that we are now responsible for our own evolution. We are becoming evolution itself. As we personally evolve in consciousness, we are advancing the evolution of all life on earth!
Right now we are at another critical point in human history and in the evolution of consciousness; the choices that we make in the near future are crucial. This is so not only because of the mind-rattling events and changes that have occurred in recent decades—along with the unprecedented dangers precipitated by some of them—but also because it seems that, like never before, the time is ripe for a quantum leap in conscious evolution.
We are living in a new era, an era not defined by the calendar or even by world events, but by an incipient transformation of consciousness that now rests upon the horizon of our vision. Many are aware of this, but cannot name it. Such awareness can cause excitement, anticipation, anxiety or dread, depending on the readiness of the psyche to acknowledge it. For many, this awareness is a clarion call to awakening. For some, it is a call to action.
The most important choice facing us today is the willingness to do the work of transforming consciousness—beginning with ourselves. This last phrase marks the most difficult part. Many may be ready for someone else’s consciousness to be transformed, and we may have been waiting for a long time! But it just doesn’t seem to work that way. We can begin only with ourselves.
We begin this work by recognizing the illusions that keep us asleep and addicted to conflict and suffering. Indeed, conflict and suffering are symptoms of our illusions. Just as we check for fever to see if the body is ill, we look at the rough edges of our life to discover our illusions.
To be transformed we must be willing to do the vital work of personal healing and awakening—both within ourselves and within our personal relationships. Suffering is often catalyzed by others. By their presence or by their absence, they rub against the raw spots of our psyche, making us aware of our need for healing. Focusing on the faults of another is a common way of avoiding a look at our own unhealed wounds. Our personal healing depends upon this willingness to look at and compassionately accept what is there.
As we do this transformative work, both personally and inter-personally, we set the stage for global transformation—even if we aren’t trying to do so. A fascinating, and perhaps inexplicable, relationship exists between personal and global transformation; perhaps they are two sides of the same coin. As soon as we begin the work of personal transformation, we are already engaging in global transformation. We are all related in profound and mysterious ways.
We use birthing as a metaphor for this process of transformation because it parallels that process in so many ways. A natural process, birthing cannot be controlled or dictated by human will; it has a life cycle and timetable of its own. Yet it requires human preparation and cooperation or else great suffering can result. Birthing is almost always painful, but our degree of understanding and our cooperation with this process can minimize that pain. Birthing is typically a joyous process; it normally results in a brand-new life—a life that is not ours, yet is very much a part of ourselves. And, there is always the possible misfortune of miscarriage or stillbirth; not all transformations are successfully completed.
All the same, evolution is on our side; it is the river in which our lives flow. The river moves us whether we like it or not, but we can no longer drift mindlessly. We are at the point where we must evolve consciously. Yes, we still go with the flow, but we now influence the course of that flow.
Evolution no longer occurs entirely unconscious of itself. We must now understand this process—and even more, we must become the process. It is time for us to become conscious evolutionaries and bring forth the needed global transformation. We are pioneers blazing the trail that will be followed by generations to come.
This book has three general parts. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the big picture of who we are and of our history. We start from the very beginning of time and come up to the present moment as we look at who we are, why we are here, and what choices lie before us at this point in our evolutionary journey. We look at a few frameworks for evolutionary theory in order to determine both the direction and the crucial factors embedded in the evolutionary process.
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 parallel this approach, but here we focus on the personal level. Who am I, and why am I here? We unconsciously develop answers to those questions before we are aware of asking them. To transform, we must explore these answers and reconsider them at the deepest level of our identity.
Chapter 6 is where we integrate our understanding of global evolution with the wisdom derived from personal transformation. We then have a blueprint for that which is ours to do. As we align our heart’s deepest desire with the direction of evolution, we become God’s hands and feet in this evolving universe of form.
Before the beginning of time, the One rested in Omnipotence, for there was nothing impossible for Her. Then She rested in Omnipresence, for She had no limitations whatever. She began to rest in Omniscience; for it seemed there was nothing She did not know … but the One developed a strange uneasiness: “If there is nothing I cannot do, then I cannot know what it means to be powerless. If I have no limitations, then I cannot know what it means to be limited. Therefore, there is something that I do not know! How can I be omniscient?
“How can I truly know power,” She pondered, “if I cannot experience powerlessness? How can I truly know limitlessness, if I have never experienced limitation? How can I understand darkness, if I am nothing but light? How can I know anything, if I have never experienced its opposite?” These questions haunted Her for a long time, or would have if time had been invented yet!
But the One, being truly omniscient, found a solution to this dilemma: “There is a way I can experience opposites simultaneously. I can be Omnipresent and limited at the same time. I can be Omnipotent and powerless at the same time. Only then will I truly know power and love and light!
“I will dream that I am powerless. I will dream that I am limited. In my dream, I will experience all kinds of pain and limitation. As I awaken, the memory of this dream will teach me the ultimate nature of love and power and wisdom. For without illusion, I cannot fully understand the nature of reality.”
And so the One said, “Let there be Light … and there was a Big Bang … and there was time and space and matter … and the dream began.
Now it was no small feat to create this universe. It had to be ordered and balanced with incredible precision. For instance, if the energy of the Big Bang had been too strong, matter would have scattered too far apart and the universe would have eventually disintegrated; but if that same energy had been too weak, the universe would have soon collapsed upon itself. If electromagnetic forces were too strong, then stars would collapse upon themselves before matter could evolve far enough to support life; but if electromagnetic forces were too weak, these same stars would be incapable of having planets. If the universal strong force was too weak, no complex organic molecules could form and thus physical life would not be possible; but if that strong force were too strong, then nothing beyond helium would have formed and life would not be possible. And … well, you get the picture … let’s just say that it wasn’t easy!
The Big Bang occurred nearly 14 billion years ago. And about 10 billion years after this Big Bang, you—the living soul of humanity—were born into physical form.
You were born on a small planet circling a fairly average star located somewhere near the edge of a spiral galaxy. There were more than 100 billion such stars in this galaxy and over 100 billion such galaxies in the universe at that time. This planet, now named Earth, formed more than 4 billion years ago; but it was less than a billion years old upon your arrival.
Your beginnings were indeed humble: A few protein molecules decided to get together and to make something of themselves … and voilà, you were born! For more than 2 billion years you were just a single-celled creature. But then you discovered sex and things really took off! Just a billion years later you developed a backbone, and only 300 million years after that you were feeding milk to your babies.
About 2 million years ago you found yourself in your present form: a hairless primate that learned to walk upright. You learned to use tools, and eventually, speech. About 200,000 years ago you became Homo sapiens: wise man. Then in the blink of a cosmic eye, you were walking on the moon! You have learned language and music and science and poetry and many wonderful things; but more important, you are beginning to discover yourself.
About 100,000 years ago you became Homo sapiens sapiens; not just wise man, but wise, wise man. You began to understand that you understand. You became aware that you were aware. You began to discover your own wisdom and power and beauty. And now you are starting to discover what you really are. You are beginning to awaken from the dream.
Your long birth has been chronicled in many of your myths and legends. One that may be familiar to you is the one where you were named Adam, and you lived in a paradisiacal reality with your partner Eve. According to this story, you were expelled from this paradise for disobedience—and so it seems that you did disobey the Lord. But there is another, more important reason why you needed to leave: You grew up.
Your disobedience was not a sign of moral ineptitude, but rather a sign that you were no longer a creature—you were ready to become a co-creator. One might say that you graduated from the Garden of Eden. And upon graduation, it was time to find a job. And so you began to “toil all the days of your life” and to “earn your bread by the sweat of your brow” (Gen. 3:18-19). The early days of co-creation were not that easy!
Your partner Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, not only because it was “good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes,” but also because the fruit was “to be desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6). And when you ate of it “the eyes of both of them were opened” (Gen. 3:7). And the Lord said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22).
You then discovered the purpose of your creation in flesh: to know both good and evil, right and wrong, pleasure and pain. By experiencing the polarities of life in this dream-universe, you began to discover why you are here: to be the eyes and the ears, the hands and the feet of the One.
As the eyes and ears of the One, you are destined to awaken within the dream. You are destined to know yourself as a limited, temporal human being living in a physical universe, and simultaneously, to know yourself as unlimited, existing beyond time and space, ever-present and eternal. As the hands and feet of the One, you are destined to be a co-creator of the universe—this universe of time, space and form.
You, in essence, are the One dreaming that she is you as an individualized personality. And by remembering who you truly are in the midst of the polarities and limitations of this dreamworld, you are fulfilling the purpose of your life on this planet.
About 500 years ago a young Italian named Giovanni Pico della Mirandola delivered a brilliant oration to a convention of scholars wherein he spoke as The One spoke to Adam at the time of his creation:
Neither an established place, nor a form belonging to you alone, nor any special function have We given to you, O Adam, and for this reason, that you may have and possess, according to your desire and judgment, whatever place, whatever form, and whatever functions you shall desire. The nature of other creatures, which has been determined, is confined within the bounds prescribed by Us. You, who are confined by no limits, shall determine for yourself your own nature, in accordance with your own free will, in whose hand I have placed you. I have set you at the center of the world, so that from there you may more easily survey whatever is in the world. We have made you neither earthly nor heavenly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, more freely and more honorably the molder and maker of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever form you shall prefer. You shall be able to descend among the lower forms of being, which are brute beasts; you shall be able to be reborn out of the judgment of your own soul into the higher beings, which are divine.1
According to most theories of evolution, we have chosen to descend among the lower forms of being, to become the brute beast, and then to be reborn into a higher form of being. The theme of evolution may be seen as that of continuous birthing into a greater reality.
At this point in our evolution, we humans find ourselves “halfway between the beasts and the angels,” disguised as Homo sapiens sapiens. We have exhibited both the best and the worst of each, as human history has shown us. We have soared much higher than the angels, and we have behaved much lower than the beasts.
Humans have climbed to magnificent heights in many arenas. The past century has seen achievements that would be totally unimaginable in the century preceding it. Through genetic engineering we can replicate and control life forms; with artificial intelligence we have created devices that surpass human thinking capabilities; through organ transplants and other miracles of medical science we can prolong human life by many years. In 1903 the first airplane soared to an altitude of 10 feet. Just 66 years later we landed on the moon: altitude 238,857 miles.
In the social arena we have made breakthroughs never before possible: In the United States, 150 years after African slaves were owned as property and treated like farm animals, a man of African descent is elected as president. He was competing for the position with a woman, whom nine decades earlier would not have been permitted to vote in a presidential election.
We have soared to great heights. But in many ways we have descended much lower than the beasts. In the past century more than 100 million people have been killed by war and genocide. (This is equal to the population of the entire planet at the time of Socrates.) In the last decade of this same century, over 100 million children have died from starvation or malnutrition. Those deaths could have been prevented for what the world’s nations spend on their military every 48 hours.
At the start of the 21st century, we find ourselves at a crucial juncture in this human experience. Having acquired powers undreamed of by our ancestors, we seem in many ways godlike. But we have not evolved the wisdom needed to broker these powers. In this regard we have become more like the beasts than the angels. This is a very dangerous circumstance; we are like a small child with a loaded gun.
For the first 99.99 percent of humanity’s time on earth, the greatest threat to existence came from the vagaries of nature: wild animals, microbes, parasites, climactic changes and natural disasters. But today the greatest threat to human existence is humanity itself. Of the many possible scenarios for our collective demise, most are the result of human behavior. If the human species were to become extinct, the most likely culprit would be ourselves. We have met humanity’s greatest enemy—and they are us. This statement is true for no species other than ours. It is the greatest of paradoxes that the presumably most intelligent species on this planet is also the most self-destructive.
Our development has become dangerously one-sided. We have achieved an astounding degree of knowledge of the material world, and we remain appallingly ignorant of ourselves. We have overdeveloped knowledge and underdeveloped wisdom. This lopsided development has forced us into a position where we must become more balanced or we may perish as a species.
The answer does not lie in negating the progress we have achieved and returning to some idealized primitive past. The problem lies not in knowledge, or technology, or in the material world itself. The problem lies in the tremendous imbalance and the lack of integration between our inner and our outer worlds. We have failed to parallel our rampant external development with a corresponding growth in self-awareness. We have created external wealth and internal poverty.
Because of this internal poverty, we have developed a culture that attempts to fill its inner emptiness with material possessions, with pleasure, with entertainment and social status. We have developed a lifestyle that uses both people and Earth’s resources to fill our inner emptiness. We have become a highly addictive culture. This has led to rampant consumerism and to near depletion of many of our planets resources.
Paralleling our lagging wisdom is our lagging compassion. Our blindness to the deeper aspects of ourselves is reflected in our blindness to much of humanity. The state of humankind is always a reflection of the collective human psyche. This blindness has lead to huge disparities in the distribution of wealth, education, power and privilege: The richest 1 percent of the world’s population owns 40 percent of the world’s wealth; while the poorest half of the world’s population—about 3.5 billion human beings—owns barely 1 percent of the world’s wealth.
In many ways it would seem that the dream of the One has become a nightmare. And what is the solution to a nightmare? We may wish to change the bad dream into a happy one, but a more direct and permanent solution is to simply wake up. Yet something is keeping us asleep. What is it that keeps us in this slumber? Discovering the answer to this question can help us to awaken.
In the biblical story of creation, Adam falls into a deep slumber. Nowhere in this story, nor anywhere else in the Bible, does it say that Adam awakened. It is not mentioned because it has not happened. Adam remains asleep.
Adam’s slumber is the major cause of our crisis. The crisis before us is not a political or economic or even psychological crisis, it is a spiritual crisis. The vast majority of us do not know who or what we truly are, and this ignorance may destroy us. Waking up has become an evolutionary necessity. It is no longer optional. So let’s look at what keeps us asleep.
Every biological species has evolved a certain strategy for survival. Some animals have claws, sharp teeth, hard shells, horns, fur, camouflage, and so on, as survival weapons and tools. For many species, certain instinctive behaviors are strategies for survival; hunting, foraging, migrating, hibernating, burrowing or climbing trees are examples.
When we look at the human body, we see very little that would insure our survival in the wild. Our body lacks claws, fur or protective armor; almost any animal can outrun us, and we have relatively few survival instincts. Without restaurants and grocery stores, most of us would starve to death! Completely helpless at birth, we remain in need of parental protection and care for many years; much longer than any other species. Amazingly, ours is the dominant species on this planet!
We are the dominant species for one reason alone: Rather than adapting to the natural world solely through biological evolution, we have evolved a brain that gives us the ability to create internal representations of the outer world. We are able to create an internal virtual world. And we have developed the ability to manipulate our inner worlds in very creative ways.
We are able to create a hypothetical reality: a “what if” world. We have learned to become like gods in this hypothetical inner world. In our minds we can take things apart and put them back together in some very ingenious ways. We have learned to reproduce our internal creations externally. We can manipulate our world in ways unavailable to other species because we have an internal universe wherein we have become a god. And we are then able to fashion our outer world to replicate our inner world. Rather than evolving claws and sharp teeth, we have developed powerful weapons and tools. Instead of migrating south, or growing fur, we create warm clothing and comfortable heated dwellings.
Our internal virtual reality is more adaptable to change than any physical body. We can change our internal maps and strategies much more quickly than it takes an animal to evolve biological changes. When environmental conditions change, we can readily adapt our tools and dwellings and clothing to the new environment, as opposed to going extinct or spending 50 million years evolving a new physical form. (What a drag that would be!) With this brain and its ability to create virtual realities, we have developed speech and written communication that allow us to pass these survival strategies on to subsequent generations much faster than is possible via biological evolution. We have created cultures, wherein vital knowledge is passed on to later generations, who may then improve upon these strategies. As individuals, we both inherit and influence our cultural knowledge. Perhaps we may play a part in its evolution.
Nothing I’ve said so far sounds like bad news—and it isn’t. Our survival strategy is actually an evolutionary stroke of genius. The problem is that the human mind, an evolutionary tool designed to help us survive, is no longer our servant; it has become our master.
We have become identified with this mind; we think it is who we really are. Thus, we have not recognized its limitations, and we are attempting to use this wonderful tool for purposes beyond which it has evolved.
The One is awakening within the world of form. She is gradually awakening from the dream. But the primary tool that we have evolved in order to physically survive is being used to keep us asleep. Human thought has done an amazing job of helping us to survive, but it cannot wake us up. It cannot go beyond itself.
Yet we don’t know what else to use, and we are afraid to abandon it because it has been our lifeline for hundreds of millennia. Evolution is calling us to awaken to a greater reality, but our mistaken attachment to our familiar survival tool is inhibiting that awakening.
We have said earlier that the crisis before us is a spiritual crisis: The vast majority of human beings do not know who or what we truly are. And this ignorance may destroy us. Let’s explore this further.
Imagine that you are sitting at home when an uninvited stranger walks into the room. You inquire, “Excuse me, sir, but who are you?” He replies, “I don’t know.” Puzzled, you ask, “Where are you going?” “I don’t know.” “Well, where did you come from?” “I don’t know.” At this point you might consider calling the police or an ambulance because obviously this man needs help.
This fictional man is a symbol for virtually every one of us. If every human being on Earth were asked these questions, most of us would—if we were deeply honest—answer exactly the same way. But, paradoxically, this man is actually better off than most of us because he knows that he does not know who he is. Most of us don’t know that. We already think that we know who we are.
We are like an Academy Award-winning actor who has developed a case of amnesia. We know our lines perfectly; we perform our role exquisitely. But we’ve forgotten who the actor is. What’s more, we have forgotten that we have forgotten! We have become totally identified with our role and our script; we believe that it is reality.
In humanity’s early days, we were identified with the body; but more recently, we have become identified primarily with the mind. Because we do not know who we are, we have identified with our survival strategies. If we were to let go of this habituated identification, we would feel like a turtle without its shell, or a tiger without its teeth or claws. Our primary survival tool would appear to vanish. This is frightening indeed.