Who am I – the Ultimate Question🔗

There are many kinds of questions we ask in our lives. The first kind is out of innocence – we don't know the answer and we ask because we want to know. The second kind is out of knowledge. Here we know the answer but we ask to see if the other person is saying the same thing; we simply look for a concurrence. The third kind is out of ignorance. We don't even know if we want to know the answer, but we ask. This kind of question arises out of some deep dissatisfaction.

The question of the first kind is what a child would ask. The second kind is asked just to express your knowledge. The third kind simply expresses the deep confusion within.

People come to me and ask, 'Master, tell us about God. How do we get enlightened?' I simply talk to them about various things, about their family, etc. After an hour of conversation, they would not ask the question on God again. Be very clear: This only means that the question was just a casual one, not a deep one and not our own at that. Hence it simply disappears.

'Who am I?' is the ultimate question. Why? Because the moment you ask this, all other questions disappear and the questioning mind itself dissolves! Mind survives with the help of questions. As long as it survives, questions will arise. Questions themselves get provoked by progressive answers. The answers instead of quenching the questions, give rise to more of them.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna asks Krishna, 'What is Brahman? What is the science behind Jeevan Muktha, Adyatman etc.? What is it that makes the Jeevan Muktha react, age and respond to life?' Krishna tells him, 'If I ask you to repeat the question you have just asked, you will not be able to. It is not your own question. You have asked simply for the sake of asking.'

Most often, we just express our deep confusion in asking these kinds of questions. We keep asking, 'Why is this?' but forget to ask, 'Who am I?' Until you know that none of your questions is going to help and until you realize the source from which these questions arise, the questions will not stop. It is like this: If the source of the fountain is poisoned, the fountain will also be poisoned. If the source is pure, the fountain will also be pure. Unless you solve the source of the questions, the questions themselves will not be solved.

The smallest and greatest book that I have read is Ramana Maharishi's book titled 'Who am I?' The very question is beautiful. It puts a full stop to all other questions! It transforms all your questions to a quest and your urge to urgency.

There are two kinds of questions. The first kind leads to answers and the second kind leads you to experience. The first kind gives you more philosophies, more words and more confusion. The second kind dissolves all the questions and leads you to the ultimate Truth or Bliss in life.

If you are asked who you are, you will reply that you are the father of someone, or the mother of someone, or the wife of someone or the husband of someone. But, who are you, yourself? Sit alone in a room and ask 'Who am I?' You will then probably say that you are God or Atman or a spiritual being. But what is 'me'? Either you think that you are the body or you think that you are the soul. If you think based on your instinct, you say that you are the body; if you think based on your intellect, you think that you are the soul.

Actually, if you start contemplating deeply about the question ‘Who am I?’ you will slowly lose your very base, the base which you have built over many years with all the conditioning. Your whole life is built on pseudo-identities, pseudo-personalities. You continuously associate yourself with relationships like father, son etc. You play between different personalities. You simply cannot exist without social identities. Even spiritual practices and religion are taken up to boost your social identity. In front of your boss, you are very submissive and obedient. The next minute, when you turn to your subordinate, your whole body language changes. You simply switch identities!

Your life is nothing but a bridge between two unknown points - birth and death. You don’t know the secret of your birth; why you were born. You have no idea or clarity about it. Death is also unknown. With birth and death unknown, just the travel of life happens. Why is this? Because you live with pseudo-identities and you never question your real identity by asking, ‘who am I?’

You simply move on from one unknown to another, from one thought to another. If anyone asked Ramana Maharishi a question, he would simply ask them in return, ‘Who is the questioner asking this question?’ That’s all, the question will disappear! We know about others but do not know about ourselves, our own being.

We think we need to get a new car, and therefore work hard and buy a car. Barely a few days and the excitement of having gotten the car dies. What seems like a mountain before achieving becomes nothing after achieving it. People, relationships, career etc, seem indispensable before we achieve them, but after we achieve them, there is no excitement.

This is because, before achieving anything, you are a one personality and after achieving it, you are different one – your identity has changed! Your mental set-up keeps changing. Till you know who you are, the question ‘what you want’ will never be answered. And till the question ‘what you want’ is answered, you will never feel peace irrespective of what you achieve. You will achieve outer worldly comforts but no inner satisfaction. First you need to know ‘I’ and then only ‘What I want’. The greatest thing about a rat race is that even if you win, you are only a rat!

Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity through his formula E=mc². Through this he delivered one of the great truths of the last century. He is said to have told people, ‘The greatest truth has been given by me but my whole life has become a lie.’

When you don’t know what you want or don’t have the courage to go beyond what you want, you will only achieve and feel a deep sense of depression called ‘depression of success’. There are two kinds of depressions; they are ‘depression of failure’ and ‘depression of success’.

Depression of failure is alright because it gives you hope to stand up again and achieve success. Depression of success is not alright because you have achieved all that you want – name, fame, relationships and you now feel that what you achieved all this for, you have not achieved! You achieve the means but miss the goal that is the Bliss of life.

This shows that the entire life has been lived on a wrong philosophy, on castles in the air. People ask me, ‘Master, if we meditate or ask the question, ‘who am I’, will our dreams come true?’ I tell them, ‘Meditating or asking ‘who am I’ will not make your dreams a reality but will make you understand that reality is your dream!’

To realize the first – that is realizing dreams as a reality, you need just Shakthi, Energy or power. To realize the second, - that is realizing reality is your dream, you need Buddhi or intelligence. Meditation can give you deep intelligence to help you lead your life.

In life, we need to learn only the basic things. The question ‘Who am I’ will teach us these basic things – what we really need to know. This question is more than enough to start, move and end your life; to create, sustain and transform your life, to show you the path. Vivekananda says, ‘Until you inner intelligence is awakened, no book is going to help you. Once your intelligence is awakened, no book is necessary!’ Books are there to awaken your inner intelligence, your Master inside, your energy. Ramana’s booklet, ‘Who am I’ is a bookless book that can awaken your inner intelligence.

When you start asking ‘Who am I?’ you will start feeling that you are not the body. If you are able to stand away from your body and see it, you will realize that you are not the person being observed, but the person observing or seeing. Next, if you witness your thoughts, you can experience your mind objectively. You will be able to see it in a state of depression or joy. You will realize that you are not your mind since you are able to experience it objectively. Objective experience of emotion, body or intellect shows that you are not any of them.

If you search deeply, the answer to this question is nothing but the pure awareness of what you call Atman or Brahman or Shiva or Vishnu. Shiva is nothing but auspiciousness and Vishnu is nothing but that which fills the whole world. Here, your questions end and your being begins. Ramana says, ‘until the question dies, ask it.” There will be a space where there is neither the question nor the answer.

Let me tell you a small story from my own life.

As a young boy, I once overheard a Yogi saying to his disciples that he was only an Atman (Spirit) and had no body. I rushed back home curious to explore what I had just heard. I grabbed a blade and slit my right thigh to see if I experienced pain. Only excruciating pain and chiding followed. I went back to the Yogi demanding an explanation. At that time, his explanation was beyond the scope of my understanding. The incident however further strengthened my resolve in my spiritual quest.

To experiment with what you hear is perfectly alright even if you have understood it wrongly. But you must experiment. The Yogi told me to sit and observe where my thoughts were coming from. I played with this technique as a 10-year old boy. This was the technique that gave me my first glimpse of God!

On one Buddha Purnima day when I was 12, I sat and tried tracing the roots of my thoughts or in other words tracing ‘who am I’. Suddenly, something ruptured in my being and I became aware of the higher consciousness. We need to understand that we are not the experiencer or the experienced, but simply the experience. We will feel that we are the experiencer if we try to explain based on intellect. We will feel that we are the experienced if we approach from our instinct. But we need to understand that we are simply the ‘experience’.

Your being is nothing but the Experience! ‘Who am I’ is a basic question which can lead you to experience. It will start as a question and dissolve all other questions.

Someone asked me, ‘Master, what IS real!’ What Is, is real, not what you see. There is nothing to be done with the ‘IS’ness. There is something to be done with the person who sees it. When you feel at ease with ‘what IS’, you will see reality. When you are dis-eased with ‘what IS’, you will be diseased. If you start seeing without prejudice or judgment, you will see reality!