(2) Remembering The Nature Of “I”
The first realization is that the world you were taught to trust is not the full story. There is a knowing, even if you cannot yet name it, that something essential is missing. What follows is a search for a foundation of truth strong enough to hold when everything unessential falls away.
There is a reason spirituality is concerned with the question of self. If you do not know who you are, you will spend your life in the chase of seeking and building identities that cannot possibly hold the fullness of you. You will look for fulfillment in roles and achievements, always wondering why none of them deliver lasting satisfaction. You will look outward for validation, missing the truth that the one looking has never been lacking.The search for who you are is often what draws people into spiritual practice. But if the path is honest, the question itself will eventually deepen. You begin to realize that you were never just searching for who you are, but what you are—the unchanging ground beneath all that changes.
Spiritual seeking has a reputation for being endless. You go from one teaching to the next, one practice to the next. You learn to meditate. You learn to heal. You learn to observe your thoughts, regulate your emotions, question your beliefs. And with each discovery, there’s a spark of recognition as if you’ve just remembered something you didn’t know you’d forgotten. It brings you both relief and clarity, but also a hunger to keep going. It’s the explorer’s journey of gathering the scattered fragments of your knowing, and then piecing them together into what was once whole. All that seeking eventually leads to a stillness. Not the kind you feel when reaching a goal or mastering a skill, but a quieter state that replaces what you never realized was an overactive mind.
We know this as the phase of “dissolving the ego” or shedding one’s identity. What is actually happening is the shift from a conceptual understanding of yourself (built on conditioned beliefs and mental construction) toward an embodied recognition of what has always been true. Through seemingly endless touchstones on your walk toward truth, you see that you were named before you had language, taught what to believe before you had context, and rewarded for playing roles before you realized you were in one. You adapted to survive and then forgot you adapted.
If you truly want to know who you are, you have to begin with finding the most essential part of you. Most people live without questioning the conditional identities they layer onto the basic fact of their being.
I am Alyssa
I am an American
I am a woman
I am a sister
I am struggling
I am happy
I am hungry
I am right
I am successful
I am human
Awareness reveals a nature that is radically different from anything you have ever identified with. It does not take on the qualities of the experiences it witnesses. It remains unchanged whether the body is young or old, or whether the mind is restless or still. It doesn’t cling to emotion. It just allows everything to appear within it, without becoming what appears. Awareness is not personal in the way you once assumed. It can focus outward onto the world or reflect inward onto itself. It can hold thought or silence, focused attention or distant observation. It is not owned by the body nor the mind, but moves through them both. Tell your self to become aware of a specific finger, and watch your awareness flow there. Ask yourself to recall the sound of a person’s voice and watch it echo through the invisible field of you.
The realization, once it comes, feels so obvious that it is almost surprising you ever missed it. It is what all the teachings are trying to say without saying it. That beyond the thoughts and the personality, there is still a you here, underneath all of it. Awareness itself, aware of being. You don’t get there through effort. You don’t really even arrive at it. You return to it, usually after exhausting every attempt to become something. We cling from identity to identity without recognizing as quickly as one passes, another takes its place. You are the is-ness that remains beneath all of it. You are the continuous fact of "I am."
Once the nature of "I" is recognized, the experience of reality changes. It is no longer possible to fully believe in separation, or in the story of being isolated and alone within a private mind. There is a deeper knowing that the awareness you now know as yourself is the same awareness behind other people’s eyes. Seeing “I” to “I” takes on an entirely new meaning. You begin to understand that we are not separate islands of consciousness, but individual expressions of a single, continuous life. Life experiences itself through form, but is not defined by form. In a way, life itself is filtered through individuals. This is where the boundaries of the ego can truly begin to soften, as you see yourself in everyone and everything.
Many who reach this threshold mistake the experience of revelation or clarity as the goal, as if awakening were a private achievement or a retreat into personal peace. This realization, profound as it is, is not the end of the path. If remembrance were meant only to remove you from the world, there would be no need for embodiment at all. You are here, in form, for a reason. The real work begins when what you have remembered is no longer something you experience privately, but something that moves through your choices and your presence.
Infusing spiritual knowing into physical reality asks you to see how much of the world around you has been shaped by belief in separation— in otherness, in scarcity. It also asks you to recognize how easily people become bound to identities that limit them, moving inside invisible structures built on fear. Remembering your wholeness is essential. Even holding it quietly within yourself changes the way you move through the world. But over time, what is within us naturally seeks expression. It asks not only to be known, but to be lived.