Who Am ‘I’?

An Investigation into the Divine Name We Speak Every Day

The most familiar word in your vocabulary may hold the key to the ultimate mystery. Every day you say ‘I’ countless times, referring to yourself as the centre of your experience. But have you ever paused to investigate what this simple word actually points to? In this exploration, you’ll discover that the great sages throughout history – from Delphi to the Sufis – weren’t speaking of temporary roles or social identities when they urged us to ‘know thyself’. You’ll find that the deeper you investigate this most intimate of words, the more it reveals itself as something far more profound than you might have imagined.

Who Am ‘I’?

What if the most familiar word in your vocabulary points to the ultimate reality of the universe? Every day, countless times, you invoke the name ‘I’ – speaking of yourself as the protagonist of your life, the character at the centre of your experience. But when you pause to investigate, to whom or what are you actually referring?

The inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi reads Gnothi seauton – ‘Know thyself.’ Pythagoras expanded this wisdom: “Know thyself, and you shall know the universe and the gods.” Socrates declared that to know thyself is the beginning of wisdom. The Sufis say, ‘Whosoever knows their self, knows their lord.’

These sages weren’t referring to your temporary roles or social identities. They pointed to the very ground of your being. The deeper you investigate ‘I’, the more it reveals the purest essence of what you are.

You have been referring to yourself as ‘I’ all your life and, in doing so, you always refer to the same self. Therefore yourself, or ‘I’, must be that aspect of yourself that always remains with you, that cannot be removed from you. It is the constant factor in all changing experience.

All thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, perceptions are intermittent. They come and go. But you remain. Who is this ever-present unchanging self?

You say, ‘I dreamt last night’, ‘I slept deeply’. Therefore you, ‘I’, must be present throughout the three states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep.

All experiences come and go; therefore you cannot be an experience. You are that which makes all experience possible but are not yourself an experience.

You are the common ground of all experience – always present, though often overlooked.

You are the knowing element that lies behind all experience, but are not yourself an experience.

Although everybody has a sense of ‘being myself’ all the time, most people have allowed their sense of their self to become entangled with the content of experience – thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions. This mixture of our essential self or being – pure awareness – with the content of experience creates the illusion of a temporary finite self, who derives its ‘selfness’ from pure awareness and its limitation from the content of experience.

This confusion obscures who ‘I’ really is, veiling the innate peace and joy that are the very nature of the awareness you essentially are.

However, when you go deeply into yourself, discarding anything that is not essential to you, you lose the qualities you derive from the content of experience. You return, as it were, to your essential, naked being. As Rumi said, ‘Flow down and down and down in ever widening rings of being.’

Divested of the qualities you derive from the content of experience, you stand as unlimited being – infinite being – God’s being.

For this reason, ‘I’ is the divine name, the name for the infinite presence that shines in us, as our very own being.

The name ‘I’ serves, as such, as a portal from the drama of experience back to the peace of your true nature. The name ‘I’ shines like a beacon amidst the drama of experience, pointing to the sanctuary of peace within you.

Simply sound the divine name, ‘I’, once within yourself and allow yourself to be drawn into its referent, into that to which this word points: the place of peace at the heart of your being.

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