Who Do You Think You Are?

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

Our civilization puts immense weight on what everybody thinks. It’s not surprising. We all go to school and spend the most vital and bubbly years of our lives learning for the most part to restrain the wild energies coursing through our bodies and to tame the somewhat crazy longings of our souls. We learn to THINK life instead; and of course, we grow up thinking as we have been taught to think!

It never ceases to amaze me that, despite the obviousness of the fact, most people don’t recognize that their way of thinking is prefabricated: white American Southerners have attitudes and belief-systems quite different from, say, Californians. Catholics have their mind-sets, Jewish people theirs, Christian fundamentalists theirs. Children raised by parents who celebrated the 60’s have a wildly different outlook on life to the children of right-wing conservatives, the Swiss have fixed ideas that are simply different from the idées fixes of the French or Germans, and English conditioning is different again. Some of the thinking is shaped by the family, some by schooling and community, some is religious and some ways of thinking are national or racial. There’s the media too and their corporate agenda for the world: people = money, so the more everyone is conditioned to consume, the better, regardless of the consequences. The way we think is shaped too by all the idiosyncratic things that may happen to any of us along the way to adulthood - traumatic experiences such as illness, accidents, family break-downs, abuse, violence, natural disasters, as well as the beneficial influences of good fortune and the profound effects of growing up loved, safe and cared for all the way through to adulthood.

As all these external teachings and influences interact with our born nature, our personality takes shape, and this becomes the way in which we experience life as we live it from day to day. We grow into the costume of our personality, our own composite of countless possibilities that impel us to be care-free, competitive, uptight, rigid, liberal, passionate, playful, driven, lethargic, sociable, narcissistic… as well as Catholic, Hindu, Brazilian, Afghan, and so on. There are precisely as many permutations as there are people who have ever lived.

Despite our essential uniqueness as beings, our costumes are tribal, as are the habits, routines and rituals that go with them. This is as true of suit-and-tie corporates as it is of Bedouins wearing djellabahs or me in my jeans. One of the very human features of our tribalism is that we favor those who belong to our own tribe above those who don’t. On the national, religious and political levels this is very apparent. Our entire history is a litany of wars and persecution in the name of God, country and ideology. Not surprisingly, the tribalism infects even the most personal layers of our social interactions. The basic tenet of tribalism is that I and mine are right, you and yours are wrong, or at least less right than I and mine. All our arguments with each other, all our fighting, all the unkindness that goes on between people and social groups – the back-biting, blaming, intimidating and all kinds of abuse – stems from this deep “me and mine” ferocity that probably ensured our survival a million years ago, and is unconsciously acted out today at every level of our relating with each other. In most of us it is now tamed, more or less. We are socialized and domesticated, and horrified when the untamed among us resort to the old barbarity that still runs in our blood. Most of us have learned to channel the ferocity into socially acceptable forms, where it is reflected in everything from the sports we choose to engage in through the jokes we enjoy to the political party we vote for.

Now here’s the crux of the matter. Whether our personality is light, dark or rainbow colored, as long as it’s all we know, we are fixed by it - in what we think, how we feel and how we behave. As long as we have experienced nothing else, we think our personality is who we are and we function according to it. How we happen from moment to moment is shaped by it just as the music at a concert emerges from the orchestra. This is a useful analogy. The music is already decided before a single note is played; the orchestra plays the music it has been prepared to play. So it is with the personality. We play the music we have been trained to play. We may have more or less room for improvisation, depending on how stiff our personality costume is, but essentially we stay within the confines of how we have learned to play our part.

The most potent division in the world today is not between opposing nations, religions or political entities. All of these are manifestations of people’s personalities. The division that really splits humanity is between those who live from and through their personalities, believing unquestioningly that this is who they are, and those who have realized that their personality is only a costume (or maybe a whole wardrobe of costumes!). THIS CANNOT BE REALIZED AS AN INTELLECTUAL IDEA. It can be understood as an idea, but that just means we THINK we know. Thinking that we know is one of the ways that we try to satisfy ourselves living the unsatisfying life of the personality. It is not possible to be fulfilled living in our personality, because the personality has no soul. It has no real life in it, any more than the clothing we wear has life. All the life is in the one who is wearing the clothes; all our real life is in the one who is hiding inside our personality.

Stepping out of the personality into this one is the moment of becoming who we really are. It is the single most transforming event that can happen in anybody’s life. It is the moment of true awakening. It doesn’t mean we are then enlightened, but it does mean that from this moment on we have another perspective on life. We have experienced the reality of our being, and even if we lose touch with ourselves from time to time, we see our personality and everyone else’s too for what it is. We see that all these attitudes, opinions and beliefs, whether ours or ‘theirs’ - simply stand in the way of our ever meeting each other. We are all stuck in the same absurdity, SQUABBLING WITH EACH OTHER’S COSTUMES and completely oblivious to the fact that there is no one at home. We are not, and neither are those who are arguing with us. There is no one at home because until we wake up, we are all busy thinking that we are our clothes!

This would be merely farcical, as it often is anyway, were it not for the fact that when all we have is our costume we will at times do anything on its behalf. Then the dream may become a nightmare, for ourselves and for others. To understand this it helps to recognize that as long as we are living the illusion that our personality is who we are, we will always be afraid. We may not show it directly. We may not ever know it. The fear is there because deep down we know that something is wrong. In our souls we know we are not the costume. We just don’t know how to come home to ourselves and so we try desperately to believe in the costume of our personality!

The ultimate insanity of the personality is the conviction with which it believes in itself and in its own view of life; it will therefore do whatever it can to keep on running the show. It is this compulsion to have things its way that causes all the misery. On a global scale this madness is being acted out right now in the U.S-Iraq-U.N-Al Qaeda-Israel-Arab quagmire of political, religious and financial competition. All the personalities involved believe they are right, and they all want to win, AT ALL COSTS: and there is the misery! It is the same story in our personal relating with each other as long as we are stuck in our personalities. We create misery for ourselves and each other through our insistence on having things our way. We quarrel and hurt each other, we punish, reject, judge and abuse each other all because we relate from personality to personality. True, we don’t usually give ourselves the right to destroy each other or anyone who happens to get in the way of our bombs and guns; but as long as we ourselves are functioning as personalities rather than beings, we are to some degree responsible for producing leaders who do give themselves that right. Bush, Blair, bin Laden, Hussein, Sharon, Arafat and all the people around them supporting their conflicting causes are all tied together by their fanatic beliefs in their own identities. They all think they are the costumes they are wearing! They are just different teams playing the same game. If any of them ever woke up, they would take one look at what they are doing and walk out on it.

We have to see, each and every one of us, that their incapacity to do this reflects our own entrapment in the personality game. So how do we change the way the world is? First by waking up out of our delusion that our personality is who we are. The awakening is a delight too, because believing ourselves to be our costumes keeps us isolated. We live then disconnected from the real source of all our happiness. That source is our being, our conscious presence in here-and-now existence. Here we feel everything. We sense everything. We are intuitively wise. Above all, we love, because awakening is of the heart as well as of the body and soul. Awakening is like every single atom in us becoming aware, with a powerful lovingness, of everything that is happening in existence. Awake we are in love because it is not possible to be here now without being in love. Awake we see through the madness and absurdity of all our fighting and arguing with each other. We may not know what to do, but we surely know what not to do. We will not go to war to stop a possible war. We will not cave in to the old barbarity. We will not choose fighting just because we see no alternative. We will seek the alternative, with our whole heart, with love, with humility, with conscious regard for ALL BEINGS.

© Alan Lowen 2003