Reaction Paper 1

The book’s third chapter explores the question: “who am I?”. The author argues that the response to this question is not the ones we typically give when asked this question: We are not a collection of letters that make up our name. We are not limited to our relationship with someone, meaning someone’s spouse, child, etc. We are not our birth dates, our childhood, or any events that happened to us in our lives. We are not our experiences. We are not our appearances either. These are not ourselves, but things that we see or feel. Nothing except what is inside of us can qualify as ourselves.

But then what is the answer?

The author looks at ourselves in the form of our thoughts, but once again, thoughts are things that we feel, therefore they cannot be us. Emotions are ruled out from being our “me” for the same reason as well.

The author argues that the truest form of a “me” can be qualified as our consciousness, and at its core, our awareness. Without awareness, we become nothing and cease to exist. The answer to “who are you?” is that we are the ones who see, experience, and are aware and conscious of our minds and ours surroundings. We are the “watchers”. Awareness is what allows us to focus on our thoughts or one the situations, people or objects around us.

This was very hard for me to understand and think about at first. My answer to “who are you?” when asked by other people has always been my name, my age, my nationality, my occupation, etc. I never asked myself this question. I always considered myself an emotional person, as I generally tend to let emotions overwhelm me in situations. I also get anxious thoughts, which might sometimes come at the worst of times and ruin some situations for me.

It was reassuring, in a way, to think of this person who is always worried about the smallest things as someone who is not me, but as a negative influence in my life, and to think of the voice in my mind as someone that I’m hearing talk instead of myself. It’s a relief to think that all these things are just things that I cannot control, therefore they do not represent me. Awareness and consciousness are still hard concepts to grasp in their entirety, but the simple concept of being a “watcher” is kind of like a weight lifting off my shoulders in a way. I think that in the future, seeing like this might allow me to actually disregard any negative thoughts and distance them from my experiences and my daily life. I could choose the thoughts that I actually want to apply to myself.