The Ultimate Creation

If someone asked me to describe myself, what would I say?

What am I?

What are the essential characteristics that I identify as “me”?

Even if I can generate a list of said characteristics, that is not who “I“ am, that is simply a list of attributes that I associate with myself.

What am “I”?

There was a time in my life when I was absolutely certain who “I” was.

Then life intervened and showed me, over the course of many months, that I, in fact, had not the slightest idea of what “I” was.  Over time, through a series of traumatic events, I was shown very clearly, again and again, that what I identified as “I”, was in fact an accretion, something that I had embraced and identified with but that, in fact, was not “I”.

I felt like an enormous onion, losing layer upon layer--some layers sloughed off easily like scales off a butterfly’s wing, others were ripped off in agony like flesh from bone.  It was intensely painful to release my grasp on what I so adamantly identified as “I”.  What would I be if I lost that thing I was so certain was “I”?  But I was clearly shown that “I” was not “that” and to be clinging to “that”, I would continue to suffer excruciating pain.  I felt mounting terror as I saw again and again that more and more of those things I have identified since childhood as “I” were "not I”, and however hard I looked, I saw nothing to take their place.  In the absence of those accretions, how “I” could continue to exist?

As the debris was cleared bit by bit, little by little, I began to catch occasional glimpses behind it.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I saw that there was “nothing” behind all of the things that had been obstructing my view my entire life.  Again and again, I was plunged into utter no-thing-ness.  There was quite literally “no thing” at the heart of “I”.  In fact, I had to face the reality that “I” as a catalog of qualities didn’t, in fact, exist.  Everything that I had associated heretofore with “I” was in fact trappings that I had put on over “I”.  This is probably the normal way for human-beings.  From birth, thoughts, ideas, emotions, etc. are projected onto us:  first by parents, then by playmates, teachers and other adults.  We are taught to believe what adults tell us, especially about ourselves, so we embrace these fictions as “I”, when in fact they are just colorful garments to obscure the fact that “I” doesn’t really exist.  The nature of “I”, at least in my journey, is the void.  It has no shape, no dimension, no qualities, nothing to grasp onto, nothing to give it form or any identifying characteristics.  Anything that can be known and described is, in fact, something that covers the “I”.  To function in the world, it is probably necessary to clothe the self in these more or less colorful garments that provide a sense of familiarity and help us identify others of our tribe.  But just like paint applied to skin, feathers threaded into hair or fabric draped across a frame, they are all additions, accoutrements, nothing more.

But rather than a sentence of despair, this realization is, in fact, the clarion call of freedom.  Since “I” has no characteristics and everything we put on over it is a creation, we are left with total freedom what to create, what to clothe ourselves with, and what to take off.  We can create out of nothing what we want to be, de novo, every day, every minute, every second.  We are the creators of our presence in the world, we and no one else.  Of course, it helps if we can gather a group of people around us who recognize, value and reinforce what we create ourselves to be, but even that can be a trap.  Haven’t we all experienced powerful changes in our life that fundamentally alter our idea of what we want to create ourselves to be?  We change the accoutrements over the “I”, generating new patterns that are more empowering, more creative, and more joyous than what we had habitually created for ourselves in the past, only to discover that those around us give no credence to these new colors, textures, or melodies.  They continue to see our old patterns like a mirage hiding what we are now actively creating.  This is to be really and truly invisible.  Only people with very strong egos can continue to tirelessly recreate themselves over and over again, each and every day, with no encouragement and no acknowledge from those around them.  Maybe someday I will be that person who believes in herself and her creative abilities to such a degree that being acknowledged for this self-creation by others will be entirely unnecessary.  Until such a time, I value those few honest and true friends that I have, the ones who can see this presence in the world that I create, consciously--or sometimes not.  You mean the world to me!