Let me ask you a question
Who are you?
What do you think you are?
What do you believe you are?
What defines you?
What excludes you from everything else?
Is it your name?
Your profession?
Your nationality?
Your tastes?
Your convictions?
Your faith?
Are you your gender?
Your age?
Would you still be you if all that changed?
What are the boundaries between you and the outside world?
Is your skin and hair the last frontier?
What about the air that enters your lungs?
Does it become part of you?
And when it comes out through your mouth and nose...
Does it stop being you?
What happens to the food you eat,
the nutrients that stick to the cells?
What happens to the water you drink?
Are the three kilos of bacteria that inhabit your intestine right now part of you?
Who are you? Really
Would you still be you without your feet?
And without your legs?
And without your arms?
Imagine that by a miracle of science, only your head was left.
Would you still be you?
And without your ears,
without being able to hear anything.
Without your tongue,
unable to speak and taste.
Without your eyes, unable to see.
Would you still be you? Without the skin and flesh of your face...
Imagine you kept only your brain floating in a tank.
Without any bodily sensation.
In the dark
with no sounds to hear.
Just thoughts.
Are you your brain?
Is that organ your true essence?
The kilo and a half you gelatinous mass.
What if a piece of your brain were removed?
Are you the whole brain, or just part of it?
Which part?
The most intelligent?
The most primitive?
How many neurons are necessary for you to continue being you?
Or maybe...
maybe you are the thoughts produced by the amazing neural connections...
What do you think about that?
Hmmm?
“I think, therefore I am”
I am because I think I am.
But who are you in the space between thought
and thought?
Who are you when you sleep?
Your dreams?
Who are you when the mind becomes still and quiet
even for a few moments?
Have you checked?
Who are you in these moments?
There is a experience of thoughts, that's clear.
There is a experience of being “I”
thats also clear.
But, who or what is experiencing the thoughts?
Who experience the “I”?
Let me ask you this question again.
Just one more time...
Who are you?