Who Do You Think You Are vs Who You Are

work in progress

It is obvious that a thought about your mother is not your mother ( I borrowed this line from a wonderful Dharma talk by Howard Cohn).  But somehow it is less obvious to us that "who we think we are", is not who we are.  In a way this is related the "the straight jacket of insecurity" that I wrote about here because who we think we are is mostly less than we really are.  Cohn talks about this "personality view" that we have of ourselves and how it tends to be slightly (or not so slightly) on the mean side.

Think about it for a minute.  Think about how you normally see yourself.  Do you see yourself as a clutz, a poor public speaker, slightly lazy, not very focused, depressed?  Chances are the picture we generally snap of ourselves tends to be on the negative side.  It encompasses things others have said to us, what we've implied from looks and comments, our judgements of ourselves when things don't go the way we want and a multitude of things.

We are in fact much more than we could ever see from our vantage point.  We are like shadows standing in our own light.  We encompass both wholesome and unwholesome qualities which create a much larger picture than we ever focus on.

Since our "personality view" is likely flawed, and small, like a tight, slightly wart covered halloween costume, maybe we should just give it up, let it go.  Since we like to wrap things in little packages and have been doing this forever and a lifetime, it may not fly off instantly into the stratosphere.  But maybe, just maybe we should lighten up a bit and give it a little help.  Perhaps every time we think we know who we are and how we operate, maybe we could just let that float away like a kid's lost balloon.  Maybe after we have filled up the stratosphere with lost balloons about ourselves we will be free to be whoever we authentically are in the moment.

It's not about getting newer and shinier balloons, that say we're stellar, it's about letting our real self just be, that interesting, quirky, human self.  We don't need to be anyone.  We don't need to be any way.  What our soul really longs for is to be free,  free from who we think we are.