Who Am I?

Of all the questions, one stands beneath the rest: who, or what, is the "I" that asks? Every other inquiry assumes an inquirer. Turn to find him, and the search becomes strangely intimate — the seeker is also the sought.

The Method of Negation

The seers answer not by description but by neti-neti — "not this, not this." Whatever you can point to as an object, you are not, for you are the one pointing.

• Am I the body? I can feel it, watch it change and age. It is observed. Not this.
• Am I the breath? I can follow it, slow it, hold it. It is observed. Not this.
• Am I the mind? I can watch a thought, an emotion, arise and pass. Observed. Not this.
• Am I the intellect, the very faculty of judging? Even its conclusions appear to me. Not this.

What remains when all that can be set aside has been set aside? Awareness itself — the constant witness that cannot be made an object, because it is the subject of every experience.

The Eternal Witness

This witness is the ātman, the Self that the Bhagavad-gītā calls unborn and undying. Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, water does not wet it, and the wind does not dry it. It is not a refined object hidden among the others; it is no object at all — the light in which every object is seen.

The Self is the witness, ever free, beyond all change; it is not the seen but the seer.

To ask "who am I?" sincerely, and to keep subtracting until only the seer remains, is the whole of the inward path in a single question.