When we wake up...

What we come to understand when "we wake up to who we really are" is not actually "who we really are". We wake up to who we aren't. We actually wake up to the fact that even our most treasured and revered roles and identities, while perfectly valid and important on one level, can never really define us in any absolute, fixed or comprehensive sense.

We come to see the boundaries that divide 'self' from 'non-self', 'inside' from 'outside', are actually quite porous and permeable. "Who I really am" is not so fixed and definitive. It can never be confined to one thing or set of things. Who I am is open-ended. Though it may be perfectly valid and true to say that I am this or that, I can say this truthfully only with the caveat that I am never MERELY this or that.

Who we are essentially is the pure consciousness that is always present. But this formless consciousness will manifest itself in myriad ways and forms, even through this one body that we call by your name or mine. Who you are essentially is the unchanging aspect of who you are. But who you are un-essentially is still valid. The one does not negate the other. The unessential is included in, appears and disappears in, the essential.

Francis Bennett