I am not what I am

As an adolescent one is allowed to experience crises of identity and not know who one is, or what one wants. By ones mid thirties one is not supposed to feel this way. By that time existential quandaries should have been resolved and sorted. By that time, naval excavated, wild seeds sown, restive eggs scattered, a secure career direction, a settled partner, children, and a mortgage, should be the new reality of your life.

If there’s one criticism which ‘gets my back up’, as it is cryptically said, it is that I’m immature (possibly because it’s true). It’s not without defensiveness or anxiety therefore that I admit, as a 35 year old, that I’m no closer to knowing ‘who’ I am or ‘what’ I want. I resent the idea that the reason I’m no closer to ‘self-actualisation’ than ever is because I’m a retard, even if it’s true. I hope that is understood.

Everyday people are asked what they 'do’. Usually people are not particularly interested in the answer, but asking the question is a conventional way of filling the silence and breaking the ice, and one is supposed to reply. If you answer that you eat nachos, scratch your head, breathe, walk the earth, dress and undress, think, sleep, look at things, listen to birds, get sad, get happy, drink coffee, slurp beer, walk into lamp posts, etc, you may have answered accurately. But you have not answered conventionally, which is why you will be thought strange. To give a proper answer you’re supposed to understand that the question is code for a specific enquiry: How do you fit into the human patterning of society, or the system, which more often than not means, (unless other people have given you money, or you have won money) what do you do for money?

The assumption is that you belong to this system, and that what you are equals what you do within it. A related assumption is that you have chosen to do what you do, and so have chosen to ‘be’ who you are. Therefore by finding out what you do, what kind of job you have, it can be shown what kind of person you ‘are’. There’s also a belief that what you have done in the past, in the form of money making, or else, preparations undertaken to make money later (education), is a crucial indicator of ‘who’ you are, or rather ‘what’ you are –how you are to be placed, how you are to be ‘weighed’.

This is all well and good if you feel at home in the system and don’t think it an insanely degenerate, absurd prison. Most people feel at home in the system and have managed to align their subjective sense of who they are with one or more of the available choices on offer as to what one can do within it.

Needless to say I do not feel at home in the system and have not been able to do this (despite trying), and this, I would wager, lies at the heart of my feeling of alienation. I am and am not the ‘being’ that fits into the system as it does. Undeniably I earn a living teaching English. But I do not do so because I want to, and certainly I do not consider myself to ‘be’ an English Teacher. However, this is how other people must view me, because this is what I do. They think I am what I don’t think I am. Rather, I am not what I am.

But it's not only in terms of your job that people will understand your identity. We realize that we don’t only work, that we have free time in which to express ourselves less formally. And so people might want to know what your interests are, what star sign you are, what your opinions are on this or that, or what your values are. They want to put you into a box and distinguish you and compare you, so they can map and chart you and see how you are similar to this template, and how different from that template, of the ways that people are imagined to be. The idea always is that you are finite and explicit and enduring over time – that you are unitary and that you can be known- that is compacted into a exclusive, specific thoughtform.

Maybe this whole ‘self-actualisation’ business is deeply flawed in its basic premise. During those times when my spiritual awareness is awoken, and when my ego doesn’t get in the way of that in a way that makes me think that I am ‘uniquely’ divine (Jehovah or otherwise), I consider myself not actually to have a self at all but to be a little part of the one true, infinite, sublime Godhead (the Pleroma to the Gnostics) which just happens to be attached to and expressing itself through this person called Jonathan Mark Tillotson, but which, in truth, is quite different from that person altogether.

I hold this body, this heart, this mind, this ‘personality’, to be just a fraction of what I am..and sometimes a poor representation of my true essence – which existed prior to the moulding of this personality into the often regrettable forms it has assumed. So you see, for me ‘self-actualisation’ is hardly a desire. Rather it is to be freed from the limitations of my self that I seek. Or at least from my lower self, my ego, my ‘sociological straightjacket’. You will understand that this is a difficult task when for so much of the year one is expected to earn money – for which the ego is a crucial prerequisite, and when everyday one is surrounded by people who identify you with your job or want you to tell them about your ego -‘the account that you give of yourself’- and so force you to wear the limiting, excluding ego mask in their interactions with you.

I am pure light, pure joy, pure love…

And its bloody annoying that I have to live inside a self, inside a world, that so often does not allow this to be apparent.

But its ok I suppose, being a slave and a prisoner of society and other peoples perceptions. Or at least or some of the time anyway…hey, sometimes even most of it. I am used to this predicament in any case.

Currently I drink a coffee and wait for my Saudi visa, which I don’t expect to get without unanticipated or anticipated hindrances.