who are you when alone?

Who are you when you are alone?

What do you respond when somebody asks who are you? Most people would give their name, perhaps their occupation, perhaps their nationality, or maybe their religion even.

Have you noticed, though, that almost every way that we define ourself is in relation to other people. It's really a social definition. If you really were stranded on a desert island alone, what would be left? You wouldn't need a name – that's only so other people can refer to you. Your nationality would be meaningless – a nationality is just a group of people agreeing to abide by the same set of social laws. What's a religion? An organised religion is actually much the same – a group of people with the same beliefs, perhaps following the same customs, the same practices. Of course you could still be religious when you are alone. It's just that it wouldn't need a name. There would be no point in calling that religion, Christianity or Islam, Buddhism. When you are alone, your religion is just between you and god. It's nameless. It doesn't need that identity.

And what of your occupation? Of course, alone on a desert island, one would probably be very occupied merely with the business of survival: catching fish, climbing the coconut palms to pick cocoanuts, whatever it takes. But that's not the sort of occupation that you would give a name to, unless you're also providing food for other people. Again, a fisherman only calls himself a fisherman because he is selling the fish on to other people. It's all a social arrangement. And almost all our occupations, our professions, have to do with other people, how we relate to them, what we are providing for others, in return for what society provides for us. It's a sort of contract.

So all these ways that we define ourselves, there are many others too, they are almost all to do with how we relate to other people. And these various ways of relating allow us to create an identity for ourself. And it's useful in a social setting. The difficulty though is, we tend to really identify ourselves in these ways. We tend to think that's who we really are. But you don't cease to exist when you find yourself alone. And that's why, in a sense, it's very important to spend time alone, if one is to really inquire deeply into the question of who am I?

And that's really a fundamental question on the spiritual journey. Who am I when I strip away these superficial identities, the various roles that I play in society, the various positions that I have become identified with? What happens when all that drops away? Who are you when you are alone?

There is an essential part of our being that is there whether we are relating to other people or not. And this essential part, this is who we are. Sometimes I call it our buddha nature. It has many names, but the names themselves distract us. The important thing is to reacquaint oneself with who one really is, return to this space within oneself, which is the core of one's being. And this is most easily done when one is alone, when all those other things no longer have a role to play. I'm not saying one has to be alone all the time. It's just that some things can only be recognised when one is alone.

So I really urge you to find your own answer to this question: Who are you when you are alone?