A time comes in a person’s life when something happens to them, and they begin to ask some questions about themselves. And the three main questions are: Who am I? Where did I come from? And where am I going to?
A curiosity develops in people as to these questions, and they begin to search to try and find the answers, little knowing that this is not a quick path; it’s a lifelong journey to find out who you are.
There was a man at an airport who needed to get on a plane, and he thought he was late, so he ran in front of the line and presented his ticket and said, “I need to get on the plane right away.”
And the lady there said, “You can’t get in front of the line, there are lots of people in front of you, and you’re all going on the same flight anyway.”
He said, “Don’t you know who I am?”
And she pushed a button and she said, “Security, security! Come to the American Airlines desk. There’s somebody here who doesn’t know who he is and needs help.”
And in truth, very few of us know who we are, and we really do need help. But security isn’t going to help us. We have to begin self-help. We’re not going to find out who we are by asking other people. We’re not going to find out who we are through looking at our genealogy, we’re not going to find out by trying to figure out what country we came from and where our ancestors came from.
We’re going to find out who we are by getting very still, and very quiet, and somehow getting deep inside ourselves towards the essence of ourself. And this takes a certain amount of ability to be quiet. In this world being quiet is not an easy thing. People have this multitude of opinions about everything, and to get to a space where you are without opinions, and without ideas, is very difficult. And just because you’re not speaking doesn’t mean you’re quiet.
You can have, going on inside of you, all kids of tumultuous thoughts and processes, yet you may appear to the outside to be quiet, and inside there’s chaos. So being quiet not only means not speaking, it means being at peace, it means being at repose, it means being without anxiety, it means being without so many things that belong to the world. It means letting go of them and not having them influence your being.
Again, when you are somehow attached to externalities, the externalities influence your being. And when your being is influenced by externalities, you can’t find out who you are because you’re mixed in with all these externalities.
We become hybrids, it’s like we start as peaches, and somebody hooked a plum up to us and we become nectarines. And the nectarine comes from all the influences of the world. So, in truth…
