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In the Way, you are not trying to become someone; rather, you are returning to yourself. The more you unbecome, you become. You are not trying to be, for you are. There is nothing to do to be yourself or be; the undoing of what you are not awakens you to who you are. Words like "who" and "what" are but intimations of you, even as the word God is merely a shadow, if that, of God. See, who you are is who you are in God.
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We become overlaid with what is not who we are. We are, then, inauthentic, unreal, and we feel this as inward, quiet desperation. We all undergo this, and our realization of this heightens as we become more awake to our True Self. This clear seeing is part of the process of seeing more into what many have called our false self. This false self is false, for it is not. We suffer by trying to be something that is not and cannot be.
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We run from ourselves, even in a religion or a spirituality. We are taught to be lost to being lost; hence, we run to find ourselves, not knowing we are running to find ourselves. This aimless pursuit is part of the lostness.
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To be lost to God, to Buddha, to Love, to Life, . . . is to be lost to one's self, and vice versa. Lost to who we are, we are vulnerable to adoptive identities and behaviors that mire us in the slough of confusion. Like the old Tarzan movies I watched as a child, where persons would fall into quicksand and get deeper by struggling to get out, so is the human condition of many of us. We may try one spiritual trip - like a drug trip -, for example, only to move on to the next. We may read books, looking for the answer; however, no book, teacher, spirituality, religion, nothing, and no one can give you to you. Some persons, however, those who know who they are, can be a means to help us awaken from the delusion.
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We are not an identity, but we are not separate from identity. An orange has features like all other oranges, while each orange has features that set it apart from all other oranges. This is how Life manifests. While we are more than an appearance, we cannot reunite with our True Selves, or that of others, by ignoring what makes us appear different. We realize our unity through honoring those differences Nature provides us through birth in a body. Grace comes to me through the humanness I am. Hence, we live with these apparent opposites of being not-a-body, while appearing bodily.
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The Way is a realization that we are all one being-in-God, no difference. The Way is a realization of how we each are different. I can become more respectful of how others appear different from me by growing in reverence for how I am particular in my way.
This is true, for example, of race. White supremacy is not based on white persons who honor being white. White supremacy refers to a group of whites who have no reverence for being white or those of another skin color. Fundamentally, white supremacy is a lovelessness, whereby a lack of self-respect is launched onto persons of other colors. White supremacists do not love themselves as white, they simply lack love. The color of skin is not at issue, the lack of love for oneself is at the core of refusal to love the other who appears different from me. They may be proud of themselves as white, but that is racial arrogance, not self-love. Feeling a need to be superior to others is a way of displaying one truly feels unworthy and inferior. White supremacy, then, is low white self-esteem. If someone reverences her particularity as a race, she will reverence other races. When we truly see we are a child of the divine Life, we see others likewise. When we love ourselves, we love others, for Love cannot be divided, we cannot choose to love one and not the other.
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