You are not your body. You are not your mind. Who are you?

Coming to terms with death can help us discover who we are.

May 22, 2022

Hey,

I hope you’re okay.

I’ll like us to start today’s letter by inviting you to watch the most intriguing video I came across this week here.

Stay curious always. Experience life always.

There was a professor who lived in Florida. He taught Philosophy at one of the best schools in the state and had spent all his years working towards becoming a tenured faculty member. He succeeded at this. Got a beautiful wife and a smart daughter. On the outside, he was living the life.

On the inside, he and his wife were strangers living under the same roof. He got drowned in work and didn’t have time for her. She was having an affair with the Dean of his university. His daughter didn’t feel cared for. She was discovering that she was a lesbian and didn’t have any support for going through that phase.

One day, he goes in for a routine check-up and is told by his doctor that he has lung cancer. He had never smoked in his life but now he had 6 months to live and up to 1-year if he went through treatment.

He decides to not get treatment and his outlook on life changes totally. He decides to live life to the fullest in the little time that he has left. He communicates bluntly his feelings to his wife and their relationship gets better with both acknowledging their flaws. He listens to his daughter more, supports her and their bond grows stronger. Above all, he takes each day by the horn and experiences it to the fullest, on his own terms.

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This is a quick summary of the life of Richard Brown in “The Professor” movie portrayed by Johnny Depp.

For much of my life, I have been mistaken. I failed. I failed not only to comprehend my mortality but to appreciate it. And as a result, I failed to make the most of my life. - Johnny Depp (In ‘The Professor’)

It is very easy to live a life of accumulations without truly living life

I wrote last week that we all crave identities and that they’re comfort zones. Two things that are central to the identities we crave are: Our bodies and minds. It is very easy to limit our understanding of ourselves to these two things. But I’ll argue that we are wrong by doing so.

What is our body?

According to Scientific American, 25% of our body is composed of fluids such as plasma. Another 7% is solids such as minerals. The vast majority though (68%) are human cells. The average human has roughly 30 trillion cells. A huge percentage of this is cellular mass (fat and muscles - only about 0.1% of the total number) while the rest are mostly blood cells.

The interesting thing though is that about 330 billion cells are replaced daily (1% of all our cells). In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you.

So the body we carry around is mostly an accumulation of cells and every 3 months, a new body arises without you even knowing it. What fuels all of this? Food and nutrients that you take in. So in essence, can we say that Francis is this body? Definitely not, cos this body is probably on Francis version 3323.

The mind

I find our understanding of the mind more intriguing. Our mind is like a sponge. From the day we’re born, we’re exposed to information in many different forms. Cultures, values, behaviours, beliefs, education and more.

Our minds, personalities etc are just a combination of information we’ve accumulated and filters we’ve created to choose the pieces of this information that we align the most with.

When someone tells me they get angry easily and that’s who they are. It doesn’t make sense to me. Somewhere along the line, you picked up a certain way of reacting to things for whatever reason. But were you born angry? Did you come out of your mother’s womb screaming at everyone? I’m pretty sure you were crying.

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So there’s a deep and twisted sense of identity and who we are that we’re all battling with. But I refuse to believe that I can only be one thing because that’s what my ‘unintentional’ life path gave to me.

I grew up as a middle child and spent a lot of time with myself. So I can be quite introverted sometimes. But I wouldn’t let that description of life cage me. I can choose to express myself however I want relative to each moment. So I don’t want that identity. I just want to be and to do what I want, when I want to.

What we have accumulated is not us. Think about it. Most of the information and identity you’re associated with were gotten without your consent or control. It was as a result of your background, the environments you were brought up in and more.

The fact that you didn’t have control then, doesn’t mean you don’t have it now. That’s why we’re supposed to be ‘adults’.

Thoughts and Emotions

These two things are one of the weirdest pairs of things in the world. When I first started listening to Sadhguru, he would say that we spend most of our lives living in psychologically created worlds and not in real life.

I didn’t understand it until recently. A lot of what we experience in life is made up and not reality because of our thoughts and emotions. We spend most of our lives living in our heads. More than we know.

When we go out. We assume people are looking at us and watching our every move. It’s all in our heads. Everyone else is doing the same thing. When you promised to do something and the guilt eats you up for days, it’s all in your head. 8 out of 10 times, the other person didn’t spend any time thinking about it and painting you as a bad person. When we want to do something (Toast a babe/guy, speak up in class, do something crazy), the excuses we create are more often than not in our heads.

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We need to find ways to gain control of our thoughts and emotions. We need to not hold them in such high regard. They are manufactured. And in many instances, we are manufacturing things that’ll work against us.

Our Weird Relationship with Death

If I were to ask any random person in any city in the world: If you have only 6 months left to live today, would you spend the 6 months living the life you’re living today? Doing the same things?

I can bet that 90% of people (even rich folks) would say no.

This is a very intriguing conundrum. If we were told by someone that we had a limited time on earth, our perspective will change. But yet, we can’t come to terms with the fact that from the day we’re born, we’re on a countdown.

Regardless of how long you live, death is one of the few guaranteed things in life.

When I was younger, I always used to feel somehow when people prayed for long life. Especially in Christianity, it is believed that people that God loves live long lives. So one of the rewards of being in God’s good books is to live a long life. I guess that’s why it’s hard to us to come to terms with people dying young. And by young, I mean anything under 60.

Then we switch the script and say God loved them more. Lmao.

So if we do what God wants, we live long. But if for some reason, we die earlier, God loves us more? I don’t know what to make of that.

Regardless of how long you live, you and everyone you know and love will die. (Some will say God forbid after reading that line). But it’s a simple fact. Why are we scared of that fact? Why are we scared of confronting death?

When you go past the phase of coming to terms with that. I find that it’s easier to comprehend what people mean by truly experiencing life. Except one is ill, the way most of us will leave this world will be unexpected. Unplanned. We’re alive one day and gone the next. It could be tomorrow. It could be next week. It could be in 20 years. But you don't know when. And that’s okay. We shouldn’t live in fear of that. We should live in the realization of that.

Then life starts to make more sense. Do you really want to live your life keeping malice? Do you really want to live your life doing something every day that you don’t like? Do you really want to live your life in a relationship you don’t enjoy? Do you really want to live your life frequently angry and in a mood? Do you really want to live your life making complaints and giving excuses?

I don’t think so.

A Potential Practical Step

I’m on this journey as well. Trying to figure sh*t out. So I expect my ideologies to change. I expect some views I hold today to be incorrect in the future as I come to new knowledge.

Finding bliss and truly experiencing life is something I’ve yearned for over the past years and I feel like I’m getting closer each day. It’s not a destination, it’s a journey. If you’re going on a journey, your car is likely to break down. There might be armed robbers on the road. There would be good and bad times. And that’s okay.

I’ve listened to Sadhguru and learned about the yogic culture almost every day for the past 4 months. I’ll typically just open YouTube and click a video that has a topic I want to learn about. This has been incredibly helpful in helping me make sense of who we are and understanding our universe. That’s my first recommendation.

More recently, I started a certain type of meditation taught by Sadhguru, called “Isha Kriya”. I have tried multiple approaches to meditation in the past. I spent most of that time going into deep thought and solving issues that I was facing. That wasn’t bad but my meditation experience with Isha Kriya has been on a different dimension.

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It’s a simple practice of just sitting down. Breathing in and out for 6minutes. And then sitting there for another 6 minutes. So simple but very effective in helping you connect with the energies in the universe.

Try both approaches and let me know if it helps you. Got ideas you think I should try? Share with me in the comments section.

Who are you?

I am on the path to discovering this further. But I am sure that I am neither my body nor my mind. I am not an accumulation of matter and information. There is something deeper that can control both of these. Something deeper that connects with the universe. Something deeper that just wants to experience life as much as possible while it is still breathing in this body.

I intend to unleash that something as much as possible while I still breathe.

Musings in My Head [MIMH]

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