WHAT AM I?

 SELF-ANALYSIS: WHAT AM I?

I value my critics. They keep me honest. One European physicist who is very critical of most of what Dr. Neppe and I write about TDVP, the scientific paradigm that includes consciousness, asserted about me: “You may have once been a physicist, but you no longer are one!” He meant it as a reproach, a condemnation, but I take it as an indication that I have improved, grown beyond the limitations of a burdensome materialistic belief system.

This brings up an interesting question: If I am no longer a physicist, then what am I? This is not a trivial question for me, or for that matter, for anyone who is interested in self-analysis. Asking yourself this question is a good exercise that will help you to evaluate your progress as a sentient being. If you declare: I am a teacher, engineer, mother, father, salesman, engineer, or whatever, and completely identify with that role, you are tying yourself down, inhibiting your overall progress.

 If you totally identify with what you do to earn a living, or even what you enjoy doing most, you are selling yourself short.

I have worked in at least eight or ten different areas of employment over my lifetime and I achieved professional certification or registration in at least four of them. But I refuse to identify with any one of them. I am not a laborer, a salesman, a teacher, an engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, a computer programmer, a systems analyst, a research hydrologist, or a philosopher. Those are things I do, not what I am. I am a soul, a spiritual being, forever growing in awareness and Self-Realization with every day I am alive.

My advice is, no matter your age, endeavor to learn and do something new every day. Read a book about a subject that interests you, but which you have never before taken time to explore. Learn another language and go to a part of the world where they speak that language and stay there for at least three months. Learn about the world, the solar system and the universe. Learn a new skill. It will extend your life and your enjoyment of being ALIVE. The moment you stop learning, you start dying.

Read something inspiring and up-lifting every day. And watch carefully the thoughts that come into your mind and vigorously throw out everything negative, evil or depressing. It’s your mind; do not allow your mind to become polluted with negative thoughts.

If you don’t like something about the world you live in, you can do something about it: you can change yourself! Unless you are perfect, don’t waste your valuable time trying to change other human beings, until you first learn how to change yourself. You are the most important person in the world – to you. Learn to love yourself, and until you are perfect, think of yourself as living in a glass house, and refrain from throwing stones at others. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.”

Above all, learn to increase your capacity to love. Love is one of the few things that we can have in this world of which there is an infinite supply: The more you give away, the more you shall have. Don’t forget to be grateful for the life you have been given, a life within which you have an infinite ability and capacity to love and be loved.

Daya Mataji (1914 - 2010)

The Wonderful Spiritual Teacher and Disciple of Paramahamsa Yogananda, who initiated me into Kriya Yoga at SRF Headquarters, Mount Washington CA, September 17, 1960