Who are you?

I really wanna know.

John Lennon and David Bowie in Hong Kong, 1977.

The vacuum created by the arrival of freedom
And the possibilities it seems to offer.
It’s got nothing to do with you, if one can grasp it. …
Up the hill backwards! It’ll be all right.

—David Bowie, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 1980.

I saw David Bowie once, in Seattle where he was making a movie. I was out walking and turned my head to look down a side street. There was the unmistakable face, radiating star power! I recognized him instantly. He was smiling, with his head tilted toward the face of an assistant who was walking beside him—trying to convince the man to do something, I’ve always thought. The poor assistant seemed to be suffering under the outpouring of energy; his head was down and he was frowning in an attitude of resistance. I thought then, as I have many times since, how difficult it must be for normal people to be in the orbit of a star.

Some stars radiate such power that they affect entire planets. When I was a younger man, trying to make sense of what the Beatles had done, I felt the magnificence of John Lennon’s achievement so personally and acutely that it drove me to despair. “What can I ever do that will be like that? Who can I be that is other than nothing, when that beauty and power has existed?” I learned later that Lennon’s assassin had suffered a similar feeling of self-annihilation from the star’s power, which drove him to the sickening and brutal act.

Every individual needs to figure out who they are. In modern Western societies, this is a matter of existential necessity, because communal definitions of identity are degraded or non-existent. If you don’t make something of yourself, then you don’t exist. It’s even worse nowadays with the Internet: if you’re not an influencer, then you’re not worthy of notice; you might as well not exist.

But our true identity does not come from outside. It is the result of a relationship between ourselves and that which is central and holy in the Universe. Joseph Campbell calls it the “Transcendent Mystery Source,” which is both at the center of all existence and at the center of you. It is now a mainstream idea that the Universe is at its root the unfolding of our innumerable selves into manifestation, in a never-ending process of self-knowing. The Universe cannot know itself, and cannot be known, until your identity is fulfilled.

I used to pursue the One, but now I revel in the Many. I think it is not possible to perceive or interact with ‘the One.’ It is only when the Universe is manifest—initially as duality, then as ‘the 10,000 things’—that we can perceive or interact. I spent a long time trying to figure out how the One becomes the Many, and after many decades I finally uncovered an answer that satisfies my intellect and lays the question to rest for me.

Simply put: “Potential and manifestation emerge together from the ineffable ground of being. We can observe and map the interaction between potential and manifestation (cf. David Bohm’s ‘implicate and explicate orders,’ and quantum superposition), but we cannot grasp, penetrate, or even truly think about the ground of being (i.e. ‘Tao’), which is an imponderable mystery (i.e. ‘darkness within darkness’).”

This kind of metaphysical conjecture used to occupy most of my mind, most of the time. I could not rest until I understood the question at least well enough to know where lies the boundary of absolute mystery. Now I feel I do, and the effect is quite dramatic. It’s as if part of my mind has vanished! A knot has been unraveled, and the tangle is now smooth. The engine of cognition was made of thoughts, and once those thoughts penetrated themselves, they turned into clouds, which have now vanished, leaving silence.

So, I am experiencing “the vacuum created by the arrival of freedom.” The mental energy that used to go toward solving the central metaphysical problem of my life is no longer needed for that. There is a vacant space in the middle of my mind, where nothing will focus. I can still pursue the occupations of daily living, but when I try to create a structure of thoughts, nothing happens!

This condition is not comfortable. It has manifested as a weeks-long depression characterized by lethargy and unstructured time. I have not written a line that I felt could be shared, until now. I have a hard time knowing what to say or what to do. I used to be able to find reasons for doing things, but it is exactly the capacity of “reason” which has faded. The world does not run on “reason,” and I cannot look into the world for reasons to act. Instead, I must attend to the silence which now fills my mind, and listen for the whispering of the night oceans.

And it is in that dark place where I must now search for my identity. I can no longer look out into the world for a concrete image defined by habit and history. Instead, I must look within, and accustom myself to the absence of my reasonable engine of thought. It is no great loss, I think! The power of Nature appears as flows and currents which have no reason, but which emanate from a soul beyond time. That is me. That is you. Everyone must discover who they are.

Who on Earth do you think you are?
A superstar? All right, you are!

And we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun. …
Everyone, come on!

—John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Instant Karma, 1970

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