Who are you?

Who are you? This is the unanswered riddle of ages. We all seem to know who we are. We feel securely rooted to ourselves, yet when we dream we are not rooted at all. In dreams we could be anyone, anywhere. In deep sleep we lose even that notion of ‘I’. It is as if we didn’t exist for that duration.
Who are you? Neuroscience is getting there. The notion of ‘I’ is like an image on a screen — a hologram created by hundreds of millions of neurons firing together. So long as we live, the neurons keep firing, the hologram keeps forming and ‘you’ exist. When we die the neurons stop firing, the screen turns blank, and ‘you’ will cease to exist. This is deep. But there is something deeper. ‘You’ are continuously dying and being reborn. ‘You’ are not the same person who started reading this article. In the space of a few seconds, ‘you’ died and were reborn many thousand times.
Neurons create an ever changing ever refreshing field. Think of it as a projector beaming a movie. Movie frames refresh themselves 24 times a second. Each of those frames are a different ‘you’ recreated quickly in smooth continuity.
It is happening so fast you can’t tell the difference. Who are you then? Are you the flickering image on the screen or the projector beaming the images? If you think ‘you’ are the image on the screen, who is the projector? Isn’t that also you? If it is not you who else could it be?
The ‘projectors’ are neuronal cells creating an electrical field. What’s making them create the field? You are already wading in deep waters filled with contradictions. Neuronal cells are made of billions of living molecules. Each atom is intrinsically ‘dead matter’.
The molecule is somehow magically alive. Inside the ‘dead’ atoms there is surprisingly perpetual motion, eternal life. If you dare go deeper, laws of physics will disappear in the quantum domain.
What a strange mind bending zone you pierced searching for yourself — a domain full of extreme puzzles, more mysterious than ‘science can ever imagine’. Back off. You won’t find that answer here.
So what is creating the images? Who are you? No one through the ages has ever had the faintest clue. Vedanta doesn’t even try for an answer. It just calls this mystery as ‘That’. Whatever it is, it is beyond the grasp of mind, but know this, the mind is completely in its grasp. You are That and even if you will never know what ‘That’ is, you can still feel its presence as truth, bliss, consciousness. Its truth is your life, its bliss your joy, its consciousness the music of your existence. You can never ‘know’ it, but you can merge with its mystery… and emerge rejuvenated into your every day self. It is the deepest most luminous layer of your being after all.
Vedanta Rocks. Feel that luminous self now. It is right here looking at you.