What does it mean to ask 'Who are you?'

Asking 'Who are you?' goes beyond name, identity, career, or relationships. It is a deeper inquiry into the core awareness or consciousness beneath all labels — the pure sense of existence that remains even when all external identifiers are removed.

Are we the roles and labels we identify with?

No. Roles and labels such as job titles, relationships, achievements, and personality traits are external layers that describe us, but they are not the true self. The real self exists beyond these temporary identities.

How does spirituality view the concept of the self?

Spiritual teachings describe the true self as pure awareness or consciousness — the silent witness behind thoughts, emotions, and experiences. This awareness exists before identity forms, just like in infancy, and remains even when external layers fall away.

What does science say about the meaning of self?

Scientific theories like The Looking Glass Self, Symbolic Interactionism, and Social Constructionism show that our sense of self is shaped by social interaction and conditioning. Science suggests identity is a constructed narrative rather than a fixed independent entity.

How can one discover who they truly are?

One can discover the true self through self-inquiry, meditation, introspection, and detaching from labels. By observing thoughts instead of identifying with them, we access pure awareness — the essence beneath all layers of identity.

Who Are You — The Side Of You You’ve Never Seen

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Theme – Existential, spiritual, metaphysics, self-inquiry

If someone asks you to write a page about “Who are you”, perhaps you’ll start with your name, age, gender, occupation, designation, and so on — your hobbies, interests, family, friends, and relationships. Some will have more to write about, and others will have less to explain themselves with.

Now let’s say you have written it all or perhaps you know the answer, but here’s the question, don’t you think whether it’s your name or age, your occupation or relationship, it’s all something that surrounds you through which you define yourself, but at the core, it’s not you? In other words, all the things that you explain to be yourself, are more like things attached to you or labels stuck on you instead of that YOU – on which the labels stick?

In case you find this tricky to accept, just imagine that you don’t have a job, no relationships, and not even a name for yourself. But even when none of these are there to explain you, won’t you still exist? You will, right?

The best example to witness this in real life is to observe an infant, who doesn’t know the world, the sounds, or the words to explain anything, nor has knowledge of the names and functions of their own body parts, but he still exists, perhaps just as a piece of life. And if we recall the same phase of our lives, then we would realize that perhaps, as an infant we too had no knowledge of ourselves and our existence, yet we did exist, survived and with time, we acquired all the layers and labels with which we identify ourselves now.

But the point of emphasis here is that, even when there is neither a name nor anything to label yourself with, you – that is purely the feeling of existence or existing, still resides, and this goes the same for each one of us.

It’s like a sticky blank page, which is the self on which various information and labels come and stick, which we later on think to be ourselves forgetting about the source from which the feeling of the self emerges.

In spiritual texts, that sticky page — or the pure and clean feeling of the existing self — is called awareness or consciousness, which is the same and the basic layer beneath all of us. And that’s why, our spiritual texts always say that –

“The self is one – and the many are the reflections of it.”

Scientific Aspects and Theories about "Who are you"

Even if you see it from a scientific angle, science too agrees that what we think of ourselves is just information picked up from our surroundings and society, while what we are is something deeper to perceive.. This is well explained in various scientific theories like –

The “Looking Glass Self” — Charles Horton Cooley (1902) – It says we develop our sense of self by imagining how others see us.
George Herbert Mead’s Symbolic Interactionism (1934) – the “self” emerges from social interaction and language.
Social Conditioning & Behaviorism — B.F. Skinner – Skinner demonstrated experimentally that behavior is shaped by the environment.
The Social Construction of Reality — Berger & Luckmann (1966) – This theory demonstrates how reality itself — including social roles, morality, and identity — is a socially constructed narrative, without which the existence and self still resides

If we use our own scientific knowledge and depth, that which the scriptures call consciousness or awareness, would be something fundamental to the creation.

Just like atoms create elements and matter, and can shape into any matter, just like that, in this case, awareness would be the fundamental unit behind the entire creation, that can combine and recombine with itself to take various shapes.

And it’s not just the religious scriptures that agree with this, but even the greatest mind of the 20th Century, Albert Einstein too agreed with a similar philosophy, and went so far as to mention it in one of his newspaper articles, where he wrote that he believes in the God of Spinoza. God of Spinoza basically was something similar to the concept of consciousness, awareness and Brahman in the case of Advaita Vedanta, where Spinoza meant God as something even subtler than the quantum states, and the underlying layer of creation, embedded in everything.

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Our scriptures have told us the same in numerous ways for thousands of years.

All in all, if we remove all the layers of information that we tag to ourselves, we will find an empty sheet – a feeling of awareness and existing – which holds the possibility to shape into anything. And that’s where the Buddha’s saying “You become what you think” comes into play with its real meaning, unlike the motivational interpretation that we have always been told. We have explained this with extreme detail, both from scientific and metaphysical angles in our article named – “You become what you think” which you can read to understand the entire thing more profoundly.

But just to give you an idea of it, it basically explains how awareness – which is the core layer of everything including you, me, everyone and everything in the world – shapes into different things and that’s how we all experience the world and ourselves. But in the end, as the awareness takes shape of an object, that’s when you’re thinking of an object, you lose the awareness of yourself for that fraction of time, and as you get back to the thought of yourself, the awareness or knowing of the object goes away. All this happens in tiny fractions of seconds, where only the awareness takes the shape of one thing – at once becoming the observer, and then the observation itself.

All in all, it explains how it’s just awareness that exists beneath all the layers, shaping everything that we are and all that we experience.

So, what do you think? Who are you? Are you your name and the things you do, or are you the feeling that calls itself by a name and holds certain qualities to express itself? Let us know in the comments.

If you liked this article, read another profound observation on Buddha’s saying “You become what you think”, where we have explained the hidden insights left by Buddha, unlike the superficial and motivational interpretation of it that we have always been told.

“Find the link to the article below:”

https://thenakedsoul.in/hidden-meaning-you-become-what-you-think/