Who are you really? Where is the key to ourselves?
Consider, firstly, the highly improbably fact of your existence.
That since life first began on earth, bacteria devouring bacteria, evolving, into single celled organisms, one always devouring another, the battle for survival - now multi-celled, now something resembling what we might consider life, always - one devouring another, a predator and prey - and you - the sum total of all creation, you've survived - the output of billions of generations of the fiercest competition that evolution could devise.
And here you are.
And, this - we take it for granted. If we have children this continues, if not - well, you had a good run, 3 billion years of ancestors staring blindly into the future, wondering what it was all for...
We are born without the ability to care for ourselves. Completely, utterly, naked and helpless, there is not a human being that could be birthed anywhere on earth and survive without the care of others of our species.
This is how it goes. You are born, and from the moment you first open your eyes you are being inculcated, indoctrinated, into the world(s) of those who birthed or cared for you.
Everything you become is a result of them. Your every early experience, prejudice, personality, opinion, ambition, these are inherited. We are, however inadvertently, the sum of other peoples experiences and their childhoods, and so on and so forth.
This is their gift to you. This is their curse upon you.
Struggle as you may you cannot shake these things off. You are born an empty vessel to be filled up with the experiences of others, and in time - when you are old enough - you will begin to have your own experiences, and these will be profoundly shaped by those early experiences with those others.
You become a collage, an assembly of other peoples hopes and unfulfilled ambitions, of other peoples prejudices, opinions, whether you shared them or disagreed with them.
Perhaps you realized this, you were a rebellious teenager, were moody and despised your parents, broke the rules, loathed the class that birthed you - but in this too you are not yourself, you are merely opposing that which you do not want to become.
Your destiny, it would seem, is inescapable.
But who are you?
Arguably you are the sum of your interactions, of what you eat, of what you read, watch on TV, read on the internet, listen to on the radio - but where does the SELF reside? The you? Take away these things and think. Quiet any thoughts, intrusions, imagine self without the heap of opinions and prejudices that have shaped you, impressed you, that you have bought into or rebelled against, think without language, who - what - are you?
Breathe. Feel your body from the inside out. Control first the breath. This is the easiest. Now, try to bring under control the heart, reduce your heartrate, grope about your viscera with your mind, can you feel your liver? kidneys? lungs? Move your consciousness through your body. See if you are well. Can you do this? Yet - every single function of the body - at some level - moves through or reports to the mind.
I have taken it too far, perhaps. There - we first need to quiet the mind - as nature abhors a vacuum so does it loathe an open mind - thoughts race, jostle for attention, no sooner have we let one go than another insinuates itself in it's stead...
It is a journey, this - for sure, to find a quiet space in one's own head.
And when we're not trying there are a host of distractions, emotions, we are hungry, tired, bored, in pain, we've obligations, bills to pay, people to meet, the list, verily, is endless.
The chick still in the egg recoils from the shadow of the hawk, the tarantula-wasp is born and knows to eat, knows - when it is time - to do what her mother never taught her, to find another tarantula, lay her egg, and these are - next to us, but insignificant creatures, possessed of the smallest portion of consciousness and intelligence.
What instincts are we born with? There must be some, a heap, a human template of psychology that is mapped onto us at birth - that makes us - well, human. Then what of the Ego - that tower we build for ourselves, which - so rarely do we have any say in the building of - it is built for us, by everyone I have mentioned and more besides, we are really prisoners, look from the highest window you can find and see yourself surrounded, everyone within their fleshy cell, each their own survivor, a prodigy of evolution, a miracle of chance, and not one of them with even a glimmer of self awareness.
It is time. Tear down the tower or build a bridge.