You’ve spent your life crafting beliefs and opinions about yourself that are not solid. They’re not even your own. Your most fundamental thoughts and feelings, the building blocks of your identity, didn’t originate from you.

Everything that’s shaped who you are; your upbringing, your teachers, your friends, the songs whose lyrics you know by heart, your adult social circles, the brands you’ve bought into, your political leanings, the laws you follow, and even the historical and philosophical teachings that have painted your views. All of these things have converged to form a complex personality that you call “you,” making it nearly impossible to separate yourself from this amalgamation of influences.

All of that information doesn’t just disappear. It gets stored in your subconscious, influencing how you think and feel. Many of your memories aren’t exact replicas of events but are modified by your current mental and emotional context, filled in by your subconscious. These memories evolve and degrade over time, filled in by your own fears and desires. These are the altered memories that guide your actions and form the basis of your identity.

Stolen novel; please report.

Your ego, then, is a compilation of all these external influences, combined with your memories and experiences. It’s not really you, in a holistic sense. So who, or what, are you?

Beyond the multiple layers of personality and ego, there is an indefinable something, an essence. This is the true source of your existence, a force that operates within the confines of your physical body, but isn’t limited by it. It is pure awareness. It is “love”.

The end