Better to Ask 'Who' Than 'Why' - 8th January 2018

How many of you noticed how much the mind enjoys the 'why' quest? It just loves it. Why is this happening to me? Why? I mean, why is it like this? Why am I not getting it? The three letters, the W-H-Y. And it completely abhors the 'who' question. Just one alphabet is different, and it is completely attracted to this 'why' question and completely repelled by this 'who' question.

Why is it? Why is anything? Consciousness looking for phenomenal answers about phenomenal things, and the only cause of all things is consciousness itself. It sounds like a strange answer, I know. Usually, those who hear it from me in satsang, when they say, 'Why is this happening to me?' I say, 'Consciousness.' If the correlation is not found, but it is the only answer. The only cause of our lives and all the effects are also experienced in consciousness itself.

So the invitation, I tremble on Ramana Maharshi onwards, is to ask 'who' instead of 'I, me, me.' Because until we clarify who we are, the 'whys' of this life really don't make sense. And we've tried this often, haven't we? You've made conceptual frameworks about things which will make our life work, and we see that something starts poking and the whole thing comes down like a house of cards. Then we start fresh again. When we rebuild, you say, 'Now this is going to work for me.' Like he was saying, 'I went to a previous master, now am I on the right track now?' So we're building, and these frameworks don't work. The so-called knowledge that we have about running our life, it doesn't work because it's only conceptual.

So we're moving away from conceptual knowledge, which is just belief actually, just opinion. We have many opinions about things, but what do we truly know? We don't even know—and we can say this for most of disappearing humanity—we don't even know who we are. The 'who' question is very useful now. I would say if it is at all possible for you to prioritize it over the 'why' question for some time, you'll find that a lot of clarity will come because the 'why' question is dependent on a presumption of 'me,' and the 'who' question will lead to clarity about who you are.

The only confusion ever is the confusion about mistaken identity. It can sound too overarching, and I say this, try this for some time and you'll see that beyond, behind every confusion, there is a mistaken identity about who I am. And what is the conclusion? It is suffering. 'Why did he do this to me? Why did she do this to me? How could I have done that to them?' All our grievances, great guilt or resentment, false ideas of doership, the idea of desire—if you ask ourselves 'Who am I?' then you will see that the 'why' answer cannot really be given in words.