How do you know?

“But how do you know?” the man kept insistently asking, “How do you know!”
I was at St. James Church, Piccadilly, in the heart of London last night to hear Simon Parke talking about living in the present. Simon had been speaking about what we are not: not our passing thoughts and emotions, not our worries and resentments and anger, not our plans for the future, not the roles we assume (husband, wife, athlete, hairdresser, executive and so on). So what are we and how do we know it? You could hear and feel the man’s anxiety in the aggressive and insistent repetition of his question. Perhaps like most of us he had always been able to identify himself with the things we can know about ourselves. We can build a personality and identity out of these things that we know. We can even measure some of them: I am chief executive of this company and I earn this much per year and I can afford this house. Other things we know about ourselves are intangible and even sometimes dangerous to us and to people around us. ‘I am this poor little person who is always downtrodden’. ‘I am this invalid’, this ‘hard man not to be trifled with’, this expert in some field or other, even this expert in myself.

But suppose we are not, essentially, any of these things. Most of them are only semi-permanent anyway: some are mere fleeting shadows. Suppose I am not anything – any ‘thing’!

Suppose I simply AM?! Suppose this is what Jesus was getting at when he said, “Whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life will find it.”

‘Who am I?’ is the question human beings have been asking ever since we became self-conscious. Cogito, ergo sum, is the answer the philosopher Descartes came up with: “I think, therefore I am.” Simon Parke was inviting us to approach that ultimate question from the standpoint of Jesus. Underneath all the thinking is a deeper more fundamental reality. The problem is actually talking about it which is why it is easier, and safer, to talk about what it is not. Have the courage to keep stripping away all that we think we are and the result is not (or not necessarily) a hopeless empty nihilism. It does involve emptiness, but a hopeful, creative kind of emptiness. The address of this blog is www.spacesilencestillness. Keep stripping away what we know and we find a spacious stillness. That’s who we are.