The “I” we think we are

Sixteen years ago, I went into silence with a question:

What can I change within myself so I can experience the joy within?

I didn’t have a roadmap.

I didn’t know where the question would take me. I only knew that the desire to experience that joy had become so intense that I was willing to look honestly at whatever within me stood in the way.

I wanted to understand what I could change—not in the world around me, but within myself.

At first, I thought the journey was about changing myself so I could reach joy. But as I looked more deeply, the question itself began to change.

It became:

Who am I?

I wasn’t looking for an intellectual answer. I was looking for something deeper than an idea—something I could know directly.

And somewhere in that intensity, something happened that I still struggle to put into words.

I wasn’t given an answer.

I met something that could not be described.

Because the moment I try to describe it, I turn it into an object. And the moment it becomes an object, there is a “me” looking at “it.” The mind can then spend forever analyzing, defining, comparing and reasoning—and still never arrive at what it is looking for.

So I can only tell you what it felt like to return from it.

In that moment, nothing of me as I had known myself remained.

The “I” I had spent my entire life identifying as—the body, the mind, the five senses, the intellect, my thoughts, emotions, feelings and sensations, my stories, my wounds, my accomplishments, my intelligence, my relationships, my family, my roles, my successes, my failures, my pain, my suffering, my country, my world—none of it was there.

Not because any of it had been destroyed.

But because, for that moment, none of it was necessary to define what I was.

Even the word eternity seemed inadequate.

And then I came back.

Back into this body.

Back into the mind.

Back into the intellect.

Back into the five senses.

Back into the woman I had always known myself to be.

The return was not a rejection of the life I had lived. It was a return to that life with a different understanding of what it meant.

It was almost like stepping back into a movie.

Except something had changed.

I could see the character I was playing without believing that I was only the character.

I had chosen—or perhaps simply found myself living in—this woman’s body, playing all these different roles: daughter, wife, mother, friend, professional, member of a family, a society, a culture.

And I would continue to play these roles for as long as I was here.

But I had returned with something I hadn’t brought with me when I entered the silence:

a knowing.

Not knowledge.

Not something I had learned.

A knowing that seemed to exist before thought.

It was as though I had come back with a new set of eyes.

Not physical eyes.

The eyes of my own inner wisdom.

That knowing also changed the way I understood my search for joy. I had entered the silence wanting to discover what I could change within myself. I returned sensing that the joy I was seeking might not be something I needed to create at all.

And that realization humbled me deeply.

Because I hadn’t grown up with a particular religious path I felt I had to follow.

I grew up in a Hindu family. My grandfather would read the teachings of the Sikh Gurus, meditate and chant Gurbani. I went to temples, mosques, gurdwaras and other holy places.

But somewhere underneath all of that, even as a child, there had been a quiet knowing within me.

I knew it was there.

I just didn’t know what to call it.

As I grew up, I seemed to lose touch with it.

Life became louder.

The roles became bigger.

The responsibilities multiplied.

And the voice of that knowing became quieter.

Until silence brought me back to it.

The experience did not give me a belief system. It gave me a direct recognition—one that was difficult to explain but impossible to dismiss.

And even then, I couldn’t explain it.

How do you share something that cannot be seen?

How do you describe something when every word you use becomes smaller than the experience itself?

There were no words for it—and yet somehow all words seemed to arise within it.

There was no feeling that could contain it—because all feelings seemed to arise within it.

The mind couldn’t comprehend it—because the mind itself was within it.

The body couldn’t feel it as an object—because the body itself arose within it.

The intellect couldn’t define it—because definition requires separation.

And suddenly I saw something that continues to transform the way I live:

Perhaps everything I have been looking for is already holding everything I am.

Why Did I Get to Taste It?

Once I had glimpsed that possibility, another question naturally arose:

Why did I get to taste it?

I’ve asked myself this many times.

Was it because of everything my mind, body and intellect had accomplished?

No.

Because none of those things had satisfied the hunger I carried.

The hunger was older.

I remembered the joy I had experienced as a child when I had almost nothing—and yet somehow felt completely alive.

That simple joy.

That freedom to just be.

I wanted it back.

So I chose to trust the yearning.

It was so strong, so piercing, that I was willing to look within and change whatever I needed to change to find it.

I remember thinking:

This is all I really want.

Not more things.

Not more accomplishments.

Not more experiences.

Not more approval.

Not even more answers.

I wanted to experience the joy that didn’t depend on any of them.

The silence experience helped me see that this longing was not separate from the question of identity. I had been asking how to become joyful, but underneath that question was another: Who is the one seeking joy, and what is it seeking?

I began to wonder:

What if that joy isn’t something we have to earn?

What if it is our birthright?

What if every human being carries within them the possibility of touching a joy that isn’t dependent on what they accumulate, achieve or become?

Of course, we need things.

We need relationships.

We need accomplishments.

We need experiences.

We need all the beautiful and difficult things that make up a human life.

But there is no natural endpoint to accumulation.

There is always another achievement.

Another experience.

Another role.

Another thing to fix.

Another thing to become.

And I had reached a point in my life where I wanted something different.

I wanted more joy—not more things that promised me joy.

I had no idea where this desire would take me.

There was no roadmap.

And in many ways, I felt completely alone in the journey.

Yet underneath all of it was something remarkably simple:

I wanted to find the simple joy of being alive that I remembered from childhood.

I wanted the freedom to simply be.

I saw glimpses of it in my own home.

I saw it in the eyes of my son.

I saw it in the simple interactions between my husband and my son—their play, their laughter, their ability to be completely present without needing to become anything else.

And I realized how much of that simple presence I had lost while trying to wear so many different hats.

That realization could have led me to reject those roles. Instead, it showed me that the roles themselves were not the problem. The problem was believing they were the whole of who I was.

And yet, I cannot reject any of those hats.

Every role I played brought me here.

Every experience contributed something.

Even the things I once believed were taking me away from myself were somehow becoming part of the path back to myself.

That realization brought an enormous amount of gratitude.

I didn’t want to continue living only from the “I” I had constructed.

So I chose to take a journey inward.

Not away from love.

Not away from my family.

But within love, while still being deeply connected to my family.

My husband and my son gave me something I can never fully repay:

the space to be.

They became my teachers without ever asking to be.

And through them, I began to understand that awakening did not require me to leave ordinary life behind. It required me to see ordinary life differently.

The “I” We Construct

That shift in perspective brought me to a deeper realization about identity.

I came back from silence with a humbling recognition:

I could have lived my entire life believing that the “I” created by my mind was who I truly was.

The truth was always there.

The “I” was never absent.

I simply kept identifying with everything that appeared around it.

And perhaps this is something many of us do.

We begin life with a quiet knowing.

Then we grow.

We learn.

We achieve.

We acquire identities.

We become students, professionals, partners, parents, leaders, caregivers, friends.

We become successful.

We become intelligent.

We become responsible.

We become independent.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, something happens.

The fruits of our lives become our identity.

The accomplishment becomes mine.

The body becomes me.

The thoughts become my thoughts.

The knowledge becomes my knowing.

The role becomes who I am.

And eventually the story becomes:

I am this.
I am that.
This is mine.
This is me.

The roles and identities are real in the human world. They matter. They shape our relationships and responsibilities. But they are not necessarily the whole truth of who we are.

Meanwhile, the quiet knowing that was there before all of these identities remains.

It doesn’t fight us.

It doesn’t demand our attention.

It simply continues to hold the space for us to experience this extraordinary human life.

This is where duality enters the picture. Once we identify with the character, we experience the world through contrast. We divide life into what we want and what we resist, what we call good and what we call bad.

We paint our canvas with our experiences.

Some strokes are beautiful.

Some are painful.

Some are dark.

Some are brilliant.

And because this is a world of duality, we experience both.

Good and bad.

Pleasure and pain.

Success and failure.

Love and loss.

Perhaps even the difficult strokes have a purpose.

Without contrast, would we recognize the beauty of what we call good?

Without darkness, how would we experience light?

Without loss, how would we understand what we cherish?

Duality may not be the problem.

Perhaps duality is the gift that allows us to experience being human.

The challenge is not to eliminate the contrasts, but to stop mistaking them for the entirety of who we are. We can experience pleasure and pain, success and failure, love and loss, while remembering that something deeper is present through all of them.

But then another question arises:

Are we trying to become better because we genuinely want to grow?

Or are we trying to become better because we are comparing our painting to someone else’s?

And underneath that question is an even deeper one:

Who is the “I” that is trying to become better?

Is it the mind?

Is it the intellect?

Is it the body?

Is it the accomplishment?

Is it the academic qualification?

Is it the relationship?

Is it the role?

Is it the story?

Or is there something here that existed before all of these?

Something that was there when you were a child.

Something that may still be quietly there now.

Something that doesn’t need to become anything at all.

Perhaps the invitation isn’t to abandon the life we have created.

Perhaps it is simply to look at it with new eyes.

To enjoy the painting without believing that we are the painting.

To play our roles without forgetting the one who is playing.

To experience the fruits without mistaking the fruits for who we are.

To allow duality to shape the human experience without allowing it to define our deepest identity.

And perhaps, somewhere in that seeing, we begin to remember.

Not who we have become.

But who we have always been.