The "Who Am I" Question

  The “Who am I?” question is the most important question you can ask because the answer to that question describes the soil—your identity (the real YOU)—that must be prepared for any planting that will be done in your life. When it comes to the values you hold and the behaviors you practice, with patience and perseverance, you can always find the most answers within yourself or your immediate family. But the “Who am I?” question—the question related to the essence of your existence—has external answers. In other words, you cannot look within yourself to discover who you are. Your own internal explorations will yield only your values at best, but will not disclose the compass by which you travel in life. Your notion of your own identity is learned from others outside yourself.

   Many external voices are telling you who you are: your family, the schools you attended, your religious institutions, and advertising and commercial messages, to name just a few of the myriad voices that scream every day into your ears that you are what they say you are. So the real challenge is finding the external voice that tells you the whole truth, the objective, unembellished, certain, there’s nothing-in-it-for-the-truth-teller truth. To be the voice of truth, this voice must speak based on irrefutable laws of nature—laws that have the same weight as the laws of gravity, physics, and mathematics.