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Lt Gen Narendra Kotwal
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When you ask, “What am I?”, you are asking a question that is deeper than every biography, every title, every relationship, and every achievement, because all of these are context-dependent. In one moment you are a son, in another a sibling, friend, uncle, teacher, student, doctor, patient, helper, being helped, director, financer, landlord, tenant-each identity valid, each necessary, yet none final. They arise when time, place, and relationship “call” them into existence, and they dissolve when the context changes. This is the first doorway of wisdom, the self you can describe is always a self in motion, a role-self. But then the mind naturally takes the next step: if all these are changing masks, who is the one that wears them? What is the “I” that remains when every label is removed?
Scriptural and philosophical traditions converge on a radical claim: the deepest “I” is not a role, not even the body-mind bundle, but the essential self, the Atman or soul-principle, described in Advaita Vedanta as pure consciousness that is ultimately not separate from Brahman, the absolute reality. Roles are not denied; they are seen as temporary expressions-useful, meaningful, and yet not ultimate, much like waves that rise and fall on the ocean of being. The existential punchline of this view is not intellectual but experiential: the goal is the recognition, “Aham Brahmasmi”, not as arrogance, but as the dissolving of mistaken identity, the realisation that the core “I” is not confined to a name, a profession, a family tree, or even a lifespan. Greek philosophy, in its own language, also points beyond the body: Plato’s psyche is not merely physical; it belongs to a higher order of reality and only temporarily inhabits the sensory world. Monotheistic theology similarly anchors identity not in performance but in intrinsic worth: you are a creation of God, endowed with a unique soul and purpose; your value is not a function of success, status, or applause. In these scriptural frames, the deepest self is not something you earn; it is something you remember.
Now enter science, not as a replacement for scripture, but as another lens that can refine contemplation. From an evolutionary perspective, what you call “I” is also a dynamic process: a self-organising biological system shaped by roughly four billion years of continuous adaptation. Your nervous system constructs a stable sense of identity to coordinate survival, social belonging, prediction, and meaning-making. Many of your “roles” are not random; they are strategies of a social species-ways of creating cohesion, trust, reciprocity, and protection within a group. In this view, the self is partly a model generated by the brain: a living narrative that updates moment by moment. This is not a reduction of your dignity; it is a clarification that the role-self is an interface, immensely useful, but not necessarily ultimate. And once you see “self as model,” a doorway opens again: the model is known. Who is the knower? The question returns, sharper and more intimate.
Quantum physics, used honestly, does not “prove” spirituality, but it offers metaphors powerful enough to break rigid thinking. Consider wave-particle duality as a language of identity. Your relative self, the one seen in action is like the particle aspect: when you interact with a patient, a colleague, a sibling, you appear as a definite, localised, measurable role. In a hospital you are “doctor”; at home you are “parent”; in solitude you are neither, and yet you remain. Beneath the role-collapse is a deeper field of possibility, like a wave function containing the potential for countless expressions. The out-of-the-box insight is not that you are a wave or a particle, but that you are the conscious principle that can move from potential to expression, from silence to speech, from stillness to service. Whether one takes this as metaphor or mystery, it trains a valuable humility, what we see is not the whole of what is.
This brings us to the most radical, most practical answer-one that meditation reveals directly and philosophy merely points toward: you are the Observer, the witnessing awareness, the “gap” in which thoughts arise and pass. Roles come and go; thoughts come and go; emotions change; the body ages; the biography accumulates; the world shifts, yet there is a strange continuity: the fact of being aware has not aged. From childhood to this moment, content has changed, but the capacity to know experience has remained. If everything you can point to is observed, body sensations, memories, fears, pride, labels-then the observer cannot be any of those observed things. This is why the sages say neti, neti-not this, not this-not to negate life, but to arrive at the unnegatable: the one who knows.
Vedic mathematical imagination offers a stunning metaphor for this. Think of Shunya (zero). Zero is “nothing” by itself, yet it grants place value and meaning to digits; it is the silent power that allows numbers to scale infinitely. In the same way, your roles are like digits-1, 2, 5, 9-valuable, functional, but their “value” depends on position and context. The deeper “I” is like the zero: it has no fixed attributes of its own, yet it is the enabling ground in which all attributes appear. Without this zero-self, roles would be mere events with no experiencer; with it, every role becomes a meaningful expression rather than a prison. The most liberating implication is this: you do not need to destroy roles to find truth; you only need to stop mistaking roles for your identity.
So, what are you? In a complete perspective, your existence has a dual aspect. On one level, you are the relative self: roles, body, mind, history, context-temporary, changing, relational, “particulate.” On a deeper level, you are the absolute self: pure awareness, Atman, the witness, the ground of being-unchanging, independent, wave-like potential, the “zero” that makes all digits meaningful. The spiritual life is not an escape from the relative; it is the art of holding both truths without confusion. You honour the relative self through dharma, doing your roles with kindness, competence, integrity, and compassion. You honour the absolute self through realisation, shifting your centre of gravity from the changing contents of life to the changeless awareness that knows life.
To live this, you don’t need a new belief; you need a daily alignment. Let the role be performed beautifully, but let the performer rest in the witness. Let the world see your titles, but let your inner being know: I am not merely what the world calls me; I am that in which the world appears. And from that inner anchoring, something extraordinary becomes ordinary: service without ego, love without possession, leadership without insecurity, success without intoxication, loss without collapse. In that maturity, the question “What am I?” stops being a philosophical riddle and becomes a living answer: I am awareness expressing itself as responsible humanity-an evolving form rooted in the eternal.
