Who am I anyway?

One of those things I've always tried to determine is who I really am, at my core. There are a lot of things I'd like to believe about myself (intelligent, compassionate), a lot of things I've come to accept about myself (procrastinator, pack-rat), and a lot of things I think are true but wonder if maybe I could be doing more to combat (depression, low energy).

For example, at my most authentic self - am I night person? I think I am, but on weekends I love getting an early start on the day. Do I believe that rich people should pay higher taxes? Well, yeah, because they can afford it, but they worked to make all that money (or were lucky enough to be born into it) so why shouldn't they keep it? Do I want to be a parent or do I just want to keep my options open? Am I sucker who fell for the lie of financial security and the need for health insurance that's too afraid to follow my bliss? Do I believe in a higher power or not? Do I really like reality television but hate myself for it?

My best answer is that today, my beliefs/preferences are A, B, and C, but tomorrow they may be X, Y, and Z, and I'll have to deal with that then. I've never been able to pin myself down - all I can do is look at my patterns. But isn't integrity about being true to yourself and your ideals? I don't even know what mine are!

Yesterday I read this article about a man's experience on a meditation retreat wherein he battled self-loathing so intense it changed his life. The part that struck me follows:

A second aspect of the practice, though, was even more important, and that was seeing the self-hatred for what it really is, not what it is conventionally thought of as being. At first, I interpreted the feelings I was having according to the conventional geology of the self. This is what I felt "deep down." This is was what I "really" believed, despite all the rationale I'd proffered to myself and to others. But that entire geology is a fiction -- deep down inside what? All that was actually present in my experience were different beliefs. One belief (gay is bad) had the character -- the "feeling tone" in Buddhist language -- of being long-held. Another belief (gay is good) didn't, even though I knew it made more sense, and had led me to more happiness and more spiritual capacity. But the former belief wasn't really "deeper" or truer. It was merely its character -- its feeling -- that was being interpreted as "deep."

This was such a critical turning point for me. Of course the guilt felt "deeper" -- it's had thirty years of constant reinforcement, as compared with just a few years of acceptance and understanding. But the "self" in which it felt "deeper" within is itself just a label for a million conditioned phenomena, woven together by consciousness. The self is like a bundle of sticks taken from elsewhere -- "we" are neither any individual stick, nor the string that ties them together. And what you discover in meditation is: there is never any time at which the bundle as a whole does anything. It's always one stick or another. A desire. A fear. A thought. Some will feel deep, some will feel shallow -- but those are just sensations, nothing more.

Have I been digging for phantoms this whole time? Trying to find the core stick in a bundle with no center? Maybe I've been Buddhist all along and just didn't know it!

My struggle with Buddhism involves my firmly entrenched attachment to the "I" that loves John Taylor, Winnie-the-Pooh, and yellow cake with chocolate icing. I like having a couple of boxes of souvenirs of my past to remind me of things I've seen and done and been. I like my overloaded bookshelves. I can't imagine what it would be like to detach from all that makes me me even though I understand that my wanting is the source of my pain. Isn't it also the source of my pleasure?

These are my most recent deep thoughts. I'm now in the throes of Excedrin and Friday afternoon; don't expect anything too weighty anytime soon.