There is a question underneath every question you have asked about yourself.
What am I.
You have approached it from the side. What kind of person am I. What do I want. Where do I belong. These are the questions the mind makes when it is afraid to ask the question directly.
Ask it directly, then.
What are you.
The mind will offer a candidate.
I am this body.
Look.
You have the body. You have arms, legs, organs, the soft animal of yourself. The body is real. The body is here.
But you are not the body the way you are the awareness of the body.
The body is something you have, the way you have a shirt, the way you have a name.
Whatever you are is what notices the body.
Not this.
The mind offers another candidate.
I am my thoughts.
Look.
A thought arises. You see it. It passes. Another arises. You see that one too.
You are not the thought, because you can see the thought.
The thoughts are weather. They move across something that does not move.
Not this either.
I am my feelings.
I am my memories.
I am my personality, my history, my preferences, my choices.
Look at each in turn.
The feeling arises. You notice it. You are not the feeling, because the feeling is being noticed.
The memory arrives. It is held in awareness for a moment. You are not the memory. You are what holds it.
The personality is a pattern, observed from somewhere. The history is a story, told by someone. The preferences come and go. The choices belong to a self that is itself part of what is being seen.
Not this. Not this. Not this.
This is the move Shankara taught twelve centuries ago.
Neti neti.
Not this. Not this.
The instruction is to walk through every candidate for what you are, and rule each one out by noticing that you can see it.
The thing being seen is not the seer.
If you can observe it, it is not you.
The body, observed. Not you.
The thoughts, observed. Not you.
The emotions, observed. Not you.
The sense of being a person with a history, observed. Not you.
You may begin to worry that nothing will be left.
That is the point of the exercise.
You walk through the catalog of everything you believed yourself to be, and you find that each thing is something appearing in awareness rather than awareness itself.
When you reach the end of the catalog, the only thing that has not been ruled out is what was doing the ruling out.
And that cannot be ruled out, because to rule it out you would have to observe it.
To observe it, it would have to be in front of you.
It is not in front of you.
It is where you are looking from.
Shankara's word was Brahman. The reality that cannot be objectified.
He said this is what you are.
Not the body. Not the mind. Not the personality. The seamless awareness that all of those appear within.
Most people, hearing this, treat it as a philosophical claim. They say, interesting, but how would I know.
You know by doing the exercise.
You know by walking through the catalog.
Take each candidate. Ask, can I observe this. If you can, it is not you. Move to the next.
You will run out of candidates.
What remains is not a thing.
What remains is the looking.
The looking has no shape.
It has no location, no edges, no contents of its own.
It is what allows shapes to appear.
This was the original meaning of neti neti.
Not a dismissal of the world. Not a rejection of the body or the mind. A precise tool for finding what is left when everything that can be ruled out has been ruled out.
What is left is what you are.
The strange thing is that what is left was here the whole time.
It was here when you were calling yourself the body. It was here when you were calling yourself the mind. It was the awareness in which all the misidentifications were happening.
You did not have to attain it. You only had to stop mistaking it for things that appear within it.
The body still functions.
The thoughts still arise.
The personality still does what personalities do.
None of it goes away.
What changes is that you stop believing any of it is what you are.
You start to live as the space these things happen in.
Sit for a moment now.
Notice the body. Not you.
Notice the thoughts. Not you.
Notice the mood. Not you.
Notice the sense of being someone. Not you.
Notice the noticing.
You cannot notice the noticing as an object. The moment you try, the noticing has slipped behind the trying, and is still what is doing the looking.
The noticing is not in front of you.
You are noticing from where the noticing is.
That is what you are.
Not the body, not the thought, not the feeling, not the self.
The awareness within which all of these appear, which cannot be made into an object, because making it an object would require another awareness to do the looking, and there is no other awareness.
There is only this.
Not this thing. Not that thing. The space all the things are in.
Sources: Adi Shankara, Vivekachudamani (Crest-Jewel of Discrimination), 8th century. The Upanishadic practice of neti neti.