Eric Knickerbocker
August 23, 2000
Who am I? Such a simple question: such a profoundly difficult one to answer. I could tell you that my name is Eric Knickerbocker, but that would only be my name. I could tell you that I would like to become a professional author and that I have strong linguistic skills and an artistic flair. But these are merely reflections of who I am: gifts I possess and talents I have perfected. I suppose I must start by telling you what I am.
I am a human being. As such, I have several distinctive and inseparable parts. There is my physical side: namely my body with all its many tangible parts. This is not really me, though on this side of the great veil I couldn’t survive without it. You may as well say that this body is merely a suit that houses the real me. But who is the real me?
I have a second side to my being, a mental side that consists of intangible things such as my thoughts, feelings, emotions, knowledge, and wisdom—in short all the things that I have ever thought, experienced, known, or felt. Yes, this side relies on my physical side, my outer shell, to interface with the outer world. In many ways this is the real me, but this answer is still not adequate. What fuels this side of me? What empowers my ability to think, feel, and know? What makes me who I am?
There is one more side yet, and this side is the most enigmatic of them all, the most mystical and complex aspect of my being. Some would even argue that it does not exist as what is not readily tangible or visible does not easily yield to analysis. And what might this element be? This is my deepest facet, the core that holds all the rest of me together—it is my spiritual side. This is the side that surfaces in my dreams, the side that understands with intuition, the side that bridges the gap between the physical world and the spiritual world, the side that sets me above and apart from animals.
I have a strange longing—every human does—for something more. As C.S. Lewis once suggested, it would be a terrible irony if the universe could spawn creatures whose mere longings were more complex and compelling than itself. No, where there is a longing there is always the quest to fill it. Nearly every religion professes that there is something more to life. Perhaps that is the answer—perhaps there is nothing on earth to fill that longing—perhaps the answer lies beyond and within.
Heartache and trauma tax the soul, and we quickly feel old before our time. Yet the hope of a brighter tomorrow still lingers.
Something deep within continues to flicker, whispering that there must be more.
Unless we end it all in a moment of emotional weakness and irrationality, the will to live goes on after the joy of living is gone. It would seem the creature had a hope of something more, a kind of a vague, perhaps uneasy suspicion that either it was a terrible joke or else there absolutely has to be more.
This is the spiritual dimension: the human soul. This is the enigmatic element that encompasses the entire being. It gives us the very life with which we live, it is the very essence of being alive, it is life itself. It enables everything else, causing the bodily machinery to spring to life, enabling consciousness, understanding, intelligence—ultimately our very state of being and sense of identity.
What am I? I am a spiritual being living in a physical body. Who am I? I am a discrete conscious soul: a creature that hurts, a creature that loves, a creature that thinks, a creature that longs for something more.
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