Episode 379: You Cannot Know What You Are

What are you?

A human being? A body? A personality? A collection of memories, experiences, beliefs, and conditioning?

Perhaps you’ve gone deeper than that. Perhaps you would say you are awareness. Consciousness. The witness. The observer. The presence in which everything appears.

But how do you know?

In this episode of The Alpha Male Coach Podcast, Kevin takes the inquiry one step beyond the familiar spiritual answers and into a much more unsettling possibility:

You cannot know what you are.

Everything you ordinarily call “me” can be known.

Your name is known. Your history is known. Your memories are known. Your personality, thoughts, emotions, sensations, desires, fears, and beliefs are all known. Even the body itself appears as something experienced.

So what knows them?

And before the mind answers “consciousness,” “awareness,” “the Self,” “God,” or “the witness,” the inquiry goes deeper:

How do you know that?

Because the moment an answer appears, that answer is known too.

Using the analogy of a knife that can cut anything except itself, Kevin explores the fundamental limitation hidden within our search for self-knowledge. Knowledge works beautifully when there is something to be known. But can the knower ever become its own object? Can that which knows experience step outside itself, turn around, and know itself in the same way it knows a thought, sensation, body, or tree?

Perhaps the problem isn’t that you haven’t found the correct answer.

Perhaps the problem is the assumption that there must be an answer at all.

This episode challenges not only ordinary identity but spiritual identity as well. “I am consciousness” may be a more sophisticated answer than “I am my personality,” but it can still become another belief - another concept the mind possesses and another identity it protects.

The invitation here is different.

Don’t believe.

Don’t conclude.

Look.

And when the mind finally arrives at the words it has spent a lifetime avoiding - I don’t know - don’t rush to escape them.

That may be where the real inquiry begins.

The episode concludes with the parable of a woman searching through a room filled with thousands of mirrors for the one reflection that will finally reveal what she truly is. Eventually, she discovers a magnificent golden mirror labeled Pure Consciousness and believes her search is complete.

Until an old caretaker points out one simple fact:

That’s still a mirror.

There is a door behind her.

And what lies beyond it cannot be given to her as another answer - because the moment it is, she may simply paint that answer on another mirror.

What is it that makes you conscious?

What are you?

Don’t answer.

Just open the door.