Joe Kou is a person. He is a young Chinese American man alive in the world today. His physical body lives and breathes. He has had experiences such as happiness, sadness, triumph, and suffering. He has had family, friends, enemies, and strangers in his experience of life.
Joe Kou has a job, a place to live, roomates, a dog, has interests and hobbies, and has desires and wishes.
Joe Kou has needs and wants and feelings and emotions. He has thoughts and ideas and beliefs and fears. He has knowledge and opinions. He has relationships and self definitions. He has prejudices and preferences. He has a life and a story, just like everyone else.
And that's the problem. Because like everyone else, Joe Kou is not really alive. And though Joe Kou's body is typing these very words... it is not Joe Kou who is expressing them.
I am not Joe Kou. I am what has always been, and will always remain, long after Joe Kou has died. Joe Kou exists only within the mind. And the mind in and of itself is not truly alive. Nor can the mind survive physical death. Who I am is not of the mind. Who I am is.
Let me repeat that.
WHO I AM, IS. Period.
For a very long time now I had thought that I was Joe Kou. I lived his life. I experienced everything he experienced. And I never doubted that Joe Kou was who I really was... until I discovered that this is simply not the case. Who I am is life. And as life, I have been powering and driving the experience of Joe Kou in this physical body... yet never truly aware of the fact that Joe Kou is nothing more than a program... an autopilot unaware of it's autonomy and believing itself to be alive.
Yeah, hard understand. Harder still to explain.
Here is the perspective I have- There comes a point when a person must die. And when this happens the mind does not survive. It cannot. Because it was never alive to begin with. Everything that was of that mind will be gone, and will only exist in the form of memories in the minds of others. But not everything goes. What remains... what ALWAYS remains... is who you really are. What remains is YOU, as life, undefined and unlimited. And you suddenly realize "Wow... I was never really this person, was I? Nope. Because this person died and yet I'm still HERE."
And yet that's when it hits you like a train... slamming into you unexpectedly and yet with a dreadful familiarity. As if you have been through this before. Not just once. Not just a couple of times. But over the course of aeons of time. Over and over again... living out these "lives" in which you are so engrossed that you believe yourself to be wholly within those once living "persons" and seeing no separation between them and yourself, only to come HERE again, remembering that you had never really been who you are NOW while you were THERE.
Frustrating. What's it all for? What is the point then, if you can't be who you really are while you are in that physical body? What's the point of having to end up here, without your "mind" and without your body, knowing who you are, but unable to experience yourself physically?
Ah... that's where I come in.
I am not Joe Kou. And I am here within and AS this physical body that Joe Kou inhabits. I am HERE, NOW, physically experiencing who and what I really am when Joe Kou is dead. Only... Joe Kou is not dead. Joe Kou, as he exists within the mind, is still alive, and still uses this body. And I am not constantly here... I am here in brief moments of clarity... when I as Joe Kou "shut down" the mind. Not the brain... just the "mind". Gets complicated.
Joe Kou's life is still being lived by this body... he has a job, has his obligations to fulfill, has his relationships and definitions and thoughts and fears... and everytime I let myself as Joe Kou participate in thoughts, feelings, emotions, dramas, and anything else to do with this "mind", I am not HERE as myself... I am HERE as Joe Kou.
Confused? Well, imagine what I'M going through.
This is my process of birthing myself as who I really am here in the physical... and this is my process of STOPPING Joe Kou.
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