Monthly Archive

Who Am I Really?

Who am I?

I’m a man.
I’m a boy.
I’m a child.
I’m a son, a father, a brother, a cousin, a grandfather, a grandson.

I’m a student, a teacher, an electrician, a cook, a cleaner, a builder, a gardener, a strategist.
I’m a friend, a lover.
I’m a nasty person, a kind person.
I’m a philosopher, a psychologist, a dealer, a smoker, a junkie, a pleasure seeker.
I’m a film-goer, a pensioner, a transplantee, a traveller, a kitchen builder, a rubbish man.
I’m a partner, a divorcee, a linguist, a neighbour, an employee, a boss, a manager.
I’m a wireman, a generous person, a greedy person, a business developer, a director, a salesman, a marketeer.
I’m an author, an administrator, a lorry driver, a cyclist, a Kung-Fu student, a consultant, a householder.
I’m a reader, an analyst, a website designer, a project manager, a pet owner, a clothing designer, a walker.
I’m an artist, a model, a prototype worker, a market stallholder, a team leader, a security man, a cloakroom attendant.
I’m a computer builder, a cleaner, a waiter, a barman, a blogger, a burger cook, a camper.
I’m a hospital porter, an encyclopedia salesman, a seller of leather goods out of a suitcase.
I’m a neighbourhood helper, a prison visitor, a course facilitator.
I’m an examiner, an event manager, a masseur, an information scientist.
I’m a card player, a patient, a crane electrician, a TV-studio builder, a labourer, a demolition worker, a fettler, a mechanic, an estimator, a musician.
I’m a Swiss citizen, an Irish citizen, a world citizen.

I’m me.

And these are only some of the roles I’ve played. There are countless more — some forgotten, some brief, some defining, some that passed like a breath of wind.

So who am I, really?

What I’ve discovered is this: in every one of those roles, in every chapter and every reinvention, I was always me. Something constant has been quietly present through every identity, every mistake, every joy, every direction change.

What is that continuous part?

I am a human being experiencing the gift of life.

That’s it. Simple. Clear. Undeniable.
It isn’t something that can be described fully — it’s something to be lived. To be enjoyed. To be recognised in the space between the first breath and the last.

Between those two breaths, I’ve been given the opportunity to see so many things, meet so many people, and live more lives than one lifetime seems big enough to hold. And the greatest fortune of all is that I learnt, reasonably early, to know who I am.

And for that, I thank the teachings of Prem Rawat, who helped me discover me — not the roles, not the labels, not the stories, but the living presence that has been here all along.

When Deep and Shallow Meet: Understanding Two Ways of Being Human

Some people move through life on the surface, while others live much of their existence inwardly—quietly, deeply, and often alone. Both ways of being are human. Both have their strengths. But when these two types meet, the relationship can become a terrain of misunderstanding, disappointment, and quiet longing. I know this from experience.

It can be disorienting to look around and feel that most people seem “shallow”—not because they are unkind or unintelligent, but because they do not look beneath the surface of life. They keep busy, stay practical, fulfil obligations, navigate routines. They do what needs to be done. Their emotional world moves in the outer lane.

And then there are those who live inwardly. People who reflect, question, listen inside. People who have walked through hardship or solitude long enough to see past appearances. People who know the difference between belief and knowing, between distraction and clarity. People who, like me, have been shaped by years of inner practice—guided by a Master, by breath, by the ongoing process of unlearning illusion.

These two ways of living can coexist, even in intimate relationships, but the meeting is seldom easy.

Two Different Languages of Living

There is the person who thinks, reflects, and sees patterns.
The one who needs meaning more than noise.
Who sees the big picture, the underlying structure, the “why” beneath the “what.”
This person seeks depth—not because it is fashionable, but because it is the only life that feels real.

And then there is the person who lives through action.
The one who shows caring by doing—cleaning, cooking, organising, helping.
The one who keeps life orderly because chaos once hurt them.
Who learned, often through trauma or survival, that emotions are dangerous, and words even more so.

Put these two in one relationship, and you have a conversation where each believes they are saying,
“I care,”
but they speak different languages.

One offers depth.
The other offers service.

Both are sincere.
But sincerity does not automatically translate.

When Depth Feels Alone

For the person who lives internally, relationships rarely reach the level where life actually happens: the place of clarity, silence, meaning, and inner experience. Most people don’t go there—not because they lack intelligence, but because they have never needed to, or because the inner terrain feels unsafe.

This can make the deep person feel alone even when they are not.
It is not loneliness from lack of people; it is the loneliness of being unseen.

The mind asks:
“Where are the others who understand life this way?”
“Why do conversations stay on the surface?”
“Why is it difficult to meet someone who recognises the inner world as the real one?”

This is not arrogance.
It is simply the reality of living at a different depth.

Depth naturally thins the air around you.
Not because you push people away, but because few people breathe that deeply.

When Practicality Feels Misunderstood

For the practical person, depth can feel exhausting or bewildering.
They care just as much, but their caring is rooted in action, not introspection.

Their history taught them:

• to survive by doing

• to protect themselves by staying busy

• to avoid emotional exposure because it once led to hurt

• to show love through small acts rather than words

Their devotion is real, but invisible to those who look for verbal or emotional expression.

When they clean someone’s flat or mend clothes, they are saying,
“You matter.”
They simply don’t say it out loud.

What the deep person yearns to hear, the practical person silently expresses through doing.
And what the practical person needs—peace, routine, stability—can feel limiting or even suffocating to someone who lives inwardly.

Both feel misunderstood.
Both are right.

How These Two Can Still Meet

The bridge is small but real:

1. Accept that depth and practicality are different forms of caring.
One speaks through reflection.
The other speaks through action.

2. Name your needs gently.
A sentence as simple as:
“Sometimes I just need to hear that you care.”
can open a new space without demanding change.

3. Recognise what the other cannot give.
The practical person may never speak the language of depth.
The deep person may never stop reflecting.
Both can still meet in kindness.

4. Value the ways each offers love.
One person brings order and support.
The other brings insight and understanding.
Both are needed.

5. Meet in presence rather than expectation.
Sometimes sitting quietly together can reach further than words or actions.

Relationships between deep and practical people will always be asymmetrical.
But asymmetry is not failure.
It is simply the meeting of two ways of being human.

In the End: Depth Is Not Isolation

Depth often feels like solitude because the path inward is always walked alone.
But it doesn’t mean companionship is impossible.
It simply means we need to recognise how different people express—and hide—their caring.

If we can understand each other’s languages, even imperfectly,
we can meet somewhere in the middle,
in a place where depth respects simplicity,
and simplicity supports depth.

And if that meeting is brief or occasional,
it is still meaningful.

Because even one moment of being truly seen—
and truly seeing another—
is rare enough to be worth the effort.

When Nations Self-Harm: Acting in Haste, Repenting at Leisure, and Forgetting to Heal

We usually reserve the word self-harm for the clinical realm. It describes a person who, in one way or another, knowingly damages their own wellbeing. They may cut themselves, refuse care, or pursue behaviours that worsen their suffering. The defining feature is awareness: they know the behaviour is harmful, but they do it anyway.

I often think this term belongs not only in psychiatry textbooks, but on the desks of whole governments.

Because what else can we call it when nations deliberately act against their own long-term survival? When leaders continue to choose policies that worsen climate change, foster division, weaken social fabric, or push us closer to conflict? These are not mistakes made in ignorance. The evidence has been presented again and again. The consequences are measurable. The warnings are clear.

And yet, the destructive behaviour continues.

The Climate Crisis: A Textbook Case of Self-Harm

Take climate change. We have decades of data, models, and lived experience. We have heatwaves killing thousands, floods destroying homes, and crop failures threatening food security. The science is not controversial. Every major institution on earth, from universities to meteorological services, says the same thing: humans are causing this, and it is accelerating.

If a person understood all this and still insisted on setting their own house on fire, we would call it self-harm.

But when governments subsidise fossil fuels, dismantle environmental protections, encourage short-term profit extraction, and treat climate conferences as theatre rather than responsibility, we call it “policy.”

The truth is much simpler: this is self-harm at the level of nations.

And because nations are not abstract things—because they are made of people—the harm falls on everyone: children, the elderly, families, farmers, workers, the vulnerable. The poorest pay first. The richest pay last. But everyone pays.

Why Governments Act Against Their Own Survival

Why does this happen? Partly because the political system rewards acting in haste. Snap decisions, slogans instead of thinking, and policies crafted for the next election rather than the next generation. A leader who promises immediate gratification is more popular than one who urges long-term discipline.

Very little in modern politics encourages maturity.

Another reason is fear. Real, unspoken fear. Fear of being blamed. Fear of losing control. Fear of admitting that the old way is no longer working. So governments cling to the familiar, even when the familiar is killing them.

And then there is ideology—the modern equivalent of superstition. Once a political tribe has decided that climate change is exaggerated, or that environmental regulation is “anti-growth,” or that cooperation is weakness, then facts no longer matter. Denial becomes a badge of identity.

From the outside, it looks irrational.

From the inside, it feels safe.

But it is still self-harm.

“Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure”

The old saying “Act in haste, repent at leisure” perfectly captures our collective moment. Nations act quickly and carelessly—rolling back hard-won protections, deregulating whatever stands in the way of profit, stirring up division for short-term political gain. Years later, after the damage has accumulated, they produce large reports titled “Lessons Learned.”

This is the repentance phase. But repentance alone is not healing.

Healing requires something deeper: honestly examining why we made the harmful choice in the first place.

A person who self-harms does not heal by saying, “I’ll never do that again.” They heal by understanding what drove them to do it. They heal by facing their own pain, their own confusion, their own fear. They heal through honesty and compassion, not performance.

Nations need the same process.

But nations rarely stop long enough to reflect. The next crisis arrives, the next election looms, and the cycle repeats.

The Missing Element: Healing

So much of modern public life is about reaction. One outrage follows another. Policies swing back and forth like a pendulum. Anger replaces thought. Noise replaces clarity. Fear replaces cooperation.

Healing is the opposite.
Healing is slow.
Healing demands humility.
Healing requires patience, and listening, and the courage to admit error.

Healing means acknowledging the humanity of those we see as enemies or opponents. Healing means remembering that we all live on the same small, fragile sphere, suspended in an endless night. Healing means recognising that the air I breathe is the same air you breathe, and that politics cannot change the physics of the atmosphere.

Healing also requires a basic maturity that is often missing from leadership. An adult understands consequences. An adult can say “enough.” An adult resists the impulse to lash out. An adult recognises that problems shared become easier to solve.

But we live in a time when many leaders behave like frightened children—angry, impulsive, blaming others, pretending to be strong while acting from fear. It is no surprise that destruction follows.

When fear is running the show, healing becomes impossible.

Where Have All the Adults Gone?

I sometimes wonder where the adults have gone. The ones who can look beyond the next news cycle. The ones who can sit in a room with those they disagree with and still work toward a solution. The ones who recognise that leadership is not theatre, but responsibility.

We need adults not in age, but in consciousness. People who value reality over ideology, cooperation over pride, healing over dominance.

The young—by which I mean the immature, not the literal youth—are intoxicated by destruction. It is quick, dramatic, and easy. Building, healing, and understanding require effort. Understanding requires presence. Healing requires courage.

Destruction requires none of these.

A Call for Collective Healing

Perhaps the first step toward healing is honesty: calling self-harm what it is. Naming the behaviour. Recognising the pattern. Every day we delay serious action on climate and conflict, we increase the bill for the future.

Healing begins when we recognise that our neighbour’s wellbeing is connected to our own. It begins when we see beyond borders, tribes, and parties. It begins when we understand that “acting in haste” is no longer a private mistake but a global threat, and that “repenting at leisure” is not enough.

Healing is the missing ingredient, the path we have not taken. It is still available. But it asks something from us: maturity.

The adults need to return to the room.

Or perhaps, more honestly, we need to become them.

When Conscience Falls Silent: On Cruelty, History, and the Loss of Our Humanity

There are moments when the news becomes almost impossible to watch. Reports of torture, arbitrary detention, humiliation, and the systematic destruction of homes in Gaza appear day after day. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened. Families who once lived ordinary lives now live under tents, or not at all. The scale of suffering is staggering — and yet what troubles me equally is the silence that surrounds it.

In the West Bank, settler violence continues with near-total impunity. Villages are attacked, olive groves burned, farmers beaten, children terrified in the night. Today, settlers destroyed a mosque — another act meant to erase the fabric of a people’s cultural and spiritual life. These are not isolated incidents; they are part of a pattern repeatedly documented by human rights organisations and even by Israeli veterans’ groups. And yet, from most political and religious institutions, there is barely a murmur. It is as if the truth has become too inconvenient to acknowledge.

The scale of the cruelty is so severe that one’s natural reaction is to ask:
What kind of human being behaves this way?
In moments of deep frustration, the word “animals” comes to mind — not because these people literally become animals, but because the behaviour has lost the qualities that make us recognisably human.

Animals follow instinct.
Human beings, at their best, follow conscience.

When a person acts without conscience — deliberately harming, humiliating, or destroying — they lose touch with their own humanity. They remain human in biological form, but something essential has gone missing. The compassion that defines us, the awareness that binds us, the inner moral compass that prevents cruelty — all of it collapses. What remains is a human body driven by something far darker than instinct.

As Prem Rawat often reminds us:

You can look like a human being and still live without the qualities that make life human.

This loss of inner humanity has nothing to do with gender. Reports indicate that a woman has been leading some of the settler attacks. Cruelty does not discriminate by sex; when conscience collapses, any human being — man or woman — can become capable of terrible harm. The tragedy lies not in what we are biologically, but in what we choose to become.

What touches me most deeply is the historical echo. Many of the grandparents of today’s settlers endured persecution in Europe. Some were forced from their homes, stripped of their rights, pushed into ghettos, and treated as though their lives had no value. They knew displacement, fear, and the quiet terror of being at the mercy of others.

And now, three generations later, some of their descendants inflict on others behaviours that bear a haunting resemblance to what their own families once endured. This is not a claim of equivalence — history is more complex than that — but the resemblance in attitude, the willingness to deny others dignity, is unmistakable and profoundly tragic.

Perhaps even more shocking is that none of this can be justified by religion. If anything, the ethical foundations of Judaism stand firmly against such behaviour. The Mosaic laws forbid the oppression of the stranger, the theft of land, the mistreatment of the vulnerable, and the humiliation of another human being. These laws are clear, direct, and uncompromising in their moral vision.

This is therefore not a failure of Judaism.
It is a failure of people who invoke religious identity while acting in direct contradiction to the ethical heart of their own tradition.

What troubles me further is the silence of major institutions.
Not silence from individuals — because many Jewish voices around the world speak out with great integrity and courage — but silence from those with real influence: senior religious leaders, large communal organisations, and political bodies that could say, plainly and publicly, “This is wrong. This violates everything we stand for.” But most remain quiet.

And silence becomes a form of permission.

On the misuse of the word “antisemitism”

Because this topic has become so distorted, it must be said clearly: none of this is antisemitism. Antisemitism means hostility or prejudice toward Jews as Jews. What I am addressing here is not identity but behaviour — behaviour that violates human rights, international law, and the ethical foundations of Judaism itself. In recent years, the word “antisemitism” has been stretched and misused to include any criticism of Israel, no matter how grounded in evidence or moral concern. This distortion serves no one. It dilutes the meaning of real antisemitism and shields injustice from scrutiny by turning legitimate criticism into a taboo. Criticising cruelty is not bigotry. Remaining silent in the face of cruelty is not morality.

When cruelty becomes normalised, when injustice becomes routine, and when a whole population is treated as if their suffering does not matter, something essential in our shared humanity begins to erode. When people who know better choose to remain silent, the harm spreads more easily.

This is not a uniquely Israeli failing, nor a Jewish failing, nor a Middle Eastern failing.
It is a human failing.
History shows that whenever nationalism, ideology, or fear overwhelm compassion, any group — however persecuted in the past — can become the oppressor in the present.

Which brings me back to the question:
What are we when we lose our humanity?

We are human only in shape, not in spirit.
We are capable of cruelty without conscience, destruction without reflection, and violence without remorse. And that is far more dangerous than anything an animal could ever be.

If there is a lesson in this painful moment, it is not to condemn a people, but to condemn the behaviours that diminish the humanity of both those who suffer and those who inflict suffering. The moral duty — for anyone who still listens to conscience — is to refuse silence, to speak plainly, and to remember what it means to be human in the first place.

The world does not need more identity.
It needs more humanity — urgently.