Who are we?.. more specifically who are you?

When you think of who you are, what comes to mind? Your name? your occupation? your family connections? family relationships? your body? Think about it and you realize that you are more than these and more than what you see in the mirror. When you say this is "my" body, who is the "my"who is making this claim?

There is "the living you" and the "non living" you not merely in the biological sense but in a deeper, spiritual context. The ability to think forms the basis of your feelings, emotions and awareness. These are the functions of "the living" you, the you who also has the ability to judge right from wrong, truth from falsehood, reality from illusion, create desires and retain memory. If you relate the qualities of the "living you" to material objects around you see the vast difference - they can perform none of these functions. But is your body different to these material objects? None of your physical organs, such as hands or feet, eyes or ears or even head have the faculties of thought. There is something apart from these organs that does these things.

Let us take an example. Whatever action I perform , although I may use various instruments, I am totally separate from them. For instance when I use a knife with my hands to chop a vegetable, throughout the exercise the knife makes no decisions. If I lose concentration and cut a finger with the knife, neither the finger or the knife become emotionally disturbed - they are purely instruments. It is easy for us to see the knife as an instrument, but we are so attached to our hands, that it is very difficult to dissociate from them and realize that they too are only instruments and really nothing more than this, I have had a pair of hands for as long as I have had this body , and I know they are the only pair I will get. So not only personal attachment to my hands, but to the whole of my physical body, is something so deep, so intense, that I have totally forgotten my real identity.

I am "the living", I am not the physical. I know that I am not because I can experience things beyond physical limitation. My body cannot go back to childhood, but I can. My mind can race forward to the days of my possible old age . Past or future both are equally easy for me to travel in. I can travel through the three aspects of time and travel across any distance in a split-second as my thoughts carry me across the oceans and continents. So my body is physical, I am not physical.

I am metaphysical, unhindered by the physical limitations of body, time or distance.

Also I am definitely invisible. A mirror shows my my bodily features, the color of my eyes but these exterior things tell me little about my real self. I, the being within this physical frame, am invisible. So I know that I am metaphysical and invisible - but what else is there about me - and, Am I eternal?