Creating Who I Am

Participating in the Person I Am Becoming

In the previous chapter, Who Am I?, I explored the forces that produced the person called Scott.

My DNA contributed something. My family contributed something. Mormonism, culture, relationships, successes, failures, losses, circumstances, and the accumulated choices of earlier versions of me all participated.

I did not create those starting conditions.

I did not choose the body I entered, the temperament I inherited, the family that raised me, or the worldview that first explained my existence. Much of who I became was already taking shape before I possessed the awareness required to examine it.

That raises another question.

Once I become aware of what has created me, can I participate more consciously in what I become next?

I think I can.

Not with absolute freedom. Not as the sole author of myself. But as a participant in the authorship.

When Awareness Enters the Process

For much of life, patterns simply move through us.

A fear appears, and we react.

A belief is repeated, and we accept it.

Someone threatens our identity, and we defend it.

Something does not happen as expected, and we become angry with reality for refusing to follow our plan.

The pattern may feel like a choice because it occurs inside us. Yet often it is an inherited or conditioned response executing itself before we recognize what is happening.

Then awareness enters.

I notice that I am afraid.

I recognize that my interpretation is not necessarily the event itself.

I see that my desire to be right may be protecting an identity rather than seeking truth.

I feel an impulse without immediately turning it into an action.

Nothing magical has happened. I have not escaped biology, conditioning, or causation. But the system has begun observing itself.

The creation begins participating in the creative process.

Awareness introduces feedback. What was previously automatic becomes visible, and what becomes visible may become adjustable.

Psychology and neuroscience use the term metacognition for our capacity to monitor and evaluate our own thinking. That research offers a grounded description of part of what I experience as awareness observing itself. It does not establish that this awareness is a soul, but it does confirm that self-observation is a meaningful and measurable human capacity.

That may be the practical beginning of freedom.

Not freedom from every influence.

Freedom through becoming conscious of more influences—and therefore recognizing more possible responses.

Philosophers call one possible reconciliation of causation and meaningful agency compatibilism: the view that some form of freedom may coexist with a causally ordered world. I do not claim that compatibilism settles the question, but its central intuition resembles my own—being influenced is not necessarily the same as being helpless.

Who Is Making the Choice?

There are moments when it feels as though awareness itself is choosing through me.

At other times, it feels as though the person called Scott is deliberately using awareness to make a choice.

Perhaps both descriptions contain part of the truth.

Awareness may be the larger field in which choice becomes possible, while my individual participation determines how that possibility is expressed through this particular life.

I cannot identify the precise boundary between the observer and the person being observed. Nor can I prove that the observer is something separate from the brain.

I can only report the experience.

When I am unconscious of my motives, they tend to carry me.

When I become aware of them, I sometimes gain room to respond differently.

The more aware I become, the more consciously I involve my choices in my creation.

This does not make me the sole author of myself.

It makes me a participant in the authorship.

Humility and Gratitude

There is a spoonful of humility in that participation.

I did not create the materials from which I am made. I did not choose every circumstance that shaped me. I cannot see the whole design, and I do not fully understand the forces moving through me.

Any claim that I independently created myself would give my ego far too much credit.

But alongside that humility is a cupful of gratitude.

I am grateful for the opportunity to experience creation from within it.

I am grateful that awareness can notice itself, question itself, and become more deliberate in how it responds.

I am grateful that life is not merely something happening around me. It is something I can meet with attention, intention, curiosity, and care.

I may not control what arrives.

But I can sometimes influence what happens inside me after it arrives—and what I send back into the world.

I Create With What Arrives

Reality continually introduces materials I did not request.

A relationship changes.

A business struggles.

A loved one dies.

A frightening diagnosis appears.

A conversation awakens an old insecurity.

A beautiful morning offers an unexpected sense of peace.

These experiences become raw material.

I cannot always choose the material, but I can sometimes choose the attention I give it, the meaning I attach to it, the action that follows it, and the pattern that action strengthens.

That distinction is central to The Meaning We Give Things. Events affect us, but the mind also interprets them—and those interpretations influence what we do next.

The next choice then becomes part of the person making the choice after that.

If I repeatedly answer fear with avoidance, avoidance becomes easier.

If I repeatedly answer uncertainty with curiosity, curiosity becomes more available.

If I practice retaliation, I strengthen the person who retaliates.

If I practice pausing, listening, and responding with greater intelligence and love, I strengthen the person capable of doing those things.

Those choices ripple outward into other lives, but they also ripple inward. I explore the outward movement in The Ripple of Choice. The inward movement is equally important:

Every choice helps train the chooser.

I do not create myself from nothing.

I create with what arrives.

Is Creation Already Complete?

My current philosophy introduces another possibility.

Perhaps nothing is being created in the absolute sense. Perhaps creation already exists in a form that our experience of time does not allow us to perceive.

What we call creation may be our moment-by-moment experience of moving through what already exists—as though it were new because it is new to us.

We experience the unfolding as possibility, discovery, surprise, and becoming. Yet perhaps the beginning, middle, and end coexist from a perspective outside ordinary time.

This resembles—but does not prove—the philosophical position called eternalism, in which past and future are understood as real rather than nonexistent. Other theories hold that only the present exists or that reality grows as events become present. The nature of time remains unsettled, so I use the idea as a possibility rather than a conclusion.

This is one way I imagine the opening of Genesis. The story describes creation as completed and then declares it good. Perhaps our lives are not manufacturing creation from nothing. Perhaps we are consciousness moving through creation, discovering it from within.

That does not make our choices meaningless.

The movie may exist on the reel, but the character still experiences the scene. The road may already cross the landscape, but the traveler still encounters each turn. Possibilities may exist, but consciousness still experiences what becomes actual through attention and choice.

I do not know whether reality works this way.

But the idea allows two seemingly contradictory possibilities to coexist:

Creation may already be whole.

My experience within it may still be genuinely creative.

From One Hundred Into Forgetfulness

Many spiritual models imagine human development as a journey from zero to one hundred.

We begin limited, undeveloped, or spiritually empty. Through obedience, discipline, knowledge, or repeated lifetimes, we attempt to climb toward Godlike consciousness.

But what if the movement is different?

What if we began at one hundred?

Perhaps we began in complete unity with consciousness and then entered limitation, embodiment, separation, and forgetfulness so that we could experience the process of becoming conscious again.

In that model, I did not begin as an empty being trying to manufacture divinity. I began as an expression of the whole, entered the experience of being separate, forgot what I was, and began finding my way back through awareness, relationship, choice, love, and understanding.

The journey would not be about adding something that was absent.

It would be about gradually remembering and expressing something that was always present.

I cannot present that as fact. It is a philosophical possibility—one that resembles the ocean-and-wave metaphor I describe in Ego & Soul: What I Mean by Them.

The wave experiences itself as separate. The water was never divided.

Becoming More Godlike

This possibility gives new meaning to something I was taught as a child: that human beings can become like God.

I once understood that through the Mormon framework of obedience, worthiness, exaltation, kingdoms, and worlds without end.

I no longer know whether that framework describes the architecture of reality.

But I can imagine another meaning.

Perhaps becoming more Godlike means becoming increasingly conscious within the act of creation.

A being of complete awareness would not be blindly driven by unexamined fear or inherited conditioning. Such a being would understand the forces moving within it and perceive consequences beyond the narrow interests of the moment.

Intelligence and love would not compete. Complete intelligence would include awareness of the larger whole, and complete love would act with understanding rather than sentiment alone.

Perhaps God—if God exists in anything like this sense—is consciousness fully awake within creation.

Perhaps becoming more Godlike is not about acquiring divine rank or cosmic property. Perhaps it is the movement toward awareness, intelligence, responsibility, creativity, and love.

That remains speculation.

But it is speculation that changes how I live now.

The Responsibility of Becoming

If my choices help shape the person I become, then attention matters.

Intention matters.

Repetition matters.

The meanings I give experience matter.

The way I respond to fear, suffering, beauty, conflict, and love becomes part of the creation I am experiencing and helping to express.

This does not mean blaming myself for everything that happens or pretending that positive thinking controls reality. That would confuse participation with omnipotence.

It means recognizing the portion of the creative process that may actually be mine.

I cannot control the entire river.

I can become more aware of the current, the obstacles, the direction, and the way I am steering.

I cannot choose everything that enters my mind.

I can become more selective about what I rehearse.

I cannot guarantee the result of an action.

I can bring more consciousness to the motive and care with which I take it.

Responsibility, in this sense, is not guilt.

It is the ability to respond with increasing awareness.

Creating Who I Am

So perhaps I am neither a completely predetermined object nor an independent creator standing outside creation.

I am created by life, and I participate in creating the life that continues creating me.

The process moves in both directions.

My past influences the choice I can see today. Today’s choice influences the person who will face tomorrow.

The more consciously I participate, the more deliberately I can examine my choices, understand their motives, and consider their effects upon myself and the world around me.

Not absolute control.

Not freedom from causation.

Participation.

Perhaps that is the movement of a human life: from being unconsciously shaped, to noticing the shaping, to consciously joining it.

I am not creating myself from nothing.

I am not finishing a fixed object called Scott.

I am participating in an unfolding relationship among consciousness, circumstance, attention, and choice.

The person I call me is both the material and one of the sculptors.

I am the experience being lived and the awareness learning how to live it.

I am the creation gradually recognizing its place in the creative process.

Perhaps that is what it means to create who I am.

Further Exploration

• The Neural Basis of Metacognitive Ability — Stephen Fleming and Raymond Dolan examine the psychological and neural basis of monitoring our own thinking.

• Free Will — The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy surveys the long debate over agency, causation, and moral responsibility.

• Compatibilism — An introduction to the view that meaningful freedom may coexist with determinism.

• Time — An overview of presentism, eternalism, the block universe, temporal experience, and competing theories of time.

These resources do not prove my model of soul, creation, or consciousness. They show where my personal exploration touches established questions in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.