If your search for happiness (or purpose, money, peace, love, career, etc.) hasn’t delivered; if you’re constantly moving from partner to partner or job to job; if you’ve always felt there was some indefinable quality missing from your life;  maybe it’s time to shift the focus of that search? Maybe it’s time to dig into the one doing all that searching.

Since childhood you’ve been fed a story about who and what you are, the nature of life, and your role in it. Your parents, teachers, peers, culture all contributed to that story of ‘you.’ Don’t blame them. They experienced the same programming. It’s the one form of inheritance that has been practiced across time and culture for as long as there have been humans.

Problems arise when we fail to investigate this ‘inherited I.’

The thing is, who – or more precisely, what – you are is vastly different than what you were taught. In fact, the consciousness or awareness that makes humans, humans, has flummoxed the greatest minds of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and quantum physics. Which is why it’s known as the hard problem, the one science has yet to solve (and, we’re betting, never does).

As philosopher David Chalmers puts it: “There’s nothing we know about more directly…. But at the same time it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe.”

Even when scientists do find ways to attribute some neural actions to aspects of consciousness, they can’t explain how or why. They can’t even ensure that consciousness is purely a product of the brain. In other words, the mystery of you remains just that, a mystery.

So how is a mystery agent like you supposed to understand yourself when the great minds of our day can’t? Further, how are you going to find a lasting sense of purpose, happiness, etc.?

The answer, simply put, is that you are the ultimate authority on you. If the outside world misled you from the start, it’s up to you to reverse that by journeying within.

Start this journey by assessing who you are – or believe you are – at this moment in time. Next, get started in earnest by using a variety of expeditionary tools – meditation, journaling, self-inquiry, feedback from others, and more. Think of yourself and this journey as the final frontier. It’ll be worth it.