I Am That I Am: The Freedom Beyond Religious Identity

For most of my life, I said “I am a Christian.” It wasn’t something I thought too deeply about at the time. It was just how I was raised, what I was taught, what felt normal. It gave me a sense of belonging, meaning, and structure. But over time, as I began waking up to a deeper awareness within myself, I started to realize how subtle and strange that identification really was. Not strange in a judgmental way, but strange in the sense that something so vast and alive as the human spirit could ever be confined to a label or reduced to a belief system. Looking back now, I find it wild that I once believed I was a religion. I didn’t just practice Christianity, I thought I was a Christian. And that’s a powerful thing to realize, because when we say “I am” followed by anything, we’re making a deep unconscious claim about the essence of our being. But the truth is, I am not a belief. A belief is just a thought I hold. It’s something that can change, evolve, or dissolve. But whatever I am—at the deepest level—doesn’t change.

This has probably been one of the biggest revelations of my spiritual journey so far: I am not my beliefs. I have beliefs, but I am not them. Just like I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. Just like I have a body, but I am not my body. There is something deeper, something silent and unchanging beneath all of it. My personality changes. My perspectives shift. My values mature. But the awareness that sees all of it remains still, steady, and untouched. This awareness—this sense of being—has no religion. It simply is. And realizing that changed everything for me. Because when I look around at so much of the division, judgment, and conflict in the world, I see how much of it stems from our identification with belief. The “my religion vs. your religion” game, the “my God is the real God” debates… they come from a very personal place because we’ve tied our identity to these beliefs. But once I began waking up to the fact that I don’t need to define myself by any belief system, that I am not the container I was raised in, I began to taste a very deep and real freedom.

It’s not that I threw out everything I learned or rejected every part of my religious upbringing. Far from it. There’s beauty in every tradition, and there are still teachings, stories, and symbols I deeply respect and carry with me. But I let go of the need to identify with any one of them. I let go of the pressure to belong to a category. That was the shift. When I first left my previous tradition, people would ask me all the time, “So what are you now?” And I remember how hard it was to answer that question. Not because I didn’t have beliefs or values, but because I could see the deeper question behind their words. What they were really asking was, “What do you believe now?” But even more than that, they were trying to locate me to figure out what box I now belonged in. It’s such a tell, such a revealing habit of our collective conditioning. We tend to equate people with their beliefs. We treat beliefs as identity, rather than as things that can shift, breathe, and evolve over time. And while I understand that impulse, I don’t find it to be a healthy or liberating way to live.

As I kept awakening, it became harder and harder to answer the belief/identity-based questions. Not out of confusion, but because identity itself began to unravel. I stopped feeling like a solid noun and started living more like a verb. Fluid, spacious, present. And the more time I spent in stillness—really knowing myself beneath thought—the more I realized that I am not meant to be labeled. None of us are. We are divine mysteries, every single one of us. Living, breathing, expanding mysteries. And to try to define the infinite is to shrink it into something it never was. The ego wants neat answers and tight boxes. It wants a label to cling to. But the soul longs to roam. The soul knows that truth lives in silence, in presence, in direct experience. And when you let go of the compulsion to be something—to be this or that—you begin to soften into something far more real. You begin to return to the mystery itself. And from that space, so much of the “us vs. them” energy just starts to fade. The moment I no longer needed to be defined by a belief structure was the moment I began to experience others more clearly. I wasn’t projecting my framework onto them anymore. I could just see them as they are.

Ken Wilber talks about the evolution from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric consciousness and that resonates deeply. For me, transcending the need to identify with a religion didn’t lead to a rejection of others. It led to a deeper compassion for all paths. I don’t feel threatened by what others believe anymore. I don’t need them to agree with me, and I don’t need to defend what I believe, because I no longer see my beliefs as who I am. That shift—from identification to observation, from defensiveness to spaciousness—is one of the great gifts of the spiritual journey.

And at the heart of it all is this mystery we call the Self. Not the personality, not the roles, not the voice in the head, but the silent witness beneath it all. The one that sees without judgment, the one that never comes and never goes. Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “Love says ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says ‘I am nothing.’ Between the two, my life flows.” That quote has been a compass for me. Because it points to the paradox of being. There’s a truth to the fullness of our divine nature—we are the whole. And there’s also a truth to our emptiness—we are the open space that allows all things. In between those two truths is the beauty of the human experience. And that’s what I’ve come to honor most. Not the need to arrive at answers or cling to identity, but the courage to stay open. To keep unfolding. To live as a question, rather than a conclusion.