Sometimes, when we say I, we specifically mean my body. For example, when a child runs home crying, points to a scraped knee, and tells his mom, "I hurt myself," he's equating himself with his body, or at least a part of his body.

Yet if I examine the fact that I can observe my body – my hand, my heart, my eyes, and even my brain – I'm forced to at least consider the possibility that I am in some sense separate from my body – perhaps something we can call mind.

For the moment, please set aside the thought that science hasn't yet found the mind. You and I both know that the statement I have a brain is a better description of our experience of reality than the statement I am a brain.

At some point, science either will or will not arrive at a satisfactory explanation of this experience. But, in the meantime, you probably don't want to allow an infant science that isn't capable of clarifying this experience to talk you out of it.

Instead, I encourage you to stay with your own primary experience of reality. Whoever you are, you are not your body, because you can observe your body. And that observation, if you're ready to acknowledge it, brings us a little closer to answering Who am I?