When we are asked, “Who are you?” we usually answer with our name, gender, our profession, and our roles in life. We rarely pause to notice that these are layers shaped by our upbringing, family, education, religion, culture, and tradition.
Beneath the names, the roles, and the histories we carry, there is still a place in us that is untouched by time, culture, or circumstance.
Before we are names, before we are nationalities, before we are daughters or sons, we are presence itself. When a baby is born, it arrives without a name, without a nationality, without a story. It is pure presence, being, curious, and whole. The baby is not yet “someone”. It resides in the simple “I AM.”
But slowly layers of identities are forming. The mind begins to shape a self that knows, ’I am a girl.’ ‘I am a sister.’ ‘I am sad.’ ‘I am angry.’ ‘I like this.’ I don’t like that.’ ‘I am good.’ ‘I am not good enough.’ and so forth – until we forget the simple truth of just being. We begin to believe, “I am this, I am not that” and are no longer aware of the essence that unites us.
The Emotional Body and the Pain-Body
As life brings joy and pain, we begin to see the world through the lens of our wounds and experiences. We react, feel triggered, something pushes our button. An example might be as simple as the scent of lavender. Imagine you grew up in a home that was filled with lavender fragrance because your mother loved it so much. But your relationship was not close and loving – perhaps it was even very painful. Many years later, you step into a friend’s house that has a lavender scent. Immediately, you feel uncomfortable, though the scent has nothing to do with your friend or the present moment, yet it triggers an emotional imprint.
Why? Because our emotional body is not bound by time and space. Every unhealed feeling, not being good enough, unloved, unsafe, ashamed, lingers in our unconsciousness – until it is fully felt and integrated. Eckhart Tolle calls it our pain-body. Once triggered, it takes over our thoughts, fears, and behavior, looping us into past or future stories. We might have adopted coping strategies such as perfectionism, people-pleasing, withdrawal, control, hyper-independence, and so forth. Or we react with strong emotions like anger, shame, blame, or grief. The pain-body reacts in the present moment, whether the trigger is new or old. In that moment, we don’t respond from a place of present awareness, but from an energetic pattern. It becomes habitual, it shapes our personality, and we believe that’s who we are.
At the core, though, remains the I AM, pure awareness, but shadowed with the layers of the pain-body, ancestral wounds, cultural conditioning, and collective trauma.
Personal Experience of “the Other”
This coping mechanism of unhealed wounds is playing out personally and collectively. As a young woman traveling in Europe, I felt this dynamic in a very real way. At times, simply being German carried the weight of history, I was seen as “the other.” Once, traveling with a Polish friend in Austria, an elderly man spat in front of our car just because of the Polish license plate.
Living in West Berlin for 20 years during the Cold War, I experienced division daily. The Berlin Wall wasn’t just concrete and steel; it was a wall of “we” and “the other.” People who wanted to overcome it for freedom from the east to the west were arrested or shot dead. Even after the wall came down in 1989, it remained in many minds and hearts.
And today, we still live with walls, visible and invisible, between nations, cultures, and peoples.
Inspired by World Citizens
During the 1980s, I was deeply inspired by Yehudi Menuhin, the extraordinary violinist who lived beyond the limits of national identity. Through music, action, and compassion, he built bridges between cultures and stood firmly against apartheid and division. What I didn’t know then was that Menuhin was aligned with Garry Davis, a man who, years earlier, had stepped radically into the idea of world citizenship.
Garry Davis was a Broadway actor and became a bomber pilot during World War II. After the war, he faced a deep moral reckoning. “I was a good American,” he said. “But I saw that being a good American meant I might have to kill good Germans.”
In 1948, he renounced his U.S. citizenship at the American embassy in Paris, declaring himself the world’s first “World Citizen.” He even issued himself a “World Passport” and famously challenged border officials:
“Point to the line on the ground where France ends and Switzerland begins. Point to the line on the ground that separates one human being from another.”
His symbolic act grew into a lifelong mission. The World Passport has since been recognized in some cases, especially for stateless people or those seeking asylum. Sadly, entire peoples remain still persecuted: the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in China, the Roma across Europe, the Kurds in the Middle East, the Palestinians, to name just a few. Indigenous communities around the world still face displacement, silencing of their languages, and loss of land.
Garry Davis became a symbol of peace, unity, and global belonging. He inspired great thinkers and leaders like Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Schweitzer, and Buckminster Fuller. His vision remains.
Bridge-to-Global-Citizenship
Wars are fought over borders and identities, yet no one can point to the exact line where one human ends and another begins. Beneath the surface of our stories, we share one humanity, one breath, one planet. The journey of knowing who we are is not only personal; it is a path toward peace, toward remembering that the world is our country.
In the spirit of Garry David:
“If war begins in the mind, peace also must begin there — through a shift in identity.” “If the world is my country, then peace is my religion, and love is my law.”
WHO ARE YOU?
