Note: This question has been discussed at length here recently in these 2 threads:
What are you? & Who are you, Really?
http://www.able2know.com/forums/about9775.html
http://www.able2know.com/forums/about24926.html
Having said that, maybe we've all had time to morph and/or change our dream/illusion of who we are into something different by now.
I hear you re: we must look beyond our circumstance and situation to answer "Who are we?"
Yet, where do you draw the line? For example, I happen to be in this human body that has 2 legs, 2 arms, a brain, etc. But that isn't really me, is it? Thats just a situation I happen to be in.
What I'm getting at is our "situation" does have a bit to do with who we are at this given moment. How much of that situation is real, and how much we "create for ourselves" is a further question.
We are in this movie. Some of it I can strip off: ie, perhaps my family history doesn't really matter in regards to who I am. The movie part about the human body, though, seems more difficult to strip off. We're very much stuck in these bodies for now (unless one believes in astral projection, etc.). We're very much stuck in these bodies. Yet, are we these bodies?
Are these bodies we inhabit even remotely connected to who we actually are?
If not, are we free floaters in a space of sorts?
It seems very clear to me that we are not our bodies. This part has always bothered me:
We are not our bodies, Yet most of us spend most of our waking hours doing things to take care of these bodies: work to pay rent/mortgage, buy food, wash clothes, clean house, clean body, etc., etc. Something seems very inefficient about that.
Part of the deal is obviously that for some reason we are here to experience having a human body. Yet...that all seems somehow so backwards.
Like, our brains, whatever you might call our "souls" are probably capable of so much more. Yet, we are forced to spend most of our time here doing mundane things like pay the mortgage/rent and put food on the table. Strange.
Are most of us missing something very, very big in this journey of life? Or, are the mundane necessary survival type tasks an integral part of the entire lesson....are those tasks actually the big thing?