who am i?

One of the suggestions for focusing during zazen is to ask "Who am I?" with an obvious or not so obvious "Don't know" answer, typically questioning during inhalation and answering during exhalation. This is similar and yet different from the upanishadic/vedantic advice of meditating on this question, the answer being the Answer to all questions.

watching an old man and an old woman walking on the lawn, Alzheimer's came randomly to my mind. don't people with Alzheimer's also perhaps ask the same question sometime? wouldn't it be frightening not to know who you are? yet, in reality, we do not clearly know who we are. we are clearly more than a label, an appellation attached to pounds of flesh and tissue. so who is m? is there a big difference between questioning "who am I?" and not remembering who one is?

another such apparent conflict between "psychology" and buddhism is the concept of self. Oliver Sacks moving describes a patient who has completely lost his short term memory and is "stuck somewhere in the late 60s" in his An Anthropologist on Mars and wonders if he had a sense of self. he was truly living moment to moment, a state zen exhorts its practitioners to get into. curiously disturbing.

one final thought, again a conflict. autistic people are not supposed to feel any emotions. yet in buddhism, the practitioner's compassion is awakened and one feels a great empathy for all sentient beings. i wonder how an autist would respond to imeditation (as opposed to medication). are there people fundamentally incapable of feeling? how much of our (as in supposedly non autistic people) feelings are "real"? to use a mundane example, take love. after 'surreal', it is the most abused word. we love x,y,z. we love tv serials, going on long drives, our pets. and yet, we can do cruel acts to people we love.