![]() In the same way we can focus on our intellect or take our astrological sign as an identity. Sometimes we identify with our desires: sexual, aesthetic, or spiritual. We might take our family history, our genetics, and our heredity to be who we are. Thus, in our culture, we might fix and identify with the role of being a woman or a man, a parent or a child. We can identify with our body, feelings, or thoughts we can identify with images, patterns, roles, and archetypes. The process of identification, of selecting patterns to call “I,” “me,” “myself,” is subtle and usually hidden from our awareness. Our sense of self arises whenever we grasp at or identify with these patterns. Instead, he described us as a collection of five changing processes: the processes of the physical body, of feelings, of perceptions, of responses, and of the flow of consciousness that experiences them all. In teaching, the Buddha never spoke of humans as persons existing in some fixed or static way. He described this as interdependent arising, the cyclical process of consciousness creating identity by entering form, responding to contact of the senses, then attaching to certain forms, feelings, desires, images, and actions to create a sense of self. He saw into the human tendency to identify with a limited sense of existence and discovered that this belief in an individual small self is a root illusion that causes suffering and removes us from the freedom and mystery of life. When the Buddha confronted the question of identity on the night of his enlightenment, he came to the radical discovery that we do not exist as separate beings. When we look into the question of self and identity in spiritual practice, we find it requires us to understand two distinct dimensions of self-selflessness and true self. Perhaps these, too, confirm how we are unaware of our true identity most of the time. Modern accounts of near-death experiences are filled with reports of wonderful ease after leaving the body, of golden light and luminous beings. Hindu yogas call the world a lila, or a dance of the divine, much like Dante’s phrase, “the divine comedy.”īuddhist texts describe how consciousness itself creates the world like a dream or a mirage. Others point out how consciousness gets lost in its patterns, loses its way, incarnates out of ignorance. Some teachings explain how consciousness creates life to express all possibilities, to be able to love, to know oneself. Persian mystics say we are sparks of the divine, and Christian mystics say we are filled with God. What is this force that gives us life, that brings us and the world into form? The world’s great spiritual teachings tell us over and over we are not who we think we are. Spiritual practice inevitably brings us face to face with the profound mystery of our own identity.
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