𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲

 

"Who am I?" That ultimate question is one for which there can be no answer. The question dissolves the questioner; the false sense of self. 

You know what passes for "identity"? ... Your history. What you do for a living. Where you live. Your relationships. Your family associations. What you own. How much you got in the bank. Like that. All those add-ons you were given and have chosen since the day you were born. Maybe even the traits that you came in with from your generational genetic lineage.

Then there's the shaping of the popular culture. It is full of images for us to choose our personae. Be like this! Look like this! Have this! Think like this! It's the broth of our social consciousness. That is, so saturated in the messaging and the themselves saturated messengers — "influencers" — that it's quite literally almost impossible to see outside that box, much less think outside the box. Even so, that we don't know we're in a box in the first place. Oy!

But, when you realize that it's just a box, then you're out. 

Then what?

Our Great Friend Nisargadatta Maharaj sums it up in his usual direct and elegantly spare teaching: "Discover all that you are not — body, feelings thoughts, time, space, this or that — nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The clearer you understand on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being."

Even so, the voices to the contrary are loud, many, and ubiquitous. You won't be hearing about that you're the "limitless being" on the TV. Or TikTok. In school. Or, from a pol. Purely out of the hubris to maintain their own self-image, the voices of influence in the world broadcast daily the products of their own self-delusion. 

In fact, is that even a question you're asking? Well, see what I just did there? Now you know that's it's a question you could be asking. Your choice. 

Please. I'm for you being you. What you want to wear. Where you want to go. What you want to do when you get there. Even, how you want to "identify". If as a horny teenager I had known that I could have identified as a female and entered the girls changing room at the beach many of my frustrations would have been resolved. 

My peeve is that the popular culture seems to cap the matter of "who am I" at the level of consumer competence, social acceptance, and sexual preference. Go ahead, be a good consumer; be a good boy or girl; do what you want with what you got down there. But, fuck sake, just wake up to that stuff, and all the other stuff you can ornament yourself with; it's just camouflage. Dressing. Ornamentation.

Because, if that's the limit of your understanding, then the real you won't have a chance to show up. And, worst of all, you will go around not knowing who you are, and fucking shit up all around you by fronting with the phony pretensions you've accumulated like badges on a proud soldier's chest.

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.