From the moment of your birth you have been acquiring an identity.  This identity is not who you are.  You are not your body, your mind, or your emotions.  You are pure consciousness.  Consciousness has given rise to all existent form.  It is immortal and eternal.  Your authentic Self knows this Truth. 

Identity is simply the data you refer to as yourself.   This is your persona, the part of yourself that you refer to as me, I, “who I am.” You determine who you are, based upon your collective but limited experiences and perceptions. All of which are subject to evolution or change.  You create yourself based upon your interpretation of your sensory awareness.  What you interpret,  becomes who you are.  What you think you become. 

You have been entrained, environmentally and culturally conditioned to assume an identity to become someThing, not someOne.  You develop an Ego, a set of personal associations, preferences, and identifications.  This becomes your agent for relating to your life’s experience.  You have departed from your authentic Self.  You see yourself as separate from the whole, and fully independent.  

This process of alienation is commonly referred to as ego development, your persona or personality, is a contrived sense of Self and therefore transient.

The ego’s purpose is to assure your survival.  Beyond that primary role, it seeks superiority, power and control.  The ego is insatiable in its quest to secure these socially valued human amenities.  Your choices have been shaped by your ego’s endless need for recognition and achievement.  You  compete with others as a means to measure your progress.  You depend on their failure in order to succeed. This is the path of destruction and illusion. 

 {The truth is, you are an expression of the infinite Source. This Source is pure consciousness.  It is the energy that gives rise to creation.  Creation is   consciousness. It is our true nature.  This is the Oneness of our conception…it is the non changing, and eternal.  All existence is an interplay of creative dependency and interconnection.  You are a reflection of the whole, a microcosm of the macrocosm.}

The ego is in constant need of renewing its authority, approval and supremacy.  Therefore it continually relies on external validation.  Judgement of self and others takes root and becomes your chief tool of measuring your relative position in the world.  You condemn and criticize others in order to elevate yourself.  Self righteousness and condemnation become tools of your own eminence .   Your concern is for your own welfare and well being. Any failure on your part to assert your supremacy is ultimately a threat to your inner stability.  You become completely self absorbed, ruled by your own ego’s obsessions, ambitions and desires.  You have given up all authority over your life.  This failed system is the root of all of your anxiety, fear and insecurity, because it lacks spiritual substance, the Truth.

The ego obscures the Truth and veils the nature of reality.  It prevents you from seeing and experiencing things as they are.  The ego lives in the past and projects itself into the future.  Its lifespan is determined by the process of thinking.  It literally thinks itself into existence.  The thing it fears most is death, {a thoughtless moment.}  because with the cessation of thinking it cannot place itself in space and time.  To be present is to create a lapse/gap in the ego’s functioning.  From the perspective of the moment, there is no past, no future…only now, only what Is.  Every moment is the same in that regard: timeless.  This is where creation occurs. The moment is threatening because it represents the unknown, so we manipulate our fear of the unknown by filling the moment with our internal dialogue, analysis,  and repetitive thinking.  You avoid the true reality by living in one you have self created. To maintain this illusion requires an inordinate amount of time and energy.  You are always having to strategize, manipulate, and control the world in order to preserve your semblance of truth.  The true reality is preexistent and  independent of your thinking, it is transcendent.  At any moment you can experience it by waking up, by bringing your awareness to “what Is”.

This only requires a shift in your attention, a willingness to be present, to relax into the moment.  Children do this naturally, spontaneously.  Their world unfolds before them and they engage authentically with whatever they encounter.  They are intimately connected to “sahaja” or the spontaneous inborn essence of their Being. ]]> http://santidevi.com/2009/02/identity/feed/ 2 http://santidevi.com/2009/02/who-am-i/ http://santidevi.com/2009/02/who-am-i/#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:08:08 +0000 santidevi http://santidevi.com/?p=134 Ramana Maharshi was a living sage and enlightened Being. He advocated self inquiry as the means to Self Realization, “moksha,” or spiritual liberation. This state of pure consciousness is experienced as union with the One, the Absolute. It is a condition of absorption where the individual merges with the Infinite. This is the sole purpose of human life.

The essential question to contemplate is , “Who Am I?” The mind that asks the question cannot answer because it doesn’t know. The Truth of your Being lies beyond the thinking mind. The question is a tool, a key to the mystery, and like all good questions, it contains the answer within it.

“I Am.”

Self knowledge can only arise out of the spaciousness of our own intimate experience. By being present moment by moment we encounter the Infinite. The inhalation and exhalation that defines our lives. In the stillness of this ebb and flow we experience deep relaxation. In the absence of thought we experience peace. By abiding in what Is, we are at One.

“Who Am I.”? When I am not my repetitive mind, when my emotions cease to rule my conduct, when I shed the thinness of my identity, what is left, what is my own?

To be naked with ourselves is to discover the essence of our longing for Self Realization, union with the Divine. Deep within us we intuitively feel the pulse of our Divinity, our greatness, our creative potential. We know that we are more than the sum of our parts, that we’re not just flesh and bone, mortal and fleeting. In reality, we are an expression of the whole of existence. We feel a disparity between the inner Truth of our knowing and the outer reality of our experience. Reconciliation lies in acceptance of what Is, only then can we absolutely know the immortal nature of our true Being. When we are present, we are connected to the Source of our origin, to consciousness. We are pure consciousness embodied, the formless within form. The only way to know this Truth is through the experience of direct perception. Therefore the practice is to be in the moment, to be who and where you are. Experience what you’re experiencing , in a state of non-resistance to what Is. This is the seed of liberation.