When you
identify yourself as a particular thing – a man, a woman, an athlete, a
Republican, a Caucasian, a Christian, an American – you create a prison for
yourself. You are stuck in a box labeled “man”, “Christian”, etc. You then feel obligated to uphold that label.
If this mental idea is challenged, e.g., someone says that you are not manly, or
that Christianity is completely wrong, your ego feels attacked, which is
painful. You might feel compelled to
fight back with arguments or violence.
This is
slavery. You chain yourself to an idea,
then defend that idea as though your very life depends on it. Rather than realize that you are way beyond
any worldly definition of gender, political party, race, religion, or
nationality, you imprison yourself with a very limiting set of labels.
Your
self-created prison prevents you from seeing truth. You filter all experiences through your
belief system so as make them appear to support this belief system. This is the cause of the confirmation bias, in which people discount any information that
contradicts what they already believe while grasping onto the flimsiest of
evidence that seems to make their belief seem true.
Your
identification also causes insecurity. No object is secure, so when you see yourself as a particular object,
you must ipso facto be in jeopardy. For
example, if you view yourself as a great athlete, then if you fail to achieve a
particular athletic feat, the image is crushed, and since you believe yourself
to be that image, you feel as though you
are crushed. Or you might simply worry
that you won’t be able to perform, even if you haven’t failed yet.
Rather than
claim that you “are” something, it would be more truthful to say that you are
in a particular life situation, for example, one in which your skin is white,
you were born in the U.S., your body is male, you exercise, or you have chosen
to accept a particular political or religious belief system. In this way your worldly attributes do not
define you because they are things that you have,
not are.
When you
make yourself an object you become a fraction instead of a whole. You are limited to a set of parameters, and
because you are limited, so is your life: what you allow yourself to do, how
you view things, who you associate with, what you wear, what you believe, and
so on. As a fraction you can see only a
fraction of reality. You cannot act from
the wholeness of being; you can only react from a very limited set of beliefs.
You are an
expansive being. Your ego is the exact
opposite: a contraction. This is because
it is based on fear, which is a contracting emotion. When there is fear, notice how you tense up,
i.e., contract. When you let go and
relax, you open up, i.e., expand.
The bottom
line is that identifying with anything other than your true self is the source
of all fear and conflict.
