To be human is to fall into identity again and again. Being doesn’t require identification. Being is all-inclusive. Everything gets taken in through the senses - sounds, smells, sightings, touch, and then there is the ongoing interpretation of reality through the mind. But to fall into identity means to label, name, and reduce to a persona or a type. I am human. I have reduced myself to a category rather than being of the earth, the cosmos, or something I can’t describe. And thought does that to all of creation. It’s a mapmaker of reality.
This morning, I am thinking about social media and how it is another vehicle of identity. But as David Bohm said in one of his dialogues on Thought - humanity keeps making the wrong turn. It’s not only that humanity made the wrong turn at one time but that we keep making it over and over. And it may be quite complex now, all of the falsehoods we must believe, but maybe it is as simple as believing in a separate identity.
By believing in a separate identity, I must have a separate role. I must be somebody who performs to prove the worth of my existence. I don’t know how to do that except to demonstrate that I have something special. Being better and having more is advantageous. But being less is also a position of identity and suffering may go with it. Suffering is a feeling that also reinforces my separate existence.
But what if all this posturing keeps us in the delusion of separation and competition? We can never be enough. We can never be whole. Wholeness is not something that we have to work for. It is already what we are. We just keep breaking off to play the game of individual persona.
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