You Already Have An Identity

I'm not a doctor, a counselor, or a psychiatrist. I am just one who has discovered a secret. It's not a secret, really. It's just something that many have not taken the time to notice, but if you spend the time, this secret becomes obvious. The secret has to do with your identity, in particular, how your identity gets created. One day, it became obvious just how that happens, and I am now sharing it with you and whoever will listen.

The secret is that the mind builds an identity out of events. If there are no events, there is no identity. This is significant, but few realize just how significant. The mind-made identity, which almost everyone takes to be real, which changes moment to moment, is not the Truth. The sense of I AM is your true identity. It does not depend on events and so does not change. To see that the mind builds an identity out of events, and to see what this process obscures is liberation.

To see that you don't need two identities, that you have the identity of God is the truth that ends suffering. Nevertheless, the mind builds additional identities out of events, and says "this other is the truth!" "I am depressed." "I am lost" "I am anxious" "I am hurt." "I am separate" and so on. But none of these identities endure. They are not true. Depression, feelings of being lost or confused, anxious or hurt, are events, not identities. A feeling, a thought, a sensation is an event. It is a happening, not an identity. An identity, you already have. This awareness of how a "time-bound" identity gets built up can help anyone to be free. This can help even in the worst case scenario.

So, very simply, what I am saying is that the mind, desirous to know who or what it is, takes events or happenings and turns them into an identity. True, these events happened, but an identity, you already have. "You are That!", the same as everything. Why complicate matters? Having one self and many identities is self-fragmentation, not Self-realization.

When we let the mind build an identity out of events, the identity is always changing, because events are always changing. Consequently, who you are is obscured. When this task of securing an identity is left to the unenlightened mind, the mind not knowing its true nature, it comes up with countless momentary or "fleeting" identities. None of them tell you who you are. To have many events is fine, but to have many identities is crazy. Having a single identity that does not depend on events, whether it is the arising of a thought, a feeling, or even the happening of your birth is Oneness. It is also Freedom. Enlightenment, Salvation, and so on.

Such "attainments" are not beyond you, because you are That already. Your identity doesn't become That, when you have meditated enough or when you have become worthy. Your identity is That. "You are That!" Therefore, That is your identity and not these others, which the mind builds out of events, which you inevitably outlast.