Ahamkara, the identity, was briefly touched upon in an earlier blog. Personal identity, as we understood, is your misunderstanding. A misappropriation of attributes not belonging to you, not consciously anyway. In an ordinary state, you are almost as responsible for your identity, your personality as you are for your height or eye colour. Well almost. You feel you ‘own’ your identity but that is a delusion. It is the other way around; the inadvertent, accidental loop of your psyche-mind, your samskaras, owns you. Your identity comprises just two basic components; your fears and your desires. These arise from your samskaras which are the foundations of your psyche-mind. As we know, samskaras have either a positive or negative emotional charge. These impressions with emotional charges give rise to our desires and fears, which make your identity.
Everything you do; all your desires and actions have just one motivation. To Protect your identity or strengthen it. Often one motivation merges into the other as the urge to strengthen actually arises from the need to protect.
Impressions with positive emotional charge give rise to your desires. Now what is desire then? It is the wish to re-experience something that left behind a positive emotional impression. It is also the wish to amplify the positive impression through a similar experience.
Impressions with negative emotional charge manifest into your fears. What is fear? It is the wish to avoid something that left behind a negative emotional impression, an experience that caused suffering. It is also the wish to minimise any and all suffering. Hence fear is the ‘desire to avoid’. Fear is negative desire.
Now, desires+ fears= Identity.
External threat to identity —> A new fear—–> a new desire to protect identity and strengthen it. Hence we end up protecting and strengthening our desires and fears themselves, creating an endless feedback loop.
Let’s dig deeper into our real motivations with an example all of us can identify with:
Q. Why do you desire to be rich and famous?
A. Because it would mean I am worthy.
Q. What if you are unworthy?
A. If I am unworthy, no one will respect me.
Q So what if no one respects you?
A. It would mean they don’t accept me.
Q. So what if they didn’t accept you?
A. It would mean that I am unlovable.
Q. So what if you are unlovable?
A. What’s the point of living if nobody loves me?
You see your desire to be rich and successful can stem from your fear of being unlovable. What if you lost that fear? Look, this is not to say you should withdraw from life or not have ambitions. Not at all. It means to not have ambitions which arise from fear, from the need to protect or strengthen your identity. You can have much more worthy ambitions to pursue, I can assure you of that.
Now we also understand that suffering comes from wrong cognition or ‘avidya’. It comes from misunderstanding the laws of existence and working against them. Once you align with the laws, suffering goes away. Hence you lose all your fears. Thus even fear is wrong cognition or avidya. Fear is a misunderstanding.
This leaves us with positive desires. Now we know that they are just manifestations of the positive impressions from previous experiences. We also know all external experiences create inevitable pain along with pleasure because they are impermanent. There is a greater pleasure to be experienced than any sensory, experiential one can give, one that has no cause. The most powerful pleasure you will ever know, one you cannot know through the senses and the mind in any external phenomenon. One that will not lead to loss and impermanence.
So if you lose your fears by aligning with the laws and lose your desires because you have experienced pleasure far greater than what external ones can ever give, what will happen to your identity?
It will dissolve. Break apart, melt, flow away. There will be no need for it. It might seem terrifying to think about losing your identity, but that is probably one of the best things that could happen to you.
You will notice this: higher the number of fears and degrees of fears in the psyche-mind, stronger is one’s identity. People with very strong opinions, the rebels and the fundamentalists have strong fears driving their psyche. People with unshakable ideologies and opinions who are extremely defensive to opposing ideas. They are so because they fear they may lose their identities if the contradicting ideology had any influence on them. They react violently because they are deeply fearful of losing their definition of themselves in the face of that opposing idea. It is so threatening to them they believe they would lose ‘themselves’ if they would allow its influence.
Take a look at all sources of violence and negativity in our world:
a) War: Protection of identity
b) Bigotry and intolerance: Responding to Threat to identity
c) Conquest, lust for power: Fortification of identity
d) Jealousy, greed: Painful responses to threats to identity
This idea seems counterintuitive because the world encourages us to assert our identity as a show of strength, confidence and virtue. “Stand up and defend yourself! Get stronger!”, that is common wisdom, no? It is not, in Yogic reality. When you are a consummate Yogi, threats to your identity do not bother you much. You consider all views with equanimity, you agree with all of them and none at all. You are not your identity. A psyche-mind which loses all fears will not care to protect its face to the world, because it is secure in itself, it couldn’t care what anyone thought. Losing fears will weaken your identity, and no, that is not a bad thing. A weak identity is a blessing because identity itself is a mirage. A smokehouse, a delusion built on fears and misplaced desires.
Thus the first move in the process of dismantling this spurious, false identity is to get rid of your fears. However much the great ones may have waxed eloquent about giving up desires for happiness, it just does not work that way. You would have jumped the bridge before you arrived at it; they have told you the story end first.
In fact, it is a smooth transition when fears fall away from your system and different kinds of desires arise, replacing the older ones. Your desires transmute. When the Yogic process is in motion, your stop fearing unacceptance. The desires to succeed at endeavours which will make you lovable and acceptable simply fall away. The desires for extroversion give way to the desires for introversion. These desires for introversion further transmute into desires of untold grandness, of undiscovered potential.
This idea of desires ‘falling away’ seems to be life-denying and nihilistic, but shockingly, nothing could be farther away from the truth. In reality, where once petty desires for acceptance and love drove you, now grander, deeper, many-times strong desires for abundance and prosperity from service arise. These desires will have a different motivation, and a different scale altogether. They do not arise from lack or limitation, from the frustration to avoid pain. They are multiple times more in potential. Where once you desired for a decent home and savings to avoid suffering in old age, you now dream of billions to serve others in fear and pain. Where once you just wanted to be accepted by your family and be happy, you now want to teach the world to accept themselves and find unprecedented happiness. Pettiness gives way to grandness. Fear gives way to limitlessness. Surviving gives way to thriving. Getting through life gives way to achieving unlimited potential.
Hence the identity is an obstruction to true happiness rather than the cause for it. It is also a false obstruction, a wall of loose sand. It is a delusion.
