The Ahamkara, or the “I am this____”, is one’s definition of oneself. It could be many things like “I am a generous person”, “I am great”, “I am a loser”, “I am intelligent” or every way we define ourselves. Ahamkara is many times misjudged as ‘egoism’ in colloquial Hindi. It is actually that sense of identification, that ‘arrogating’ of the traits of our pschye-mind, its ideas, cognitions, preferences or desires to oneself. “I like this. I want that. I think this way” and many other things.
It is our conscious, manifest personality, the one we present to the world and to ourselves, as ourselves.
Naturally, our ‘ahamkara’ is a product of samskaras, because everything is, and hence it is largely involuntary. So we misappropriate when we define ourselves, because our samskaras are in charge of the ‘I’, and there is no ‘I’ in charge at all. Ahamkara is only the outer layer of the psyche-mind complex which interacts with the world, it has a little idea of the involuntary workings of the deep depths of the psyche-mind. Hence, to be technically correct, when I say that “I am a natural at football”, or “I love Italian food”, I am mistakenly super-arrogating, giving myself powers and characteristics not due to ‘me’.
They belong to my samskaras, and I am not in any conscious control of them.
Ahmakara or identity is built on the pillar of our samskaras, our unmanifest and manifest desires and fears. If my samskaras were to be removed, my identity would collapse.
My identity will not need to exist if I had no samskaras.
It would flow out like water from a broken glass because identity is illusory. It is an emergent property of our desires and fears, not being fundamental itself. Fear and desire are themselves emergent from still deeper fundamentals, the samskaras. If the fundamentals vanish, so would its emergent properties!
Ahamkara, or the identity, may just a tool to help you navigate through life, but it does not have much basis in reality. It is an illusion.
Of course, the dissolution of identity cannot happen by just realizing its true nature, because it rests on the strong, difficult-to-break pillars of desires and fears. Dismantling of fears, desires and of identity must happen bottom upwards. The loss of identity is the end-goal, the peak state, the acme of the yogic process, among other things. It should be enough for you understand just this, at our initial stage of exploration of the science of yoga.
Identity is a ‘wrong cognition’, it is a misconception. Like all other misconceptions, it rests on the foundations of samskaras. Exteriorized ones.
Samskaras of various kinds, we will see that too as we move ahead in our Yogic journey.