Many of us go through life not really understanding who we are. We have certain social identities, as in reference to a career or in a relationship or marriage. We may know our self also as single or dating someone. There are ethnic identies, our political affiliation and sexual orientation. We also may know our self through hobbies, friends, economic status and education. These are essentially social identities.
Furthermore, there are many personal identities such as knowing our self as being shy, or confident; a party goer or studious and so on. But, when we think of it, we cannot discern any stable sense of Identity or who are. As we grow older, our brain prunes earlier emotional identities from our limbic system to an extent, and we can become a bit wiser. However, we still do not know who we really are.
There are, of course, religious identies that give us “consolation”, such as that we are a child of God, and that we have a particular destiny in this life and the next. This gives us solace but also demands upon us faith. We have to apply other teachings to our own consciousness, but this still leaves us with a sort of existential confusion. In other words, we carry around theological knowledge, but we are still stymied by ordinary existence.
How, then can we find any stable sense of who we are? We can do this by means of what can be referred to as “phenomological reduction”. This is a complicated term that simply means that when we watch our self very closely, especially if we do not apply any metaphysical notions to our experience, we can realize more permanent aspects of our self.
There are of course, other trainings that can assist in this process, because we utilize many other faculties besides our identity. (We are not only our identity, but we act and we feel and we think and so on). For example, we need to train our instincts, attention and volition, among others, because if these are not regulated at all, our identities will not be stable enough to look at. They will be “all over the place” in line with our unregulated structures, centers or “faculties”.
Nevertheless, we can experimentally isolate this important aspect of our experience and find three important trainings which can assist in located or realizing more substantial aspects of who we are, besides the conventional social and personal identities.
They can be referred to as 1) letting go, 2) tracing back and 3) dissolving. Now when these three are put into operation (along with other trainings), we will find two aspects of our “Real Self”: Nothingness and Being. We will cover the first one in this article.
Nothingness refers to the depth of the mind that contains no thing, category, substance or quality. It is our essential “nobodiness”. We are essentially an empty Space, or as certain wise people have put, we have an empty nature. However, this is not all; otherwise, we could not live in the world.
We also have an essential “Being”, which allows us to tune into our essential “somebodiness”. This allows us to act in the world and find purpose, meaning or joy in ordinary living conditions.
Now, the three trainings mentioned above, can assist us in realizing these two aspects of our essential nature or “who we are”. They accomplish this, because they transform or regulate our conventional identities. They transform them, because we can transcend them in order to find our real nature.
Secondly, we regulate them, because we do not literally eliminate them, for they have a functional purpose. However, we “regulate” their use and see them in their appropriate light, as it were. We can functionally operate on them, but we can let them go, when we need to and rest in our real or essential nature.
The first training is referred to as “letting go”. This is simply the act of observing our many identities, particularly as they are wrapped up or consist of many thoughts and feelings. When they emerge in our minds, we simply let them go, as distractions, just as we would if we were doing some activity we enjoy and we let go of distractions that would get in the way. Here, though, we do this only to observe our mind and not in any particualar activity that we like to do. We look at our thoughts, feelings, memories and identities, and let them go.
What do we find? An empty space (Nothingness) and sense of our existence (Being). We can still preserve other functional identities, such as social roles and personality characteristics; however, we do not let these consume us or mistakenly mispercieve our essental recognition of our deeper nature. Functional identies will appear to “fit into” the two primal conditions of Pure Awareness and Being.
When the internal reflective aspect of the mind take over these two essences, we can learn to look at them and let them go, realizing that they are not who we really are. We can trace them to more “egoic” aspects of our mind that may assert themselves in our mind from time to time, but do not, through necessity, need to “take over” or predominate Consciousness.
William Edwards
Author, Trainer
The Skill of Wisdom
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