Do you know who you really are?
Each of us carries an idea about ourselves, which we think of as our identity. But how real is this identity?
If you look deeply, you will find that your so-called identity is nothing more than a few ideas about yourself that you have picked up form others! Based on your relationships with your family, your interactions with your friends and with the world, you create a pseudo-identity for yourself. With this pseudo identity, you relate with the outer world.
This pseudo-identity is your ego. It is purely made up of the labels that others paste on you. You don’t know who you really are. Suppose I ask you who you are, what will you say? You will say, ‘I am the father of so and so,’ or ‘I am the sister of so and so,’ or ‘I am a doctor,’ or something else similar. But what are all these identities? They are only your relationships and professions. You are daughter to your father, wife to your husband, mother to your children. But what are you to yourself?
You currently exist only in relationships and professions. Your ego is built up on this. Your identity is only through this. That is why there is always a danger of losing your identity. It is a man-made fragile thing and so it may break at any time. That is why you need to work so hard in maintaining it. Your inherent nature is actually ‘being alone’. When you were in your mother’s womb, you were alone. You are actually enough unto yourself. This is your individuality. Over time, this individuality is taken over by what you call personality. Individuality is natural and personality is societal.
It is like this: a parcel moves from one place to another and at every place, it starts getting stamped with various details. The parcel is actually not these stamps, but the stuff inside it, is it not? In the same way you are not the stamps that people put on you. You are the stuff inside yourself. With time your ego is built on these stamps and you need more and more people to feed it. That is why you will observe that you are totally unable to be alone with yourself. When you are by yourself, you don’t hear the voices of the others feeding your ego. Your ego goes unfed. So what do you do? You at least turn on the television and watch!
So strong is our pseudo-identification! It has become such a solid reality to us that it blinds us from seeing anything else. Even at the time of death, we find it difficult to drop our prestige! We live and die unconsciously. The fear of losing your personality, which is your only anchor point, causes you to behave in the ways that you behave. That is why we say your ego is playing up.
Meditation is a powerful way of getting in touch with who you really are. A few intense moments with yourself can teach you more than any amount of logical contemplation. The whole of spirituality is all about losing this personality, this pseudo identification. This can happen when you start watching. When you start watching you will understand that you are the stuff inside the parcel and not the labels on it. When this awareness happens, you need no lecture, no sermon, no teaching or preaching!
You just are what you are!