Identity

Who or what are we?

Who or What Are We?

Our first and most primal identity is the sense of simply being alive. This is often called the I AM. It is the undeniable sense of being here now, present and aware—not as somebody in particular, but simply as unbound presence-awareness or present experiencing. Presence-awareness (I AM) is the common factor in every different experience. Boundless awareness has been called the Ultimate Subject or the ground of being, the wholeness that underlies the infinite diversity of waking and dreaming.

The I AM goes into abeyance every night in deep sleep, at least as something knowable or experienceable. In some traditions, its appearance in dreaming and waking life is spoken of as the first manifestation, the first emergence of something objective, however subtle. And from that first bare sense of being present and aware, time and space and the ten million things instantly follow.

In waking life, this organism is obviously very attached to being alive and surviving as awareness and experiencing. And yet, we also have a deep desire to return to the germinal darkness of deep sleep, consciousness-at-rest, free from the suffering that comes with conscious aware being and experiencing. We can feel both of these pulls within us.

The next layer of identity that emerges out of impersonal presence is the thought-sense of being an individual self—”me.” The boundless I AM has now morphed into “I am somebody,” an apparently bounded, encapsulated, limited being. I am me and not you. I am here and not over there. I am a unique individual person who seems to have free will and choice. Unbound, unencapsulated, impersonal aware presence now becomes conflated with the bodymind organism and the character in the story of my life.

In this dream-like movie of waking life, there is undeniably what appears to be a unique bodymind organism with a lifespan, a personality and certain qualities, characteristics, tendencies, abilities and so on. We can’t deny the person, but it’s not the solid, independent “thing” we often think it is. Even from a completely materialist perspective, it’s organic—it’s alive, continually changing, inseparable from and interdependent with its environment. It exists only in a dynamic relationship with everything apparently outside of it, and the boundary between inside and outside ranges from porous and permeable to unfindable and non-existent. It is like a wave in the ocean—an inseparable movement of the whole.

We can also notice that the bodymind and the me-story appear and disappear intermittently in this vast open aware presence, and that experientially, presence-awareness is unbound, not encapsulated. Experientially, the bodymind appears in awareness, not the other way around. And it is an intermittent appearance. But because of memory and conditioning and the ways we think, it seems very substantial, continuous and ever-present.

This “me” entity seems to be looking out of my eyes, authoring my thoughts, making my choices, having my experiences and living my life. But if we look closely, we can’t actually find this entity. It’s a kind of mirage created by a mix of mental images, stories, thoughts, sensations and memories. There’s no real substance to it. It’s more like an activity than an object, more like a verb than a noun, hence it is sometimes called selfing rather than a self. It certainly has some reality to it—we know which name to answer to, which mouth to put the food in, how to distinguish between ourselves and the carrot we are chopping up, and the importance of not stepping in front of a speeding bus. We couldn’t function in daily life without some sense of bodily identity, boundaries and location in time and space.

Like other living organisms, there is a built-in urge to survive as this organism. Among mammals, this includes such things as food gathering, finding shelter, protecting personal and territorial boundaries, mating and nurturing offspring. On an animal level, it’s entirely natural to feel fear or anger if any of this is threatened.

But of course, humans have moved, to greater and lesser degrees, beyond the constraints of wild nature, and therefore, we may not be driven anymore primarily by biological urges and instincts, but more and more by philosophies, beliefs, social roles and expectations, political convictions, vocational or artistic callings, transcendental experiences, and a whole range of identities. We have abilities that no other animal seems to have, at least in the same measure, to imagine future possibilities and to create technologies, and this has put us at the very top of the food chain. But we are also subject to a complex web of addictions, compulsions and delusions that no other animal has enough brains to be captured by, and we seem to be on the brink of destroying ourselves with our technologies and their effects.

On top of the basic thought-sense that “I am me,” a particular individual bodymind, come a host of second-hand identities and labels that we pick up and attach to ourselves on our journey through life. These identities and labels tell us what our particular “me” is: our name, age, sex, gender identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, family background, educational level, class or economic status, sexual orientation, religion, political affiliation, occupation, philosophy of life, and so on. It also includes all the things we’ve learned that we are: tall, short, strong, weak, introverted, extroverted, adventurous, timid, smart, stupid, conforming, nonconforming, a winner, a loser, attractive, ugly, athletic, bumbling, enlightened, unenlightened, a good child, a bad child, a good parent, a bad parent, a good student, a mediocre student, a good meditator, a bad meditator, an awakened one, a hopeless case, and so on.

We not only learn what sexual or racial category we are in, but we also learn a host of ideas about what it means to be that particular kind of human being. Women are emotional, men don’t cry, black people have rhythm, white people are oppressors, disabled people would be better off dead, lesbians hate men—a whole host of stories, myths and ideas—some true or partly true, but many not true at all.

We even identify with other groups who seem to be in a similar boat as the one we’re in—for example, if we consider ourselves an underdog, we might identify with other perceived underdogs or other oppressed groups or with a particular side in an international war or conflict that reminds us of ourselves in some way. If that other group is threatened or insulted, we feel threatened or insulted. It feels personal.

And so, as we grow up, we identify not only with the sense of being here as boundless aware presence, and not only with our individual personhood, but we also identify with all these categories, ideas, beliefs and stories. If you insult a category I feel identified with, I feel personally threatened, hurt and insulted. If you question my political ideas or my religion, I may defend them with the same ferocity that other animals defend their territory or their young. If you call me stupid, ugly or weak, it can hurt as much or more as if you punch or kick me. If you disagree with me on a hot button issue, it can feel as if my very life is being threatened. This is how it is to be human.

Meditative Exploration of All This

Describing what she called "the work of this moment," i.e., the work of mediation and meditative inquiry, my friend and teacher Toni Packer said this:

The essence [of this work] is to come upon a profound kind of listening and openness that reveals the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas—not just individually but collectively—and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves. The other aspect of this listening is to come upon an inner/outer silence—stillness—spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.

That’s a beautiful description of this awakening journey from being completely caught up in the trance of separation to discovering the wholeness of presence-awareness and the non-substantiality of what appears. It’s a movement from the thought-sense of being a separate fragment in a fractured and divided world to being this whole seamless happening without division. The subject/object divide melts away more and more, and this whole happening that we are feels more and more fluid, more like consciousness or energy than a bunch of lifeless solid matter. We more and more feel ourselves as unbound aware presence and the seamless, centerless, flow of experiencing.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I spent five years on staff at Springwater Center, the retreat center Toni Packer and friends founded in rural northwestern New York state. A former Zen teacher, Toni had dropped the rituals, hierarchy and dogmas of formal institutionalized Zen and created a very open place to explore life. We had about ten week-long silent retreats a year. These were held in total silence except for a daily talk and meetings with Toni. Unlike formal Zen, at Springwater all the sittings were optional. There was no prescribed sitting posture. We had cushions, meditation benches, chairs of all varieties, even recliners and couches. There was no prescribed practice. The emphasis was on open listening, open awaring, seeing how the mind worked, feeling the body, the breathing, the breeze on the skin, hearing the caw-caw-caw of the crows—simply being present and awake moment-to-moment, fully experiencing life as it is.

Outside of retreats, there was an emphasis on all the same things in the context of everyday life—working, eating and living together—dealing with all the conflicts, misunderstandings and difficulties that arise in human communities, seeing the ways we got triggered, seeing how our buttons got pushed, seeing how the mind and the whole realm of emotion-thought worked in relationships.

Questions were explored directly, rather than by simply adopting some authority’s answer or conclusion. Toni modeled a remarkable kind of total presence and open listening, a willingness to look freshly and see something new and unexpected rather than being stuck in old ideas and beliefs. I wrote about all this in depth in my first book, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life.

Questioning Identities

Toni questioned all identities. At first, that felt very threatening to me, as if I would be back where I was before feminism or LGBT liberation if I did that, back in the nightmare of the 1950s. But Toni encouraged me to question if that was really true, if I actually needed to hold onto these identities anymore. She talked about how she used to be very identified with being Jewish—she’d grown up half-Jewish in Nazi Germany—and how her attachment to that identity had fallen away during her years in Zen.

She invited me to explore whether identity as a member of various groups gave me a sense of stability, wholeness or belonging, and whether it might be a way of trying to fill a sense of lack, deficiency, isolation or separation. She always encouraged us to explore how the sense of belonging to a group could become divisive and at the root of conflicts, global and personal.

Of course, in everyday life, there’s a place for having some of these identities, especially if we belong to a social group that has been oppressed, negatively stereotyped, marginalized, erased, or looked down upon in some way. I found it quite liberating years ago to be in such groups—in my case, groups of women, lesbians, and people with disabilities. In these groups, I discovered that many of the problems that I had considered my own personal issues were common to all of us. Getting together and talking with others in the same group can reveal things about how we are treated as a group, and it can allow us to organize and work together to bring about changes.  We can see this with the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT liberation movement, the disability rights movement, and so on.

It can also be very important in psychological healing to explore our past histories as individuals and to understand the ways in which we were conditioned.

So I’m not suggesting there is no place at all for history or group identities or psychological or political work. But it’s easy to become attached to these identities in ways that are not helpful, and for all this to become a source of separation and conflict. There seems to be a popular tendency these days to put everyone into boxes: oppressed and oppressor, black and white, male and female, trans and cis, gay and straight, left and right, good and bad, right and wrong. And the truth is, none of these boxes or dividing lines are as solid or as simplistic as they seem.

I consider it a good thing that we’ve moved beyond the world in which I grew up, where we still had Jim Crow laws and where it was simply assumed that you were heterosexual and that you identified as the (narrowly defined) gender that went with your biological sex. When my mother was born, women still didn’t have the right to vote in the US. We’ve come a very long way in my lifetime, and perhaps as we correct social injustices, it’s inevitable that we will overdo it at times or get stuck in new boxes.

But for those of us interested in awakening from the trance of separation and discovering a greater truth, can we begin to notice when identity moves from something practical, helpful or functionally necessary into something that brings forth suffering, conflict and division? This is something to explore ongoingly. It’s a question to live with as we move in the world. We may find that our most primal identity—boundless aware presence—is always here as the ground of being. And then in everyday life, we can notice how we periodically identify as a person, or with a particular group, or with certain causes, ideas and opinions, and how all of that affects us. Is a particular identity helpful or is it unhelpful? The answer may be different in different situations and at different moments.

We can notice, if we’re upset or confused or feeling deficient in some way, whether we are identifying as a separate person or as boundless presence. We can notice that awareness beholds it all with equanimity, allowing everything to be as it is, clinging to nothing. Isn’t it always the separate little “me” that feels deficient and confused, upset and in conflict, superior or inferior, better or worse than somebody else? Does boundless awareness feel this way?

Spirituality as I mean it is about seeing how the mind works, seeing how identity works, seeing the nature of reality, and discovering and dissolving into the vastness being and beholding it all—being the whole show, no-thing and everything, and yes, also a unique character in the movie of waking life, playing our part in the Great Drama, the divine lila. It’s all included.

And finally, can we also wonder who or what is identifying as this or that? And what exactly is this activity that we call “identifying”? Not to come up with a verbal answer, but to really feel into these questions, to look and see and wonder and explore. What does this activity entail? What thoughts and emotions go with it? How does it play out in the body? How does it happen? What do we get out of it? Does it hurt us in any way? Again, not to come up with “the right answers,” but to actually explore directly and openly, without knowing what might be discovered.

The spiritual life as I mean it is a lifelong, moment-to-moment, exploration and discovery—finding out how we do our suffering and discovering if there is a different possibility, and if there is, what serves that and what doesn’t. It’s a pathless path going nowhere (now/here), which is where we always already are. We may have been overlooking it by thinking “this isn’t it,” by looking elsewhere, and by seeking a future result. But the solution (or dissolution) is always right here, right now.

And in this very instant, who or what are you? If you start thinking about it or searching for the right answer, you’ve already missed the mark. In that first instant, the mind stops. It goes blank. And there is simply this, just as it is.

Love to all…