social convention

Everything you think you are

Is no more than a social convention

We live in human societies and these societies have a lot of rules, some written down, but most unspoken, and yet we must abide by these rules if we want to be part of the society. So, for example, we all wear clothes, even on a warm day when it would be nice to be naked, but our social rules demand that we wear clothes.

But I want to make a different point today, and that is that everything that we normally think ourself to be is really part of this social convention. We only need our personal identity to fit in with society, to relate to other human beings in the way that convention demands. So for example, I have to have a name. If I were on my own, I would not need a name. It's not really who I am. It's not essential in any way. And yet it is required by society. And society will often implicitly require a lot more identity than that.

I have to be labelled male or female, and only now, in the twenty first century are some administrative bodies beginning to realise there can be another category, people with an extra chromosome or people who are undergoing a sex change. We are always categorising each other. As a society we demand this of each other, that we fit in boxes. We expect someone to have an address. I don't have one. I live a life of no fixed abode, and yet forms, government forms, often require me to write down an address. Of course I just use a relative's address, a friend's address, or make one up completely. It's absurd, but it's required.

Society expects us to have a job, a profession. I've done all sorts of jobs in my life, and quite a lot of the time I'm not doing any job at all, and I certainly don't have a career. But again it's expected of one. And that's just a few examples. Religion might be another one, race, a nationality indeed.

All this is a social convention. It's required by society, and who is society? It's us collectively. We demand this of each other, in order that we can feel comfortable in some way with each other. We are trying to normalise each other, put each other in categories, in boxes. And all of that has a certain utility when it comes to organising a lot of people in a way that they can live side by side without actually killing each other. So it has its place.

The only difficult is we tend to forget that this identity is a social convention. We start to believe the myth that this is who I am. And there's a great danger in that. Because there's no real substance to it, I have to start defending it. This is always the way with abstract concepts, because they have no fundamental reality, and yet we become attached to the concept. We have to start defending it in absurd ways.

I might go to war in the name of my nation, my nationality. And people praise this ridiculous behaviour. Some people actually think it's good to be patriotic. All that that patriotism means is that you want to kill someone else because they were born on the other side of a line on a map. It's absurd.

And so it is with all of this personal identity. It's an absurdity, really, and we become attached to it and then we argue for it, defend it. And the worst thing of all is that in identifying with this nonsense, we forget who we really are. And we forget to even look, to find out who we really are. And it's only when we remember, very profoundly, that we are not this identity that society thinks we are. only when we remember that do we really take the time to look inside ourself and find out who we are.

I call that the spiritual journey. It's a journey into a deep mystery. And coming home to our true self, to the essential part of our being, that is the greatest journey a human being can make, the most beautiful, the most profound, and it is the most life affirming. I urge you, if you have not set out on that journey do so. And never stop until you too find the truth about who you are. For I can tell you now it is certainly not this personal identity that is no more than a social convention.