stripping away of identity

Life will strip you of your identity

In western psychology, we are encouraged to have a strong sense of self, a strong identity, rooted in a culture, in family, with a profession, a nationality, a sense of race, perhaps religion too. All of this is seen as a good thing. It helps normalise us, make us fit to participate in society. In short, western psychology is about propping up our ego and restoring it to strength whenever it is diminished by life's challenges.

But this ego is a fabrication, a fabrication of our own mind. And its most fundamental characteristic is self preservation – not the preservation of the whole being, but the preservation of the ego itself. The ego is self serving in that sense. Its only concern is that it, the ego itself, survives and thrives.

The spiritual journey, however, takes us in a different direction. We see that we are not the ego. It's something false. It's a false sense of self. It's a false identity. We've been identifying ourself with things that are not really who we are. So from the spiritual perspective, the ego is something to let go of. And that's just as well, because in any case life will, sooner or later, strip us of everything that we have identified with.

If we are identified with our job, one day it will end. We will be made redundant, or perhaps simply reach time for retirement. Similarly, if we are identified with our status in society, sooner or later that will go, either with the whims of fashion or again simply through our aging. Nowadays, particularly in Western societies, there is no time for old people. There is no respect for the wisdom that comes with age. Everything is about becoming faster and younger and more mobile. And everything is a fashion. This year's celebrity is forgotten by next year. So status us in society, if that is what we have become identified with, will also be stripped from us, with time.

And if you look at other things that you are identifying with, it will probably be the same story. Wealth can come and go. Relationships can come and go. We're not really in control of these things, even though we like to think we are. And so, sooner or later, life will strip us of everything that we have become identified with.

Eventually, of course, we will die, and that is the final stripping away of identity – this identification we have with a particular physical body, and with this personal life story that we are so attached to – all of that will go. And really, with the spiritual journey, we are attempting to see all that, have clarity about it, before the moment of physical death. That's why it's sometimes said that enlightenment is to die before we die. It's a death of all this identity, of believing the ego, and of letting the ego run our life. And the ego itself of course resists that at all costs. And yet if we allow life to strip away these identities, it is actually felt as a relief, as if a great burden has been removed from us. We become light, almost ethereal is the feeling. We can float through life, without being weighed down with all that baggage of identity.

So don't resist it. Allow life to strip away everything that you are identified with. Become devoid of identity, unidentified, unidentifiable. For that in truth is your essence, the unidentifiable.