Richard Lawrence Cohen said...

Funny you should ask. I was thinking about identity just today, doing The Work of Byron Katie (which I've blogged about in the past) on the belief statement, "I don't know who I really am." I found that I don't know whether I'm happy or sad about the most important developments in my life; I don't know whether I'm still the same person I was as a child, or last year, or yesterday; I don't know what the interior of my body is doing; I don't know what's in my unconscious; I don't know my future; I don't know whether I love or hate myself; and I don't know whether I love or hate others. And with all this, I have thought for a long time that I understand myself.

July 11, 2007 7:00 PM

Nathan said...

I and Identity

There's a belief
that our souls are made up of fragments of older souls.
I read about this in a lovely book about Jewish mysticism called 9 1/2 Mystics.
A rabbi would look at a man and diagnose,
"There seems to be a speck of Cain
in your right shoulder."

I believe this in the same way I believe everything:
completely, not at all, and everything in between, in all directions.

***

The Rastafarian term I and I
is the same as the Hindu concept of atman and brahman:
one is simultaneously oneself as a person
and oneself as the godhead;
the many selves are one self.

***

Etymology can help us open the door of a word
and look inside.
"Individual" is "that which cannot be divided."
A useful fiction.
"Atom," from Greek, means the same thing,
indivisible, unsplittable.

***

One's self is many selves;
Letters are atoms of language;
Our voices are made of voices;
Everything we get involved with
writes long, long poems on our minds and bodies;
Our speech is the glittering surface of a river.

***

Since I was there, I've been working out what to do with the material--
how to say it, how to write it, how to dance it.

In the 1990s I spent four years in Ecuador,
teaching, translating, running illegal jungle tours, and
sitting in ayahuasca ceremonies with shamans.

Are spirits real? I wanted to know.
What is the self?
Is there life after death?
Can the soul travel outside the body?

I received no concrete answers to these questions.
No, no concrete answers at all.

July 11, 2007 10:40 PM

Part Deux

...I laugh. By the light of the candle, I notice that two eyes have sprouted on the band of Dave’s crown. I tell him so and he laughs. Next, those disappear and four new eyes appear on his face, on a level with his own eyes, forming a linked band of six eyes across the front of his head. An angel-man, he squints at me out of six bright eyes, grins and laughs. It’s a bit much. I feel like I’ve been out in the sun too long.

Nausea hits me and I rise and get down off the floor onto the ground. The night is vast and dark, the grass is soft and damp. Things are happening in my guts that I will have to fight. A battle begins between me and my own demons, whatever those are, tactile metaphors. I raise my hands in the air and do an ancient war dance, consciously playing a role, also consciously possessed by the spirit of an ancestor, grunting huh huh huh huh hu hu hu hu hu hu…. A paleolithic tribal code surges through me: first we show the strangers our peace, then our strength, and if they attack anyway, we eliminate them. I’m a soul half a million years old. I’m what I’m not. I’m everything.

Nausea hits me again, harder, a solid punch in the stomach. I bellow with pain. Losing the war against myself, I walk to a big fallen tree and vomit with a deep roar on the far side of the trunk. Now that I’ve lost, the victory is mine: I’ve driven out the invader, as all invaders must be driven out, and I shout toward the river and any demons who can hear, WE PROTECT OUR OWN! The struggle suddenly seems a transpersonal one, all of us in this microcommunity of neighbors on this river defending ourselves against attackers; the battleground is Aguilar’s life. Highly energized now, I feel a puma spirit from the highlands enter my body, and we step around catlike, silent, looking around, sniffing the air, learning the place. The puma energy leaves, the puma thoughts recede, and in comes a condor spirit. We stretch out my arms and our soul seems to fly high above the earth. A jaguar is next, and finally a wolf. He lopes away, a gray form melting into shadows. As I turn toward the hut, a river of brilliant multicolored energy from a small cluster of stars near the middle of the sky swarms down into my chest. An unbelievably strong ecstasy surges through me, and I dance, and words sing out of my mouth—One love is high! One love is high! One love is high!

After some time I’m only me again. As I walk back to the hut, still dazzled, I mutter to David, “That wasn’t me dancing, it was the universe dancing through me.” ...

July 12, 2007 4:38 AM

Dick said...

I have a powerful sense of identity that defies provenance, location, even definition. A sort of 'selfness' seems to have been with me since first memory, & maybe before; I have no idea from whence it arises within (it certainly has no connection with any external visual representation); I cannot even begin to apprehend it verbally & thus depict it to myself. As an only child, I'm aware that the purity of my consciousness of 'selfness' has been untrammeled by sibling presence & it's at its most intense & vibrant when I'm alone. I know too that its clearest voice is to be found (for better or worse) in my poetry.

And that's about as far as I've ever got when shining the torch into the darkest places!

July 12, 2007 7:12 AM

Jonah said...

I am not I.
I am not my hazel eyes,
that change shade with the seasons.
I am not my thin hair.
I am not my gray beard.
I am not my thin mouth.

I am not that reflection.
I am not I.
I am not my voice.
I am not my thoughts.
I am not my desires.
I am not my nightmares.
I am not my dreams.

I do not see my eye.
I am not that twinkling eye.
I am not my shadow.
I am not the one you see,
or the one you think you see.
I am not I.

I am not the song.
I am not the singing.
I am not the slender fingers
on my guitar fretboard,
nor the fingers that
pluck each string.
I am not the harmonica moan.

I am not the prayer
or the pray-er.
I am not my breath.
I am not that distant figure.

The finger does not touch itself.
The eye cannot see itself.
I am not I.

July 12, 2007 2:09 PM

Jean said...

I guess I would completely agree with Dick that "I have a powerful sense of identity that defies provenance".

I regard my life as an almost unmitigated disaster. Staying alive is no small achievement; still, I would have liked a lot of other things I haven't done and haven't had.

Nonetheless, if I ask myself: who would I like to be? the answer is unhesitatingly that I cannot imagine being anyone else but me, cannot imagine *wanting* to be anyone else but me.

I have no idea what I mean by 'me', but my heart and all my instincts certainly know.

I presume it is the same for most people.

One of life's great and wondrous mysteries.

July 12, 2007 3:10 PM

DefSufi said...

My experience is that identity can be a slippery thing, and that even if you yourself feel you have a firm grasp on who you think you are, others may not agree. At all. Not even close.
I sort of live that.

First, I can look back over my life and see that "who I am/was" has changed periodically, as I found new loves, new interests, new friends. I have come to think of these phases in my life as incarnations, even though my body has continued to live. Yes, there is a central thread of "me" that runs through it all, but if there were such a thing as a time machine, I doubt that my 10-year old self would ever think she would become my 47-year old self. She wouldn't recognise me as the future her.
Secondly, the way I identify myself is radically different to how my parents, especially my mum, identifies me. I am a Sufi Muslim. I have been for more than a decade. But just a few weeks ago my mum said how glad she was that I had "given all that up". She said this because I don't fit her stereotype of a Muslim woman (she's a lapsed Christian, btw, as are my dad and sister) because I "don't dress the way those women do". So in her mind, because I wear jeans and a t-shirt, I'm something other to her than how I see myself.

If you look at your day, you too might get the feeling that who you are at work is not quite who you are at home, down the pub, at church, with the kids, out shopping, etc. I've observed that most of us have "additions" to our central core personality and identity that we put on and take off like we do our clothes. Mum in the morning whilst getting the kids off to school, office manager in the workplace, mum again later when the kids are back, spouse / lover / partner when the other adult in your life comes home, dance floor chick if you get to go out clubbing with your mates. We are still "Chris" or "Alice" or "Cait" or "Mike" at the core, but we put on those other clothes.

Part of the purpose of a spiritual path, awareness path, etc. is to discover and develop our core identity to the point where the clothes can come off, and we ARE who we are, full stop. At that point, we can finally experience our true self, and the "self" of the rest of creation.
There's a quote from Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach that I really like:
"You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.
You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past."

July 13, 2007 12:19 PM

Rain said...

Wow, you started this off with a bang, as in things I have thought a lot about and could write a book on each of them.

On the DNA, I have said that for a long time that it might carry memory markers and as you said, could explain all of these 'mutual' memories. It also is possible you were the Egyptian queen in a past life and the reason so many remember the same past life is that they were in that era but not necessarily the person. So you end up with a lot of Cleopatras but most were serving maids, knew her and remember the details, claiming the more important identity as their past life personally.

There is no knowing on any of it as we can't prove from where come these memories or coincidences. Interesting though and you certainly do resemble her. They say we do through one lifetime to another and Tina Turner sure doesn't look like her this go round-- if she was her in the past.

My personal past life in Egypt (if there are such things) was likely as a temple priestess which translates to forced sex supposedly for god and not a good memory set at all.

On identity, it is weird you wrote about this as I have had the same thoughts recently; and as you said in my blog, it's kind of amazing how this all comes together that so many of us think the same thing at the same time. Like an energy wave comes through.

July 13, 2007 4:44 PM

wrr said.....

Defining who I am is a very curious endeavor because there's no one clear cut or simple answer.

All that I am is a result of the lessons learned from all the varied life circumstances I went through. As life is continuing learning process, identity a work in progress.

How I look at life is also a result of lessons leaned from decisions made in the past. This too contributes to who I am, what I stand for and what is valuable to me.

Consequentially, how I deal will people and life circumstances is culled from all of the above.

I agree with Dick, identity does defy provenance. Its experiences that is the result of life circumstances that shape a person's identity. We learn something new every time we are confronted with the result of a decision we've made in the past.

Andy said....

Some people seem very sure of their own identity; others - like me - are much less so.
I wonder how much of the uncertainty comes about because, somewhere along the line, we started living out other people’s expectations of us? Expectations which diverged from our true nature, and so that nature became suppressed, the loser in a power struggle.

Of course, that idea assumes that there is such a thing as ‘true nature’; something which we are independently of all those external influences - the old nature versus nurture polarity.

As children, we learned to please our parents; as employees we learned to live out the role our employers defined for us; as spouses we continued the desire of young lovers to please the beloved, until the desire was gone and only a shell of habit remained.

Or perhaps it was nothing as overtly coercive as expectations; perhaps it was simply that none of the role models we had available to us in our formative years adequately illustrated all the possibilities open to us. Certainly, in my case, all my relations (I have many cousins mostly a decade or so older than me) followed seemingly identical patterns – ‘good’ jobs (for ‘good’ read secure, dull, conventional, conformist), marriage in mid-20s, then ‘settling down’ to have a family. Any dreams of anything more adventurous were seen as precisely that – just impossible dreams, utterly divorced from reality.

I often feel that I don’t altogether fit in the life that I’ve got – and moreover I’ve felt this pretty much for as long as I can remember. It seems that, without deliberately planning it this way, I’ve constructed a life designed for somebody else. Over the decades, one decision leads to another, and another, and slowly the paths diverge. What is becomes further and further removed from what could have been – what should have been?

Neither path is necessarily any ‘better’ than the other in any material sense, but they’ve led to very different places. In one, I might have felt at home. In this one, I feel something of a stranger, a misfit.

Of course, reality is not always so black-and-white – I’m painting a picture of extremes in order to make the point. The influences which make us who we are complex and continually changing, and if there is a power struggle between external expectations and internal identity, it may ebb and flow.

But one of the strengths of blogging is that, since it is a means of self-expression, it can provide a medium where that ‘true self’ may find a voice.

July 16, 2007 10:19 PM