Facing and Acknowledging the Traps of Spiritual Identities

It’s pretty cool seeing the different types of spiritual identities that we can adopt, thereby creating what we can call a spiritual ego.

• I am a truth seeker
• I am a spiritual person
• I am happy and free
• I am enlightened
• I am almost enlightened
• I am not enlightened yet
• I am trapped and suffering
• I am no thing and everything
• I am an illusion
• I am the unnameable and undefinable presence of All That Is
• I am a Christian/Buddhist/Taoist/Jew/Muslim/ACIM student/Advaitan
• I am awareness
• I am the creator of my reality
• I am that which experiences these emotions and creations
• I am a spiritual being having a human experience
• I am a divine presence
• I am a manifestation of the one

I’m sure you can add to this list.

Gangaji has a wonderful video on spiritual traps where she highlights these identities and points out that although we all do this at one point or another and that these identities are a door to freedom at the beginning, they eventually become a trap, and yet there’s nothing wrong with these traps. Instead of seeing them as a problem and coming from a place of right and wrong, we can simply rest in the recognition that they are what they are and drop the struggle. As she points out in the video below, when it comes to traps, be they mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual, there’s simply more than these traps, much more than that. When there’s an identification with any of these traps, there’s a lack of recognition of what’s more than that. That’s all.

This isn’t to say that these identities are valid or invalid, but rather that in essence, we are what we are, regardless of the labels and mental identities that exist only in thought and are added onto what we are. Have you noticed that you are what you are, regardless of whether or not you adopt any of these identities? They are all secondary, a product of the mind that attempts to make sense of things and play “catch up” by understanding what is already true.

The particular sense of self we adopt may certainly impact our experience, sure, determine what character and role we play, no doubt about it, for that’s basically its purpose, yet the reality of what we ultimately are in the truth of our being remains untouched by any of this, and in fact has no problem with any of this. From the perspective of our True Self, it just is what it is.

Inquiring Into the Nature of the Separate Self

It can certainly feel like there is a separate “me” that exists and operates independent of the rest of existence, but that feeling is nothing more than the body’s way of saying, “If the belief in a separate self were real, this is what it’d feel like.” (That’s another little tidbit I picked up from Matt.)

Who is this fundamental “I” anyways who, like a chameleon, can apparently be or do or experience any of these things? Identification happens within consciousness, sure, but who identifies? Inquiry happens, but who inquires?