Seeing Through Identification with Personality

I Am a Peapod!

Imagine you were an actor who really wanted to get into a part. You put on a mask, a costume, a new voice, even a new personality, and walk onto stage completely transformed on the outside, acting like a completely new person. Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that you put on this peapod costume and rolled out onto the stage.

The actor within is obscured in favor of this temporary persona, this image that the actor is pretending to be.

Now imagine that you, as this actor, were always up on stage and every role you played was just another costume, another persona. None of the personas or emotions you act out have anything to do with you. They’re just something you’re putting on, acting out, and displaying to the audience.

Let’s call this actor your True Self, your True Nature. Now, this Self just is what it is. It’s not one of the roles that’s played. It’s not a costume at all.

You already are what you are at your core, yet for whatever reason, you’d like to temporarily become something else in order to play a particular part and see what it’s like to be something you’re not. A little variety is nice sometimes, y’know?

What do you do if you want to make these new qualities really seem like who you truly are? What do you do if you want to forget your True Nature and completely BECOME your new personality, as if you were living another life altogether?

You’d have to assign a certain sense of ownership to the various external attributes and you make them your own. “This is now who I am. It is who I am. I am this. It defines me.”

If the peas on your costume weren’t you and had nothing to do with you, you wouldn’t really care what happened to them. But now if they’re MY peas, they suddenly feel like they’re just as much a part of me as an arm or a leg.

Instead of being the original actor, you now ARE the roles you play, the costume that you wear. In order to feel real, the mask that you wear must be believed to be your real face. The belief becomes SO real that the mask becomes your real face. The objects that you own now become your objects, part of you. They define who you are. If you were to lose any of these objects, you then feel a sense of loss because the “you” you are pretending to be is now less. You have lost part of itself for your entire sense of “me”ness was based on identification with these external attributes.

The only way a false “me” can have any existence is to pretend to be something other than what you are by identifying with what you are not.

The ego that you have is the part of you that is in automatic continuous identification mode.

Am I a hot dog?

It looks at things, both physical objects outside of you and emotional sensations inside of you, and says to itself, “I am that.” “I am not that.”

By setting up a duality between what it is and what it isn’t, it can now define itself. “I am a peapod, not a hot dog.”

The ego is the automatic false self creation machine within you. If you go to it for answers, it will also tell you that you are yet another persona being acted out on stage.

Instead of looking to find out if who you are actually has ANYTHING to do with the roles that you play in the first place, you may instead seek to play better roles. We call this self-improvement.

If you hop on the spiritual boat, you may even start finding yourself playing spiritual roles.

Some classic spiritual roles you can play include:

• A spiritual being having a human experience
• The infinite self
• God
• Consciousness
• Spirit
• A meditator
• A compassionate, loving person
• A spiritual seeker
• An excellent manifester
• An enlightened person

I’m sure you get the idea. Can you come up with some more?

There’s nothing in any way wrong with playing these roles, but recognize that all of these roles are simply roles that we can play when we pretend to be one of the roles created by the ego, yet none of them are who we truly are, despite the fact that some are certainly closer to being in alignment with our True Nature. Nevertheless, no role is who you truly are.

In Reality, you just are what you are. I am what I am.

That which you are can not be named. It is the nameless One.

All suffering is based in identification with something other than what you are. It’s because the ego has created a “false self” and now this being (who really doesn’t exist outside of thought) is trying to pretend that it’s actually a real being. That’s a pretty tall order.

What are you?

Know thyself.