Identity

 From the moment of your birth you have been acquiring an identity.  This identity is not who you are.  You are not your body, your mind, or your emotions.  You are pure consciousness.  Consciousness has given rise to all existent form.  It is immortal and eternal.  Your authentic Self knows this Truth. 
Identity is simply the data you refer to as yourself.   This is your persona, the part of yourself that you refer to as me, I, “who I am.” You determine who you are, based upon your collective but limited experiences and perceptions. All of which are subject to evolution or change.  You create yourself based upon your interpretation of your sensory awareness.  What you interpret,  becomes who you are.  What you think you become. 
You have been entrained, environmentally and culturally conditioned to assume an identity to become someThing, not someOne.  You develop an Ego, a set of personal associations, preferences, and identifications.  This becomes your agent for relating to your life’s experience.  You have departed from your authentic Self.  You see yourself as separate from the whole, and fully independent.  
This process of alienation is commonly referred to as ego development, your persona or personality, is a contrived sense of Self and therefore transient.
The ego’s purpose is to assure your survival.  Beyond that primary role, it seeks superiority, power and control.  The ego is insatiable in its quest to secure these socially valued human amenities.  Your choices have been shaped by your ego’s endless need for recognition and achievement.  You  compete with others as a means to measure your progress.  You depend on their failure in order to succeed. This is the path of destruction and illusion. 
 {The truth is, you are an expression of the infinite Source. This Source is pure consciousness.  It is the energy that gives rise to creation.  Creation is   consciousness. It is our true nature.  This is the Oneness of our conception…it is the non changing, and eternal.  All existence is an interplay of creative dependency and interconnection.  You are a reflection of the whole, a microcosm of the macrocosm.}
The ego is in constant need of renewing its authority, approval and supremacy.  Therefore it continually relies on external validation.  Judgement of self and others takes root and becomes your chief tool of measuring your relative position in the world.  You condemn and criticize others in order to elevate yourself.  Self righteousness and condemnation become tools of your own eminence .   Your concern is for your own welfare and well being. Any failure on your part to assert your supremacy is ultimately a threat to your inner stability.  You become completely self absorbed, ruled by your own ego’s obsessions, ambitions and desires.  You have given up all authority over your life.  This failed system is the root of all of your anxiety, fear and insecurity, because it lacks spiritual substance, the Truth.
The ego obscures the Truth and veils the nature of reality.  It prevents you from seeing and experiencing things as they are.  The ego lives in the past and projects itself into the future.  Its lifespan is determined by the process of thinking.  It literally thinks itself into existence.  The thing it fears most is death, {a thoughtless moment.}  because with the cessation of thinking it cannot place itself in space and time.  To be present is to create a lapse/gap in the ego’s functioning.  From the perspective of the moment, there is no past, no future…only now, only what Is.  Every moment is the same in that regard: timeless.  This is where creation occurs. The moment is threatening because it represents the unknown, so we manipulate our fear of the unknown by filling the moment with our internal dialogue, analysis,  and repetitive thinking.  You avoid the true reality by living in one you have self created. To maintain this illusion requires an inordinate amount of time and energy.  You are always having to strategize, manipulate, and control the world in order to preserve your semblance of truth.  The true reality is preexistent and  independent of your thinking, it is transcendent.  At any moment you can experience it by waking up, by bringing your awareness to “what Is”.
This only requires a shift in your attention, a willingness to be present, to relax into the moment.  Children do this naturally, spontaneously.  Their world unfolds before them and they engage authentically with whatever they encounter.  They are intimately connected to “sahaja” or the spontaneous inborn essence of their Being.