We know what it means to identify something, to recognize what something is in relation to other identifiable things, but what does it mean to identify with something? The question is posed because we human beings do as much, if not more, identifying with things than identifying things for what they are, practically speaking.

Take for instance the need for self-esteem, self-image. What is a human being without pride, confidence, a sense of command and control, a clean conscience, a good reputation, respectability? All of that requires a great deal of identification with those ideas and images. And even if one suffers from low self-esteem, lack of self-control, shame, disreputability, it's the same syndrome. One feels the need to identify oneself in no uncertain terms, however grandiose, smug, wretched or disgraceful. Why?

We can brush away the question by saying it's our conditioning, but what does that actually mean? We're conditioned to identify ourselves by more than the immediate biological facts because we have organized human society around the belief that the past tells us everything we need to know about the present; that history and the knowledge gleaned from it is Authority. We worship knowledge, the past. Therefore, each one of us identifies with our past rather than simply identifying it as our past. Others know us by our past, and when our past is not well known, it is imagined and patched together from rumor and hearsay. We are what we are said to be, whether it is others saying it or oneself.

But if you look at yourself in the moment, identifying nothing but the immediacy of life, you are nothing but awareness, and until that awareness is interrupted by a reminder of "who" you are, you are nobody and nothing but human, whatever that is or isn't.

This post was last updated by nick carter Sun, 13 Dec 2009.