Identity is a funny thing. It starts a family and a war. It can build bridges of relationships among strangers and create a gulf unbridgeable among brothers. It rewards and tortures. It is suffered and savored.
The world we inhabit reflects certain physical and psychological principles as the very basis of its foundation. Love of Life, survival and perpetuity are not just concepts but something we have practiced unconsciously all along. An absence of survival instinct is considered abnormal. The grossest matter to the most refined intelligence are bound by the same laws of existence. Gravity, one of the most visible laws, affects seas and mountains, capillaries and blood cells alike.
A law is something that stands the test of experiments and gives consistently verifiable results like laws of motion. Whereas when we speak of sentiments and emotions, we have to dive into more fundamental realms. A principle comprises a number of laws governed by a conscious binding force. Based on how they are combined, they become ethics, morals or disciplines. Brotherhood, for example, includes the laws of survival, affinity, trust, territory, perpetuity - which are also impressed on our genetic material. Maternity is a fascinating occurrence. It goes against the laws of individual survival as we know how many women have died giving birth and how many have gone on to destroy themselves after a bad carriage. We call this love but it is just a label on something we do not understand entirely and it doesn’t take us any closer to the truth.
These are principles beyond sensory comprehensions where psychologists take us and thereafter philosophers. Identity is one such complex and beautiful principle. It exists in animals more prominently than plants and humans more multifariously than animals. Identity is the sign of an ascending intelligence trying to understand its own world.
Our self-identification, derived from our emotional and spiritual strengths, reflects in all we do. It decides how we treat ourselves and others. A human being has many beings in him - the mental, the spiritual, the vital or sensational and the physical. What keeps them together? Like blades of a propeller hinged onto a central pivot, they are hinged to the identification of being one. But beyond all, identity is a tool to overcome the inertia of matter. It is a dynamic urge of blade-speed while staying hinged within and with the multidimensional propeller of society. And like all things, when identity becomes distorted and degenerate, it also becomes clinging. Hanging on and on - to meaningless relationships, unchangeable pasts, irrational ideas. This is the cause of chaos in our world, this evident denial of truth.
There is a beautiful saying in the Buddhapurana. When a man takes a dip in one river and he emerges in another. The river has changed in every possible way in that moment, only one has to realize. That river denotes time. The saying goes on to say that the man who took a dip and the man who emerged are also two different people. Our body, mind and spirit are manifestations of energy in flux. So identity should be perpetually shaping entity, not a fixed one. Do not hang on, do not cling on. Just hinge on for now! To let go of the fixity of identity and embrace its mutability can spur profound discoveries of the self.
And like Sri Aurobindo says ‘Rebirth is the condition of material immortality.’ Think again!
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