On identity crises, the mind, and human potential
The topic of personal identity is a big deal. People can spend their whole lives just trying to find out who they are. And people’s conceptions of who they are can radically change after certain life events, or certain experiences they go through — be they traumatic or joyful. People even actively work to change their idea of themselves — as well as how others see them — through sustained action.
What we usually end up with after our respective journeys to find out who we are is a series of adjectives and nouns that indicate roles. We’re a parent, a doctor, a refugee, a soldier. We’re Black, APAIC, Latinx, white. We’re bisexual, homosexual, asexual. We’re transgender, cisgender, nonbinary. We’re Hindu, Christian, Jain, atheist. We’re quiet, outspoken, restless, obedient, servile, creative, loyal.
Whatever the noun or adjectives we use, we miss the fact that who we are, at our very root, is actually none of those things. Sure, get us in a room with a bunch of other people — or in a society with millions of them — and we seem to need those nouns and adjectives. We use them to define ourselves in opposition to some people, and in alliance with others. It’s what our animal brains seek to do. We sort ourselves into neat categories — even when those categories start off as a resistance to being categorized.
But those categories — however helpful they can be in the world — they aren’t who each of us is.
I once heard an odd dude — a mystic kind of dude I knew in college — say something I didn’t quite grasp until recently — until I had stumbled through my own type of identity crisis:
Whatever you think you are, you’re proving yourself wrong by thinking that’s you. You’re just the thinker; not what the thinker thinks it is.
As I came to meditate a bit more, I came to realize what he meant. Consider a more well-established quote, by Blaise Pascal:
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Why is it so hard to sit alone in a room, quietly? It’s not just because of all of the buzzing thoughts running through your head. What also makes it hard is what you encounter once you drop down below that level of stuff that’s on your mind. At that level, you’re just you — without the incidental things you happen to be out in the world. In the fleeting moments when you make contact with that simple, indescribable you — it can be unsettling at first.
In Vedic thought, a rough name for that simple sense of you is atman — or the self. It’s what Vedic practitioners aim for in their form of meditation. And they recognized millennia ago that if and when you’re able to reach that naked self — when you’re able to get past all the incidental stuff you’ve attached to your identity in this chaotic world — you can cultivate a sense of peace.
What’s peaceful about it is the realization that you don’t need to travel anywhere to find yourself. You don’t need to buy anything, take any classes, try on certain clothes, or get a new hairstyle to find out who you are. If you can sit silently, still your mind, and sink down below the swirling chaos of your thoughts and emotions brought on by the external world — you, the simple, peaceful you, is down there.
And where you go from there is up to you. But wherever that is, you get to go there with the sense of peace that comes from not having to rely on the categories of the world to tell you who you are. You are you. You know you. And in time, you’ll love you. And that love isn’t because of any category you fit into, or accomplishment of yours. It’s just a love for you — that naked you, deep down under all of the incidentals.