Self Identification

The concept of self-identification is discussed, emphasizing the importance of identifying with our authentic selves rather than the negative aspects of our personality. The ego, present in everyone, influences our thoughts and actions, but it does not define us. Various sources, including religion, spirituality, psychology, and brain studies, support the idea that we are not our ego. The key understanding is that we are beautiful and authentic beings, and the challenge in life is to choose to respond to the ego's influence with our authentic selves. I wanted to talk a little bit about the concept of self-identification. So if we go back to this whole theory of what it is to be human, how we live in a world of duality and how within ourselves we have this ego in the broader sense of the word, things that make us do things that are bad or restrict us or these unconscious behaviours we have, these learned behaviours from childhood that no longer serve us. And the idea of our authentic self, which is everything about us is beautiful and creative and inspiring and loving and how really the challenge of life is to work towards being our authentic self, well one aspect of that is really this idea of self-identification. And that's really the key and you see that I think a lot of people who haven't got their head around this concept in life, in other words a lot of people, what they do is in thinking, well who am I, who actually am I, they actually identify with the bad part of their personality, which we know is the complete opposite of the truth. So you know all of us, you can sit down with any single person and say, well name three really great things you did, just where you were at your best, in love or in creating or in purpose or in selflessness, and people could list that and then you say, well name three horrible things you did. And then the question is, well who are you then, you're this person who's capable of these bad things and you're this person who's capable of these great loving things, who are you? And I think most people would either identify with both things and say, well look I'm a mink, so I can be a good person, so I'm going for the bad person. Some people, those people in real despair I guess would simply forget about all the good parts of their personality and just identify with the bad aspects. And this is the great shame and the great sadness of being human, because the answer is, who we are is the good stuff. That is our authentic self. The reason we've been given this ego and this other side is because it's a dual universe. As we talked about before, you can't experience love unless you've been in a state of not having love. You can't experience pain unless you've experienced pleasure. You can't experience happiness unless you've been sad. So we were given this ego that that is our humanity. In order to experience all the beauty the world has and all the love, there needs to be other. There needs to be the opposite. That is the great experiment of human life. So it needs to be like this. This is the creation. This is the all-knowing God creating a situation of not knowing by giving people free will and saying, look, you're this extraordinary person, but by the way, here's your ego. It's going to be whispering in your head, and here's your life's challenge to deal with that. And as we talked about before, the ego is present in everybody from Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa to Adolf Hitler and Robert Mugabe. The ego is present in everybody. It's whispering to everybody. It's just who you listen to. So my point here in that complex interaction between the ego and the authentic self and our own self-identification, I'm talking here about who we identify with. I'll give you an example. Shortly after my separation from my wife, and look, I went through a lot of difficult times, but I'd like to think I handled it reasonably well, and there was always some light at the end of the tunnel for me, but I said a couple of things which really indicated, I think I said to my parents once, yep, I definitely have the capacity to be an arsehole sometimes, or something along those lines, and we all laughed, it was said as a joke, but I believed it. Part of my self-identification was that I'm sometimes an arsehole. And the same, I remember chatting to one of my friends about having kids, and I said, I'm not sure, do I really want to bring into the world somebody who's got these problems like I've got, and he just looked at me horrified, and he said, jeez, if you really believe that, you're in a bad place. I think they were just both examples of this sort of self-identification we have, and it's wrong. And I think women with their looks are obviously like this, women are so critical of their own looks instead of seeing the beauty in others. But the point is that when you look at all the different religions, and the messages they've been teaching, you look at all the spirituality and the understanding of the spiritual nature of the world, you look at human psychology, or even going back to Freud that brought up the concept of the ego, and you also look at the actual physiological study of the brain, where they've actually identified the part of the brain where the ego is, and it's about the size of a peanut in the left-hand side of the brain, and it's where our language centre comes from, so we can't just sort of cut it out, it is a core part of who we are. But all of these things, whether it's religion, spirituality, psychology, or the actual scientific study of the brain, are all telling us the same thing, and it's just clear, it's actually a truism, that we are not our ego. So, we have an ego, it sends us messages, and there's nothing to be ashamed about that, and in the past, there have all been times where we've listened to it and acted either consciously or unconsciously under its direction, but it is not us, and this is the key understanding. Christians have a different way of phrasing it, they have the exact same message, we're all children of God, we're all made in His image, that's the Christian wording. But the sense of it is true, whether you're religious or not, we are beautiful, authentic beings, and that is the game of life, it's then and there, where this authentic person, we're going to get challenged, we're going to go through all these things, we're going to have the ego whispering in our ear right until the last day, and it's how we choose to respond. We've got this wonderful heart to make our decisions with, which is the centre of our authentic self, and the first start is your concept of self-identification, you are not your bad behaviours, you are not your insecurities, you are not your bad destructive actions, none of that is you, you let your ego run your life, consciously or unconsciously, but you are not your ego. All of us need to identify with that beautiful, authentic person that we really are.