In this episode I take another crack at unraveling the mystery of identity and how our identities are used to control us. Topics covered include, in no particular order: church, government and corporate monopoly of identity; manipulating cultural identity through the consumerist accumulation of products; shizophrenia and multiple personality disorder as what happens when our false fixed identity becomes “unstuck”; shamans and gender/role variability; terrorism and identity theft as stemming from the same root social phenomenon; erasing your personal history a la Don Juan Matus; how privacy taken to its extreme means that you have no identity; how omni-present surveillance means that the government has the ability to tell the definitive story about who and what you are; about how we use documents to tell stories about who we are; how Jesus’ true teachings and mystical texts the world over offer freedom from the whole twisted mess by laying the axe to the root of identity, once and for all.
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3 Comments
Great post! Lots of crunchy thought to chew on.
For a while, with the talk of corporate/social control and the manufacture of identity, I thought you might be heading off down a familiar dead end trail, but as soon as you got to shamanism, and the idea of a more fluid sense of identity, you barreled into territory I know through experience, but don’t see in print all that much. The idea of tying my identity (whatever that means) to social constructs like my Social Security # (which I have written down and never actually remember…it means nothing to me; I’d forget my own name and birth date if I were allowed to do so), social status, class, “consumage,” whatever, has never made a bit of sense to me. It does not tie in with my direct experience of the world in any sense.
Direct experience is something I’ve become more comfortable with, gotten to know a little better over time. If we allow our minds (formed by all our past experience) to chatter ceaselessly, we experience the world in a second (or third, in the case of anything with social origins) hand way. The mind says, “That is a clock.” The society says, “Clocks tell time.” The eyes say, “Oh. Okay.” But when we allow both of those all-too-eager-to-be-helpful inner dialogues to quiet, we experience the world in a direct way: just seeing the clock, instead of having the impulsive need to interpret all our sensations into language.
I think this ties into the idea of erasing or loosening concepts of identity. In a more receptive state of pure experience, all the past experience that made “you” disappears. It’ll come back, eventually, but spending time simply perceiving helps tame your inner voices, which become less rigidly defined.
Does that make sense?
You might be interested in reading U.G. Krishnamurti, if you haven’t already. In “The Mystique (sometimes ‘Mistake’) of Enlightenment,” he describes more eloquently the state I struggle to put into words. An open, natural state of pure perception, unfiltered by thought and personality, that allows you to simply be you. He is an interesting person, and hard to pin down or classify, but then that ties back into all of this, huh? His central idea can probably be broken down into:
“Stop trying to change yourself.
Stop trying to change.
Stop trying.
Stop.
Listen.
Let go.
Listen.”
But in much less mystical, much more common sense language.
Well done Tim,
Consider adding to the notion that not only will other people will resist and fight against our changing but the false images of our identiry will resist their own death as well.
Good point. I am fully prepared for that eventuality as I go out into my back yard in a few moments to ritually destroy my cell phone…
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[...] Is this true? Is this the secret of state/corporate monopoly of identity? Is this a dangerous idea to post online and associate yourself with? Guess, we’ll find out, eh? Who wants to volunteer to make their credit, banking, SSN, schooling and public records open-source to test this idea out - anybody? [...]