Identity is a prison, and yet it is – absurdly – a prison that we’re very proud of, a prison that we will defend to the bitter end. Identity means that ‘I am this but not that,’ and the thing about this is that ‘what we say we are’ has absolutely nothing to do with us.  It has to do with our thinking — ‘who we say we are’ is nothing more than a mind-created abstraction whilst who we are genuinely (aside from whatever it is we think) is something we remain wholly oblivious to throughout the entire course of our lives. We can’t have the abstract and the non-abstract on the same page and we’re always on the page of the abstract; we are forever fighting on behalf of ‘one side rather than the other’ and yet there are no sides. There are no sides and yet ‘this side against that side’ is all we ever care about. ‘This side versus that side’ eats us up completely, on a daily basis.

Whatever we say we are we aren’t because whatever we say we are is just a projection of our ignorance regarding our true nature, regarding the true nature of thing. Whatever we think is just a projection of our ignorance and whatever we do is also a projection of our ignorance. No matter what our purposeful output is, it is bound to be incoherent which is to say, it is bound to be ‘at odds with reality’ since it’s coming out of an unreal place (the unreal place in question being our conception of ourselves). When we act out of a theory or model of the world which fails to account for what it is trying to model then our action is always going to be incoherent – it will create more problems than it solves, in other words. Our incoherent model is that a never-ending source of problems and it will continue to be so until we drop it. The one thing we can say for sure is that there’s never going to be any good coming out of it. The sense of self that we’re labouring under is quintessentially incoherent – it couldn’t be more wrong, in other words. Whatever we do on the basis of the idea of who we are produces results that we don’t want, results that we don’t like, and what sustains us in this unsatisfactory situation is our belief that one day we will be able to solve all these problems once and for all without having to do any radical questioning. This is ‘the lure that we can’t resist’ and the drive to obtain our goals with ever questioning our basis is the motivation that – for the most part – never lets us down. It does let us down from time to time of course (when its capacity to ‘cope’ gets overwhelmed); when a failure of this ‘extrinsic motivation’ takes place then we call this depression and depression is universally understood to be a very bad thing, something to be corrected in whatever way we can. What we are committed to correcting at any cost’ is thus ‘us becoming aware of the incoherence inherent in our situation’. The disaster we’re struggling to avert is awareness, therefore.

This is inevitably going to be our position when we’re coming at things from the POV of the mind-created identity; from an unbiased perspective we could of course say that awareness of incoherence (which is to say, awareness of the counterproductive nature of our behaviour) is something that it is helpful to have; from the viewpoint which we actually do take however the awareness of irreducible counterproductivity is the very devil himself, and it is taboo for anyone to talk about things in this way. Absurdly, what we have here is the situation where we have no interest at all in the truth and yet feel good about this dismal attitude of ours as if it was the greatest and most admirable of virtues. Our loyalty is not to ‘how things are’ but to ‘how we say they are’ (or how we have all agreed to pretend things are). When we’re part of a group, part of a social collusion, then this tacit agreement becomes ‘the most important thing going’ – it automatically trumps everything else. Breaking ranks with regard to this collusion becomes the unforgiveable sin.

What we obtain in return for taking part in this collusion is our collectively validated identity – this is the prize that we’re playing for, the benefit for the sake of which we are willing to go along with so much nonsense. My identity tells me who I am and if I ever started to doubt it (if my belief in myself starts to falter) then all I need to do is look for reassurance from those around me, who will be pleased to confirm my identity anytime of the day or night, free of charge. This is what we do all the time in games – we confirm one another’s identities. We know ourselves through being known by others, so to speak, and whilst this maximises our sense of security with regard to ‘knowing who we are’ in so doing it pins us down completely. ‘Our place of security becomes our prison’, as psychotherapists are wont to say. When we’re playing the game that ‘we are who we are collectively said to be’ then there is of course no freedom in this for us; freedom is – after all – is the thing that we have sacrificed in order to play the game and obtain the ontological security that comes with this. We simply have to go along with the script that’s been written for us – nothing more is required from us other than this. If we did start ‘going off the script’ then this would constitute deviant behaviour and we would be punished for it; we would come up against a brick wall – the brick wall of negative social reinforcement.

If we were to focus only on the sense of security that we are obtaining as a result of playing the game (which is what fear motivates us to do) then all would be good, but we can’t live on security alone;  security is ‘us feeling safe because we’re not taking any chances’ but if we’re not taking any chances then we’re not actually living and this makes our strategy perfectly self-defeating. We’ve made it impossible for us to live. To live by a script is perfectly self-defeating (just as believing that ‘we are who the script says we are’ is perfectly self-defeating) and so what’s going on here is that we have collectively engineered a situation for ourselves which is absolutely not going to work out for us but where – at the same time – any deviation from the formula is going to be instantly punished by everyone around us.  What we’re looking at here is a classic ‘double bind’, therefore…

When we comply with the pattern that we have been presented with this turns out to be a self-defeating strategy because the price that we have to pay for fitting in (and being validated by the group) is so prohibitive that we don’t actually gain anything from the deal. We’ve given away our freedom in order to avoid the ontological risk which is life and so when we find ourselves locked into a pattern of existence that brings nothing but suffering and misery (as we inevitably will do) then we aren’t free to opt out of it again. We’ve handed over freedom to the script and in time the script proves itself to be unlivable – it’s unlivable because it is inherently self-contradictory (just as all definite statements of fact are self-contradictory). Life is lived on the basis of identity is unlivable, but we don’t know of anything else – there is – in effect – a conspiracy operating to prevent us from knowing that there is any alternative to the type of life that we have all been brought up with and that conspiracy is extremely effective. We can see how effective it is just by looking around us – we’re the prisoners of our culture just as we’re the prisoners of the identity that it has given us.

Life as lived on the basis of identity is unlivable because it’s a perfectly sterile, perfectly meaningless game. Living on the basis of identity can’t not be a sterile or meaningless game since the one who is living (or rather trying to live) the conditioned life isn’t ‘who I am’, and it isn’t who anyone else is either. Stuff simply doesn’t getany more sterile than this – I’m doing everything for the benefit of some socially-validated fantasy of who I am! The identity is a generic idea and a generic idea doesn’t get to have a life of its own; the unique individual (who is not a bland copy of what came before) can have a life, but not the generic idea of who or what the individual is or should be – that’s not how it works! The only way we get to live life is by taking the risk of doing or thinking something wholly unprecedented, something that isn’t in the script that we have been provided with and that’s a risk we’re not prepared to take. We see ontological risk as being a terrible thing, an extraordinarily fearful thing, something to be refused whenever it comes up, whilst actually – as we have just said – ‘risk’ is simply another way of talking about life. That’s what life is – it’s ‘taking a risk’, it’s ‘embracing uncertainty’, it’s ‘venturing into the unknown’. Risk sounds ominous to us because it means that we stand to lose something, but the thing is that life requires us to be prepared to ‘lose what we have gained’ – being too afraid to risk losing what we’ve gained (or rather what we think we’ve gained) means that we’re too afraid to live.

Whatever it is that we imagine ourselves to have ‘gained’ is only meaningful or valuable to us inasmuch as we are willing to let go of it and see what happens next.  ‘What we don’t give away we lose’, as it is said. If we refuse the risk then we don’t get to see what happens next; if we refuse the risk then nothing does happen next – we’re stuck! Living is ‘moving on’ (or ‘letting go’) not ‘holding on to what we imagine ourselves to have already gained’. Living is the ‘moving on’, not the ‘holding on’ – ‘holding on’ is what we do when we’re too afraid to live.  To hold onto our identity, to our idea of ourselves, isn’t just to opt out of life – it’s to opt out if what is real. Life is a movement not a static fixture and we could say the same about reality – reality isn’t a thing that we can conveniently label and categorise and then file away somewhere but a happening (or event) that we can’t say anything about. All we can meaningfully say about this happening is that its new, that it isn’t a continuation of what came before. Thought creates a world where everything is a continuation of ‘what came before’….

Anything that doesn’t have precedence in ‘Thought’s Great Scheme of Things’ is dismissed without question, dismissed instantly, whereas – in utter contrast to this – the world as it is in itself has no ‘precedence’, has no ‘logical cause’. Anything that comes about as a result of a cause is that same cause; it’s the same cause represented in a superficially disguised form and so there’s nothing new about it at all. It is – we might therefore say – ‘a non-event disguised as an event’. The same can be said about the mind-created identity – the identity that we prize so much and make so much fuss about is merely the replication of something that’s happened before. We’re carrying forward the same old bundle of thoughts, the same old narrow outlook, the same old collection of prejudices, on an indefinite basis. If we could, we’d carry on with this arbitrary identity of ours forever; if we could, we’d preserve it in perpetuity – even though it isn’t who we are, even though it isn’t who anyone is. The sense of self that we consider to be so central, so crucial to everything, is 100% non-existent. This fact that we consider our everyday identity to be absolutely essential, absolutely ‘who we are’, and the fact that it is also 100% non-existent leads to a situation that we may characterise as being maximally incoherent.

Maximum incoherence – we could say – means that nothing ever works out for us in the way that we want (or in the way that we think it should do) – we have some idea or other about how we’d like things to work out (and we do our best to facilitate this) but it never does pan out according to plan. Even when we think that things are ‘going to plan’ not, they’re not – that’s just our imagination. How could things work out when the one who is supposedly working for is a fantasy? How can there be such a thing as ‘control’ when all partitions or boundaries exist only in our thinking? Nothing can come good for us because the one who it is supposed to be coming good for is a wholly imaginary entity, the ultimate non-existence of which constitutes a major ‘flaw in the argument’ by anyone’s reckoning. We might believe that we can get around this problem one way or another, via some sort of ingenious strategy or other, but if we were to pay attention to what’s really going on here instead of ‘struggling incoherently’ we would of course see that the absence of ‘the one for whom everything is done’ is a problem that can’t ever be fixed. We can be as obstinate as we please in this regard, but things are never going to work out for us in the way that we need it to. It is never ever going come good for us (no matter how committed we are, no matter how much praying or positive thinking we do) and as long as we continue to insist that it must work out the way we want it to then we’re going to have a bad time of it. But as Sir Edwin Arnold points out in his poem The Light of Asia, we suffer from ourselves, nothing else…





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