What you identify with depends on what kind of person you are. An emotional person may get identified with an emotional issue - a love affair, perhaps, or a family member, or a pet. An intellectual type will be likely to identify with a theory, a set of beliefs, an opinion. A moving centre person often identifies with something connected to their own body, perhaps their appetite or their . feeling of discomfort during an illness; they may also identify with political figures who they think may be able to bring about a change they believe is necessary.
Yet anyone can be identified with anything at all! It depends on how asleep you are, and what catches your interest.
In life, we're encouraged by the mass media to become identified with our False Personality I's, our feelings of anxiety, petty worries, vanity and the wish to put a good spin on things. By doing so, advertisers can get us to buy products that promise to solve these non-existent "problems", while politicians can keep us hypnotized with lies and deception so that we don't question the prevailing system and its injustices.
Very often people identify with some major event in their lives and go to sleep for months, even years. Dr Nicoll told one student that she had fallen asleep on her birthday - six months previously! - and had only just woken up.
Identification is the main cause of failure to make progress in the Work, and it's the state in which the majority of people live for much of the time. That is why the world has so many problems.
If you can discover what you yourself are identified with, it will give a tremendous boost to your personal work on yourself. It will provide you with valuable material to work on, and show you the way forward in your progress towards greater consciousness.
Pause for a moment now, and ask yourself: with what do I identify?
Perhaps it's your work. Perhaps you are in a competitive environment and are pressured to produce more results, climb higher up the promotional ladder. If someone were to point this out to you, you would react strongly against the idea, but let your boss make a mild criticism of your efforts one day and you feel threatened, panicky, as though your very existence is being called into question.
Perhaps it's a family member and his or her problems. Often this is true of codependent people in a family where there's addiction or alcoholism. We concentrate on this problem to the exclusion of other matters, but our very identification prevents us from acting effectively towards this person. It also keeps us from seeing our own illness, that of codependence, and thus from doing anything about it.
Many people identify with their bodies, with their state of health. The shelves of bookstores and libraries everywhere, not to mention the internet, are full of information about mental and physical health problems, some of it useful, much of it not. People become preoccupied with the best way to improve this or that aspect of their health, and devote so much time and money to it that they become hypochondriacs or valetudinarians, like Mr Woodhouse in Jane Austen's "Emma".
Sometimes it's something they've produced - a painting, a piece of writing, a roast dinner, a blog. I mention the latter because I'm writing one, and because, as a professional writer, I started out by being very identified with everything I wrote. I wanted it to be perfect, and the only cure was to work for a large, daily newspaper where each story or column I wrote would be snatched up by editors eager to meet deadlines. Perfect or not - and it never was, of course - off my story would go, and I had to give up any hope of controlling what happened to it.
If you are identified with something, a sure giveaway is how you react to criticism.
As a writer, I used to think of my stories as my "babies", so that when they were criticized or questioned I would feel my children were being threatened. This was an extremely difficult state to be in, of course, and I soon adopted the only professional attitude possible if one is to survive in the marketplace - I let go of what I'd written, wished it well, as it were, and turned my attention to something else.
Instead of feeling my stories were my babies, or even a part of myself, I began to see them as something I'd produced, which could be worked on further or let go. And once a story, an article, an essay or a book had "left home", it become impersonal. Yes, I'd written it, but in releasing it to an audience it was no longer my private property and I no longer felt my very existence was threatened if someone didn't happen to like it. I soon discovered this was the attitude of most professional writers and artists; it has to be, if we're to carry on creating. Otherwise, it's just too painful.
You may be identified with one thing or with many. Some people identify with every passing event, every interest.
Identification is at the root of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Carried to an extreme, OCD prevents people from living full lives because they become identified with one portion of it to the exclusion of almost everything else. Thus, for example, someone identified with hygiene may feel compelled to wash their hands fifty times a day. Someone identified with food may follow a strict - and near-anorexic - diet, or go to the other extreme and insist on only the most "gourmet" morsels entering their mouths. They may spend hours searching for the perfect wine to accompany their meal, or the perfect Middle Eastern spice to complete their signature dinner party dish. They have made a god of their belly, as the Bible puts it.
Do you want to know what you are identified with? Look for what offends you. When did you last take offence about something that somebody said or did? What was the context?
One person I knew took offence when I mistakenly thought he was out of work and living on benefits. Since many alcoholics and addicts do lose their jobs, and have to accept benefits from the State in the early weeks and even months of their recovery, I could not see any reason for him to take offence. It is often a perfectly normal, sensible, thing to do in the circumstances. This man seemed to have no visible means of support and did not go to work each day, but he became furious at my mistaken assumption that he was living on benefits! He reacted far out of proportion to my mistake, and even when I apologized he bridled and pursed his lips; I don't think he ever forgave me.
It turned out he was living on an insurance payout that he had been awarded when he was the victim of a car accident. It was his vanity that had been offended - he was identified with his public image, and wanted to be seen as a man of means rather than a person who was temporarily out of work. A huge False Personality "hot air pie" was the cause of his identification!
Another person became offended when a friend thought she had been "dumped" by a boyfriend. Oh no, the offended party insisted, it was she who had done the dumping! She could not bear to have anyone think she had been rejected, so great was her vanity. She would rather be seen as cruel than abandoned. Again, a massive False Personality attitude was at the root of her offended feelings.
What offends you? When did you last feel you were - quite justifiably, of course - outraged? Can you see what lies behind the feeling of outrage, or insult, that you experience now when you think of it? What aspect of your existence is being questioned? What I's in False Personality are conspiring to drive this feeling?
It might be something as minor as having to wait for a long time in a supermarket queue, a feeling of "it isn't fair", or "why does it have to happen to me, of all people". Or it could be that you felt left out in a group discussion, or failed to be recognized in the street by a passing acquaintance. Any minor incident can lead to a feeling of being offended. And this feeling is the clue that we are identified with something or other.
What would happen if you gave it up?
A good Work exercise, especially for Lent when we are looking for things to sacrifice, is to give up being offended. Try it for one day; then a week; then two. If you are so free of False Personality that nothing at all offends you, you are either very fortunate or you have worked hard on disidentifying from vanity. Or you are deceiving yourself.
Either way, seeing what you identify with is a great step forward on your spiritual path, and you may be amazed to see how much of your life has been lived in that state.
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