Tricycle's Daily Dharma: July 16, 2007
The Question of Identity
When the Buddha confronted the question of identity on the night of his
enlightenment,
he came to the radical discovery that we do not exist as separate
beings. He saw into the human tendency to identify with a limited sense
of existence and discovered that this belief in an individual small self
is a root illusion that causes suffering and removes us from the freedom
and mystery of life. He described this as interdependent arising,
the cyclical process of consciousness creating identity by entering
form, responding to contact of the senses, then attaching to certain
forms, feelings, desires, images, and actions to create a sense of self.
In teaching, the Buddha never spoke of humans as persons existing in
some fixed or static way. Instead, he described us as a collection of
five changing processes: the processes of the physical body, of
feelings, of perceptions, of responses, and of the flow of consciousness
that experiences them all. Our sense of self arises whenever we grasp at
or identify with these patterns. The process of identification, of
selecting patters to call "I," me," "myself," is subtle and usually
hidden from our awareness.
--Jack Kornfeld
