Identity & Knowing Someone
In a conventional view - when there is still a good deal of beliefs in thoughts, we tend to feel we know someone when we have a sense of their beliefs, maybe especially those they don't readily admit to themselves or others. Yet, all we have is really just a rough map of their temporary identifications, how they identify themselves. We have a rough map of the minefield they have constructed, which can be useful in daily life - in having some sense of where we are likely to find support, which areas to step around if we don't want to set off one or more mines, and so on.
When we start unravel our own beliefs and identifications, this way of "knowing" someone makes less sense. It may still be useful in a conventional sense, but it is certainly no way of knowing anyone. We see how temporary and ephemeral these structures of beliefs and identifications are. Examine them, and they fall away, one by one.
What is left is who we really are, who we already are, when the dust kicked up by beliefs settle. And this appears to be no different from what anyone else are. At our human level, we all have the same thoughts coming up - although believed in to different extent and in various patterns. We all know the suffering from attaching to thoughts, and some of us know the relief from allowing these to unravel. At beyond this, we find ourselves as clarity. As the timelessness and spacelessness that time and space happens within and as. In the meeting of others, we find ourselves as inherent and effortless wisdom and compassion.
Even at a conventional level, most of us probably have experiences of (a) the dissatisfaction of just knowing someone through their beliefs and identifications - even if they happen to correspond with our own, and (b) the depth of intimacy which can occur - even with strangers, through nonverbal interactions, maybe especially through gazing, working on someone's hara (in Breema) and so on. Here, we connect at a different level, one where are are not so different from each other, or maybe not at all different.
Labels: identity