The Truth of What You Are

This identity you are managing inside the world is not what you really are. What you are is deeper and more essential than who you are. What you are is a human being – or better yet, a human manifestation of being, while who you are is about your personal identity – the wardrobe of personas you put on and take off as you pretend to be somebody special on the social performance stages of your life.

The self-conscious center of autonomy, agency, and ambition that acts out your various roles of identity is called the ego (Latin for “I”).

It’s important to understand that your ego is really nothing but an actor looking for work, and its work is out on the performance stages of your world, playing the roles that identify you to others and assign your part in the scripts. From ego’s mental location, you look out into an objective world (i.e., the theater and stage) that is “thrown or put before” you (objectāre), as you also look into a subjective self (i.e., your human nature: what you are) that is “thrown under” you (subjectāre).

Ego’s first function, psycho-developmentally speaking, is to serve as a mechanism of self-restraint, by exercising executive control over the channels of urgency and impulse coming up from the body. A second function of your ego, following on this progress in self-control, is to redirect or sublimate those primal instincts into prosocial behavior, which is to say, into behavior that is compliant with your tribe’s moral frame.

In this context, a moral frame sets the standards of what a “good person” and “right action” mean inside the theater and on stage.

Your ego was coaxed and shaped early on by your tribe with instructions to behave as a “good boy” or “nice girl” should. To the degree you complied, your reward was acceptance, approval, recognition, and belonging. Your objective world – what I prefer to call your quality world (after William Glasser) – thus came into shape around you, anchoring and reflecting back a sense of yourself as somebody special.

In the above illustration, a spiral has locked your ego into a neurotic obsession over the question of identity: “Who am I?” Because the moral standards and social expectations of your quality world are, or can be, fickle and unforgiving, the task of managing your embattled self-esteem requires practically all of your attention. “Am I _______ enough? Do I have what it takes? Will people like me?”

Earlier, a critical distinction was made between who you are – this ego-and-persona-in-a-quality-world experience – and what you are, referring instead to something deeper and more essential: a human manifestation of being, or a human being for short. This is your authentic or true self, what easily gets lost from view in your relentless pursuit of personal identity.

Your true self is actually a communion of body and soul, where “body” names the phenotype of your biology as a human organism, and “soul” names the in-reaching depths of consciousness in the ground of your being.

Body and soul are also mental locations. But whereas ego centers you inside the theater of your quality world and on social performance stages of identity, these other mental locations orient you in Reality – not in roles and role-plays, but in the really real.

The organism of your body participates in and belongs to the greater Web of Life and the sensory-physical environment of Nature. “Organism” and “environment” constitute a basic unity, as Alan Watts reminded us, and willful ignorance of this basic unity amounts to “a serious and dangerous hallucination” (The Joyous Cosmology).

On the other side of this Yang-Yin communion, your soul rests in the Ground of Being and contemplates (beholds in awareness) the higher wholeness of all existence in a holy image of the Universe. Not to be mistaken for just another name of the physical environment at the largest scale, Universe is the consilient (“leaping together”) unity of all things, the harmony of beings – which, of course, includes you.

The beheld image of a unified Reality (i.e., the Universe) is a correlate of your grounding in Being; one implies the other.

So, the mental location of consciousness in your body orients you as an organism in a physical environment, as the mental location of consciousness in your soul grounds you in Being and beholds all things as the Universe. However, the mental location of consciousness in your ego separates you from this essential communion, in preparation for the adventures and misadventures of becoming somebody special in a largely make-believe world.

Precisely because ego-formation separates you from the body-and-soul communion of your true self as a human being, in pursuit of something that is imaginary, ephemeral, and inherently precarious, the spiritual wisdom traditions of Sophia Perennis have long regarded it with suspicion.

Anything that is separate from Reality is by definition not real.

What’s more, ego’s ambition to do enough, be better, have more, go farther, and get the reward – gold stars, trophies, diplomas, promotions, wealth and power, immortality in heaven – diverts your focus and energy away from the wonder of being alive and fully human.

Rather than suing for the suppression or extinguishment of ego, however, Sophia Perennis invites you to appreciate its delusion of separateness as providing consciousness with a detached position (a third mental location) from which you might ponder and celebrate the mysteries of being human.

Only from the distance afforded by self-conscious awareness is it even possible to see that you have a body and a soul, despite the fact that you (that is, your ego: “I”) don’t really own them, nor are body and soul mere parts of you. They are, together in communion, your true self.

As long as consciousness remained immersed in this communion of body and soul, there could be no apprehending the marvelous facts of your place in the great Web of Life and of your roots in the Ground of Being. And yes, putting on an identity and playing your part on the performance stages of your quality world ushers you into the uniquely human realms of culture, freedom, purpose and meaning, where the ecstasies of becoming somebody special await.

The danger and temptation lie in the way your pursuit of identity can pull you into a tightening neurotic spiral, where the ambitions and attachments of who you are make you forget or fail to discover the truth of what you are.