False Identity

14 Feb False Identity

Here is a joke from the 1980’s.

A Yuppie is caught in the middle of a horrific car crash. He staggers out of his car all bloody and cries out “my Porsche my lovely Porsche, it’s been smashed to pieces!”. A bystander rushes over and says to the Yuppie “you fool! your so materialistic that you notice the damage to your car but not yourself, can’t your see your left arm has been torn off!”. The Yuppie looks to where his left arm used to be and cries out in anguish “my Rolex!”

In the last couple of blogs we looked at how mediation first makes us identify less with our bodies, then we start to identify less with our minds and finally the boundaries around our sense of self start to fade
away until any feeling of separateness is gone.

These of us who live in a material culture are pushed in the opposite direction. We are bombarded with adverts trying to get us to identify with whichever product the advert is selling. We are encouraged to
identify ourselves and others by the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, our house, where we go on holiday etc. We may even attach more value to things we own then we do to ourselves.

The extent to which we do this is evident in the way we speak. Someone will say “I am out of petrol” or “My back-door needs fixing” and we won’t look at them strangely. We are encouraged to keep adding to our identity by acquiring more goods, titles, experiences to differentiate ourselves from other people.

We are drawn in a direction that takes us away from long term contentment and down a path to separateness and emotional insecurity where we are sold short fleeting pleasures by people who target our fear and greed.

An experiment by behavioural economists showed that unhappy people will pay three times as much as happy people for the same item.

Meditation helps us counter the negative influences around us and bring us closer to the world, the people in it and our real selves. Like salmon we have to become strong enough to swim against the current. Then we can experience a solid lasting long term contentment rather then the fleeting moments of happiness that are sold to us.