The Biggest Confusion in Spirituality: Self and Identity
In this brief post, I will address perhaps the biggest confusion in spirituality: confusion between the Self and identity.
The Self exists with or without identity. The Self, when being unaware of itself, does not have identity. In other words, identity is self-awareness.
The Self can misidentify itself as the ego, and awakening is the Self becoming aware of its true identity.
So when someone says the Self recognizes itself as the Self, notice that the first Self (existence) and the second Self (identity) are different.
But here you need to be careful not to separate identity from the Self because identity is also the Self. The Self transcends but includes identity.
The Self is ever-present. You have always been the Self. When you did not have identity, you were the Self. When you thought of yourself as the ego, you were the Self. After awakening, you are the Self.
But before awakening, you did not know that.
Everyone is the Self, but not everyone is aware of that. When people confuse the two, they say confusing things like “Everyone is enlightened.”
So when we talk about awakening, we mean a change in self-awareness or identity. The Self, on the other hand, does not change. It transcends changes. But because the Self is ever-present, it is never apart from changes.
It's so confusing with the different words that are used in different traditions within spirituality. I think that modern spirituality is a bit like Babylon, where everybody is speaking in different tongues and thus do not understand each other. Sometimes people even start fighting over words. What you call "the Self", Martinus calls "I", the "divine something" or "X1". Anyway, I agree with your ideas here about how to differentiate between the Self and identity and so we may have an illusionary identity because we think of ourselves as something which is not the Self or not X1, e.g., in the animal kingdom we identify ourselves with the body. According to Martinus that’s even necessary because of what he named the “principle of contrast”. In order for there to be a life experience, we need differences and oppositions. The Self is, however, everything and in its own nature it's undifferentiated and undivided and therefore, it must create something that appears to be not the Self. So that’s illusionary, but necessary nonetheless ☺️👍