Quotes About Identity

We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie-making. Our very Presence then becomes our identity, rather than our thoughts and emotions.

This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.

In other words, the content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it alive does not.

The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity.

You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity.

One of the ways in which the ego attempts to escape the unsatisfactoriness of personal self­hood is to enlarge and strengthen its sense of self by identifying with a group – a nation, a political party, corporation, institution, sect, club, gang, football team.

You have a name, a past, a life situation, a future. But in one essential respect, you are not the same person you were before

When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since ego is identification with form.

The person who is talking and making promises, however, is not the entity that commits the violence, and so you can be sure that it will happen again and again unless he becomes present, recognizes the pain-body within himself, and thus disidentifies from it.

Cuando la conciencia se libera de su identificación con las formas físicas y mentales, se vuelve lo que podemos llamar conciencia pura o iluminada, o presencia.

The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be.

the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat.

The ego is not only the unobserved mind, the voice in the head which pretends to be you, but also the unobserved emotions that are the body's reaction to what the voice in the head is saying.

en muchos casos, no estás comprando un producto sino un «realzador de la identidad». Las marcas son, básicamente, identidades colectivas a las que te incorporas pagando. Son

Paradójicamente, lo que mantiene en marcha la llamada «sociedad de consumo» es el hecho de que intentar encontrarte a ti mismo a través de las cosas no funciona. La

Your sense of who you are determines what you perceive as you needs and what matters to you in life - and whatever matters to you will have the power to upset and disturb you.

He explained to them that he still lacked the sameness of bearing before all human beings, whether beggar or king. He was still unable to look through social roles and conceptual identities and see the sameness of being in every human.

It will attempt to ensure its survival by finding something else to identity with, for example, a mental image of yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in material possessions and is therefore superior, is more spiritual than others. There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires.

Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, obsession with things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease.

If there were nothing but thought in you. You wouldn't even know your thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he's dreaming. You would be as identified with thought as a dreamer is with every image in the dream.

A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth.

Even such a seemingly trivial and normal thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death.

The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to sell things that people don't really need, they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self.

There's only one thing worse than the egoic me, and that's the egoic us.