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IDENTIFICATION by Paul Wolfe

In his book, Esoteric Encyclopedia of Eternal Knowledge, Vernon Howard says, “To identify means to believe that something gives you an identity of some kind. You can identify with anything — money, sex, public prominence, your own thoughts. A man exclaims, ‘See! I achieved my goal, therefore, I have an identity as a successful man.’ In a gigantic blunder, he mistakes a mere idea about himself as being himself. And that blunder causes dozens of other errors, including fear of failure.”
When I began to study this work, one of the first things I heard (on a talk from Vernon) was, “you are not that thought.” For most of my life, I believed that my thoughts were real, that they told me who and what I was. What a relief to find out that we’re not our thoughts, we’re not our emotions, we’re not anything we can think about. How much suffering there is in believing our crazy thoughts, for example, being convinced that someone else’s opinion could elevate (or harm) who a person really is.
If we take a look from a clear point of view, we can see the absurdity of it. Suppose a person gets a new car and identifies with it — he’s worried about it getting scratched, and it does — he goes into suffering over it, thinks that, somehow, he’s been harmed. Likely he has actually attracted what he feared. This is what people do with their lives – someone says that they don’t you like you and you get offended. If you would simply look at the situation with understanding, this is only the opinion of one person. Vernon has often stressed that we are not at the mercy of other people’s opinions or thoughts about us. And the likelihood that the person said that in the first place is because he was in a bad state to begin with — perhaps his car had been scratched — you get the idea.
Our minds are there for practical use — how to fix the dripping sink, how to prepare a good dinner, etc. The mind is not there so we can be abused and condemned by our own thoughts. If we don’t go into it being “my sink” or “my dinner,” we see it as something that just needs to be fixed or needs to be prepared and we are free of the pain. A man can identify with anything, or he can be free from identification, which is freedom from most of what causes our suffering.
One of our class exercises is called “drop it” — catch yourself identifying, suffering in any way, and just drop the thought, the state, the emotion. The effort needed to break the sleep pattern requires much honest inner work but what is more worthwhile than fulfilling our purpose here on earth to actually experience the higher life we were created to live?