IDENTITY!
Identity matters but what is it?
When I saw Georges Friedrich Hegel writing “Identity is the identity of the identity and the non identity” I found this grandiloquent, baroque, paradoxical, absurd, intriguing and a land mark koan of an otherwise genial philosopher. But of course he had something to say.
One can indeed deduce that Identity, that what makes us what we are, is :
a) the conjunction (identity) of
b) the Self (Identity: what we really are but most don’t know) in the realm of the noumena with
c) the outer sheet of our being (non identity: ego and conditionings where we spend our waking time in the realm of phenomena).
As “b” & “c” coexist in a constant overlap, the attempt of a philosopher was to assume that, through the phenomenology of consciousness, the “a” synthesis could mature.
Fair enough but this is not what is happening today. Many people have plunged into the “c” non-identity of building up a virtual profile as they brand or manufacture their identity on social networks. The virtual, smoky and ethylic dimension of virtual identity is almost symbolically expressed in the erratic monetary valuation of Facebook.
Ontology, the philosophical utopian province of the Self, is not on the GPS of post modernists with the exception of those who are the heirs to the Socratic tradition of inner seeking.
Ontologists would say that “b” Identity is not about branding one’s profile but finding who we really are. The fact that it seemed beyond reach explains the revolt of Jean Paul Sartre against his non-existent creator and his hymn to the absurdity of existing.
Hegel and the later existentialists alike could not know that achieving knowledge of Self (Identity) is possible at all, because no one knew how to go beyond the barrier of thoughts. The later days heirs to the ontologists played with their guitars in Woodstock and elsewhere, attempting to go beyond thoughts through feelings. Tough luck: feelings too belong to the barrier.
It was not enough to be anti-intellectual or to force one’s way through the brain barriers, equipped with chemical shortcuts.
What was needed was the gate to the Self, the narrow one. We have been knock knocking on heaven’s door for millennia … but Bob Dylan becoming catholic does not release this lock.
Achieving Thoughtless Awareness through the awakening of the residual consciousness (Kundalini) breaks the barriers, or, in the words of the Apocalypse, it breaks the seals that kept us in the Hegelian “unhappy consciousness”.
The realm of happy consciousness, and more, has been the gift of Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi to mankind, when the Kundalini boosted consciousness merges with the Self ; it happens within our consciousness. Christ said we had to become twice born and this is what it is. Those who think they own him wouldn’t know.
Because, through thoughtless awareness, our consciousness goes beyond the phenomena of our non-identity. In the post Hegelian constellation, Shri Mataji is the One who echoes Socrates and says: “Identity is the identity of Identity with Itself and I can prove it”.