How do you identify yourself? I am...
You may think that you are equal to your age, occupation, position,education, religious orientation, political views, gender identity, your achievements,losses, gains, material possessions.
Perhaps you describe yourself as a sibling, parent, grandparent, maybe you define yourself as being single, married, wife or a husband? Or does your horoscope reveal the secret?
Perhaps you tend to believe that you are equal to your external features: I am beautiful, I am ugly, fat, lean, short, tall, athletic...
It may also be that you identify with your changing mental states and thus form a seemingly definitive and final judgment on yourself: I am depressed,lacking self-confidence, I am introverted, extroverted, angry, sad, envious,generous, kind, angry, happy, and the line can go on for as long as you want.
You must have noticed that these are merely conditions that are forever changing and conditional!
Even within one day you can be: sad but someone calls you and it makes you happy, then someone cuts in front of you and it makes you roll into a rage, then a few minutes later the bus that is just leaving will let you pass and you calm down,in the morning you look in the mirror and you see yourself ugly, but you get a compliment and you feel happy and the order of the world is restored; you are promoted at work and you feel like you already know everything but you come across a topic what you are inexperienced in and no longer feel omniscient, etc. All in one day!
You can see that everything is conditional, correlated.
I noticed that while I identified myself with these forever changing states and took them dead seriously as something definite, permanent, I was thrown off balance over and over again.
Something to think about:
Can you find something permanent, that you identify yourself with?
How does comparing yourself to others make you feel?
