Identity and Transcendence

Identification with something, somebody, or some name may appears to be just a process of categorization for the purpose of ease, however this process has profound effects on our thoughts, practices, relationships, and the whole process of association and disassociation take place around the nucleus of self-identified being. Identification starts with attraction, motivation, and movement towards something or somebody as a desired object, a lack, which is felt to be fulfilled the moment one starts identifying himself or herself with that desired identity; desire appears as dynamics, a moving force, which is fulfilled anyway, even if one remains unaware about it. People usually identify as a separate human body, ego, separate mind, race, caste, gender, nationality, life, and what not. Identity is always already a limited belief. If one gazes the Universe with a materialistic conception just like an opportunity to extract resources for commercialized purposes, everything, from plants, animals, to moons and stars, they appear to be soulless objects to be owned and exploited. On the contrary, realizing everything and everyone as a part of me, a part of life, a dust of cosmos, makes the stranger objects our own self. Realizing cosmic consciousness is the true essence of all meditations, religious, scientific, philosophical, or psychological. The anxiety of being stranger in the world fades away the moment this profound realization is felt by our own self. We are all sparks of the life, get our moments of illumination in different forms. Looking meditatively in the eyes of everyone and everything makes us realize that we are either all or none. In both ways, scientifically or spiritually, cosmic reality reveals in its full dimensions. We are limited by our self-identification, and realize ourselves as life in the moment of transcendence from an identified body of ego to limitless, infinite life. This sense is not absent anywhere, but hidden from our limited perspectives.

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Meeting Justice Rohinton Nariman in a Sunday Morning

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BEING AND BECOMING

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