Oneness

Joseph P. Kauffman
Identifying ourselves with things that have no stability
makes us live in a constant state of fear. We hold onto
these concepts and fear for their protection, believing that
what happens to them happens to us. This way of thinking
is completely delusional, and it is the biggest cause of our
suffering and confusion.
To become free of this suffering, you need to
understand deeply the essence of who you are, for if you
knew the totality of your being you would no longer get
upset over the insignificant threats to the imagined identity
that you think you are.
The best way to discover who you are is by determining
all of the things that you are not. Then you can disidentify
with these things in order to come to a greater
understanding of your true identity. Just as you peel off the
layers of an onion one by one in order to reach the center,
you can peel off your layers of false identification one by
one until you are left with only your true self.
Let’s start with the most basic form of identification:
your name. This hardly deserves our attention as it is
obvious to see that the reality of who you are is not
confined to your name. Nonetheless, many people identify
with their name and believe it to be an essential part of
who they are.
How can the totality of your being be defined by a
single label? Not to mention that the name you were given
could have been any name. In society, we are able to
communicate to one another individually by using our
given names, but that does not mean we are those names.
Names are just labels used to identify us, but we are not
our names, and we should not identify with our names in
order to get a sense of who we are.
Nor should we identify with our roles in society. You
may play the role of a doctor, a waiter, a banker, a mother,
a father—but these roles are not who you are. Neither are
you what has happened to you in your past experiences.
Many people suffer because they went through something
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