The Myth of Identity

It is a common misconception that we humans are all individuals, ploughing our own furrow through life.  We all have separate names, we all have separate identities, we are all separate.

A few paragraphs down this article I attempt to prove that this is not the case, but first I wish to digress a little and explain why I think this myth of identity came about.

It all started probably about 2 million years ago, when the first humans (Homo Habilis) experienced an evolutionary mutation which ultimately gave we humans - uniquely amongst the animal kingdom - the concept of self awareness.  At this point our ancestors became aware of the dangerous duality that separates "me" from "others", and also "me" from the "whole of nature".   For the past 2 million years humans have struggled with this mutation of self-awareness, and it has led to environmental destruction, war, poverty, loneliness, indeed pretty well every problem known to humanity.

The myth was strengthened in the 17th century when Rene Descartes famously said "I think, therefore I am". Together with other thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment the separation between human and human, and between human and nature was set in stone for centuries to come.  Science and religion are agreed; humans are separate from each other, and they must subdue the earth and "have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth".

But it really doesn't have to be like this .... and I think I can prove it.

What makes us think we are unique identities is our thoughts (like Rene Descartes said, we all think, therefore we are)?  The thoughts that constantly run through our brains, which we don't seem to be able to switch off that easily.  We think that thoughts are generated by our brain.  But supposing this was not true.  Imagine the possibility that thoughts are not "initiated" within the synapses of the brain ... but instead that the thoughts are "received" by those synapses.  Like an antenna or a receiver.  Our creativity is in fact a gift from the universe. This is not hard to imagine.  Ask yourself; "Have I ever had an original thought in my head?".  Our thoughts usually come from people we speak to, books we have read or things we have seen.  We are a complex amalgam of a whole array of influences.  It is highly likely that none of that is uniquely originated in our brains.  Even that creative scientist Isaac Newton admitted that he "was standing on the shoulders of giants".

By the way, I borrowed this idea about thoughts from someone else.

So if this is true, that our thoughts are not generated in our heads,  then this puts a huge question mark on the existence of our unique identity.  We share elements of everyone else, and in reality we have no way of knowing who or what gave us the bits of identity that we think are unique to us, but may not be.

The idea that we don't actually exist as we thought we did might be a bit scary.  But it is also liberating.  The fact that we share so much of our consciousness with everyone else opens up new avenues of connection.  And the deeper we go, the more connections there are as explained in the iceberg diagram below ...

Because 90 percent of an iceberg is below water level it's easy to be fooled that the diagram shows three separate icebergs.  However, it is all connected below the surface.

The wonderful opportunity here though is that - if we all realise that our identity is not separated from others and not separated from nature - then we can begin to repair all the damage created by those huge world-wide problems created by our separation.  Self awareness is not always a bad thing ... E.O Wilson said "to feel empathy for others, to measure the emotions of friends and enemy alike, to judge the intentions of all of them, and to plan a strategy for personal social interactions…the human brain became…highly intelligent".

If we truly shared the world with nature and our fellow humans then we would surely learn how to live more simply, so that others would simply live.