Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich,
and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life.
Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.
A friend who recently retired told me he is having difficulty figuring out
who he is without a job. He spent his entire life working and developing a routine
without ever developing a personality, and he is not alone. But this episode is not about
retirement, it's about figuring out who we are.
A personality is defined as The mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.
There is nothing distinctive about me, he said.
My beliefs are not my own, they were handed to me, and I've never reached for
anything in life except for a promotion.
I have tried so hard to blend in, I faded into the background.
Few people ever question what moral qualities are distinctive to them unless
certain life events force them to self-reflect.
My buddy Mike, for example, wrote a book about his time in prison called Going Om,
where, for the first time in his life, nobody cared that he was a CEO, a husband, a father,
or anything other than inmate number 60419066. All the labels with which he had
previously identified were stripped from him, and it took going to prison for him to realize
he was already in one. He essentially freed himself while behind bars.
A woman who recently lost her only grandchild told me she has to constantly
remind herself of everything else she was before she became a grandmother,
or she starts feeling like she lost everything.
And a year after my buddy Jessie came out as gay, he realized his orientation is
only as much a part of him as his hair color, not his personality.
"Who are we?" is a deep question,
and it's important not to confuse identity with personality. Someone can identify as
Christian, for example, but not be Christ-like, just like according to Jewish law, I am
technically Jewish by birth, even if I never identify as such.
The questions that constantly ring in my head are: HOW am I Jewish? HOW am I Buddhist?
What else am I? And according to whom?
When I first heard Tyler Durden say:
You are not your job, you are not how much money you have in the bank,
you are not the car you drive, you are not the contents of your wallet, you are not your
f*cking khakis, I literally owned 42 pairs of khakis, believe it or not, for business casual,
drove a sports car, and worked at a law firm. I thought that's who I was,
but I wasn't even close.
Identities can be restricting and confining if we identify with our job or relationship status,
our health, youth, or anything that is either temporary or directly contradicts what we
know in our core to be true.
Gender identity is a perfect example of how personal & individual these answers must be
rather than anyone else deciding for us. But again, be it gender, religion, wealth, or health,
identity is not the same as personality.
I would go as far as to say that when we set aside the identities that segregate each of us,
we tap into the personality [the moral quality] that celebrates all of us.
On the one hand, we have Buddhism, which is all about awakening from our illusion of
separateness, but on the other hand, personality is determined by qualities
distinctive to an individual. So, which is it?
I picture the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree and realizing that we are all one.
And this concept of unity is not unique to Buddhism, of course, the last line
in the prayer of St. Francis reads: it's in dying to Self that we are born to eternal life.
Who we are, therefore, is collective, fluid, and interconnected.
Something doesn't need to happen to each of us for it to matter to all of us,
and nothing needs to happen to all of us for it to matter to each of us.
Our personality is developed when any concern with ME changes to WE.
And instead of asking, Who am I?
We ask: who am I in relation to everyone and everything else?
In answer to that question, I am another you, and you are another me. Namaste.
Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless
and Buddhist Boot Camp.
For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com,
where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project,
watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list.
We hope you have enjoyed this episode
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Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏🏼