What is the difference between identity and Self? Do you have a Self?

Let"s talk about identification a little more... the identification that gives you the illusion that you are a person, but in fact it what is standing between you and becoming a person.

So what is a person? A person is someone who has a consciousness, a Self, that guides their actions, their relationship to life. When you ask: who is he? show is she? what comes up is not what they do for a living, what awards they won, how well or poorly they do their job... but something deeper and constant... They are that everywhere, on the job, in the public, in the bedroom... everywhere.

If you identify yourself with stuff on the periphery of your being, on the horizontal plane, what you say about yourself, what you want people to know is that you have won an Emmy, three time...

Or that you have had HIV for twenty years going
Or that you are gay
Or that you are black

And alas, it leaves you with no Self. The stuff you identify with has no consciousness, and have no defining power on your character.

Let"s do a little quiz: Which of these people/characters have a self?

Some are actual people, some are roles in TV shows or in books. You need to know them to vote

Madame President: TV show:

The President
His Chief of staff
The Secretary of State
Her Husband

TV show: Blue Bloods:

The Police Commissioner (Frank)
His father, Henry
His Daughter the ADA, Erin
His Detective son, Danny
His other son, Jamie

TV show: NCIS... Jethro whatever his name

President Trump
President Obama
President Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt
John Kennedy
Robert Kennedy

Oprah Winfrey
Tai Lopez
James Altucher
Warren Buffet
Charlie Munger
Steve Jobs
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerberg

Jeff Bezos
Sam Walton

Ayn Rand
Dostoevsky
Pushkin
Chekhov
Tolstoy

Lenin
Stalin
Hitler

Rappers:
Jay Z
Eminem
Kanye West

Arnold Schwarzenegger
Michael Jordan
John Wooden basketball coach

Osho
Sheile, his one time assistant
Krishnamurti
Mooji
Deepak Chopra
The Dalai Lama
Paulo Cuelho
Eckhart Tolle
don Miguel Ruiz

Werner Erhard
Nancy Zapolski
Tony Robbins
Marianne Williamson
Wayne Dyer
Gurdjieff

Alexander the Great
Philip the Macedon

Socrates
Plato
Aristotle

Freud
Jung
Nietzsche

Just post the name of the character or person in the comments section who you feel have a Self, an overarching "who".

I have shared this before, but it"s probably time to share again in this context:

the story of how I got to filled with a Self at age 45.

In 1991 I participated in a week long Communication Course with Landmark (wasn"t called Landmark yet) where they verbalized your identity and made you wear it on a t-shirt.

Mine was "Recovering victim, get the f... out of my way". Not pretty. I experienced hatred and fear from my classmates. I decided to kill myself. I faced death and life won... But a year of extreme turbulence followed, illness, money troubles, the whole nine yards.

In 1992, Almost exactly a year after that t-shirt, in a seminar, I invented myself: Living on the edge, generating distinctions of transformation for humankind.

It included my tendency to get into trouble, to walk the fine line between accepted and unaccepted... and my goal in life: to use my abilities to penetrate the invisible, have insights and share them.

The Self is a crystallization.

It took me, from creation to crystallization another 15 years. Most crystallization happens in fire... and mine wasn"t an exception: I was in a program where the leader declared me a threat, a dark side, and that fire finalized the crystallization.

And I want to mention another phenomenon I pondered last night when I could not fall asleep: the way people choose spouses.

Power people like to choose goodness people who are meek, subservient.

And this pairing works until the goodness person awakens, and sees what they are doing. Then the only way to save the marriage is to be savvy, adroit, and not pick fights.

The scene from The Fountainhead, where Roark and Gail Wynand discuss the plans of Wynand"s house... Roark shows Gail what he was asking for, and then they both laugh. But without adroitness it would have cost Roark his life.

Self is for something. Being against something isn"t going to create a crystallized Self. Revolutionaries are primarily about doing away with the system that is...

Competition doesn"t agree with crystallized Self... by the way.

This is a big and new topic, and will upset a lot of people.

You need to look deep into the abyss and see if you are interested and willing to surrender all of your life to and idea greater than yourself, greater than something personal. And if yes, contact me. I"ll see if I can work with you.

PS: As I was looking for pictures for this article, I encountered a really confusing, confusing to you, phenomenon.

People talk about things as if they knew anything about them, like Self, and Self-Realization. Of all the people I looked at in the pictures section of google, I found one person, Nisargadatta Maharaj who has a Self, and therefore he could talk about Self-Realization, authentically. The rest: second handers, moochers, looters, parasites.

And what does Nisargadatta Maharaj say: I am that... it is that simple folks. it is that simple.