Now that I have your attention. 
I mean personal identity. To identify is to equate: 1 = 1. What are we equating with personal identity? The self with an idea (or an object, but this object is mediated by an idea).
It's a little screwy, but there are two selves that we know. One is consciousness, the other is a construct of qualities, characteristics, and such that we think make up "who we are," or what we can be in a definitive and historical sense. I am a white mental health counselor male, for example, but I'm also a lot of other things; the self can be defined according to a potentially infinite number of things, but in the most technical sense it can only be defined according to the qualities or actions the person has or is doing in the moment. I am only a fisherman when I'm fishing, and at other times when I identify as this I'm creating something that doesn't exist, even if I'm positive that I'll be fishing in an hour. For some reason we still consider ourselves as those things or actions that we're not even doing, so long as we plan on doing them in the future.
Sam Harris encapsulates Sartre's position on the self by saying:
This is an insanely profound point, and you can try this experiment yourself to see how the self (as an idea) blooms into awareness from a previous selfless sense of experience of whatever once you get a sense that someone else is looking at you, especially if it's something you're not supposed to be doing. That's the self as identity, not the self of consciousness -- the self which it's impossible to become self-conscious of, just as (according to Alan Watts) it's impossible to bite your own teeth. The self-as-idea comes upon you (consciousness) as an idea when you get the sense that you're not alone.
But there's a problem. If the self identifies itself with an idea, and in the process becomes an idea, this means that to the degree that the idea becomes threatened is also the degree to which the self is threatened. We feel attacked when the idea with which we identify is attacked, and there goes our happiness given the sense of loss that comes with this attack. This is why people become angry when someone attacks an ideal they have attached themselves to, or why many become depressed when the idea they have of themselves (their potential selves) are out of reach or inaccessible. It's also a supreme reason why people don't just change their minds when evidence or reasoning comes their way: they have identified with the idea they seek to defend. That's the whole meaning behind saying a person "identifies" with any specific belief: they attach their self (as idea) with the idea they believe in. Weirdly enough, the self becomes the belief it (as consciousness) defends.
Underneath all this all the while is the self as consciousness. Nobody considers this guy because he's very much the lens through which all other things are considered. Is it possible to identify with our consciousness only? That would mean that we identify with nothing, because consciousness is ultimately nothing, no-thing in an objective sense, and it's always the consciousness (subject) that objectifies everything else, except other subjects (but that's a complicated discussion).
Okay then, next step. Perhaps it's possible to identify with nothing, but that would take a lifetime of discipline and possibly defeat, given that our natural inclination might be to continually be identifying with things. The discipline we should develop, then, is how to realize that the things we identify with ultimately aren't who we are in a heavy sense, but are just like clothes we wear on any given day, loosely attached to ourselves but ultimately not ourselves, items we can and should cycle through and discard as much as possible to remind us of this fact. One trick would be to identify ourselves with as many things as possible rather than putting arbitrary emphasis on one or two big important things. We learn to identify ourselves as readers, writers, people who love Fall weather and disc golf, rather than identifying ourselves primarily with our careers or anything big that can be realistically taken away. That's what happened to me a few months ago: I had to take sick leave again to dabble with medications because my symptoms were making the strenuous concentration involved in counseling impossible at times, and I went through spurts of anger and depression because, after all, I'm a counselor, and what am I supposed to do or be if I can't be that? It only took a week to realize that I love reading and learning, love playing guitar, even if I don't place a heavy emphasis on these things. I realized that identifying myself with my career is silly, because there's more to life than identifying. I realized that "counselor" was an idea just as learned and contingent as anything else.
Or maybe that's it: that by constantly reminding ourselves that we're not anything or any action but qualitatively more as the elusive sense of consciousness that underlies it, we can gain relief from realizing that we're not being attacked or threatened when any of these ideas are also attacked or threatened. This is part of why the ideal of self-transcendence is so valued: because it helps us get beyond this false sense of self as identity and really enjoy the world.
I mean personal identity. To identify is to equate: 1 = 1. What are we equating with personal identity? The self with an idea (or an object, but this object is mediated by an idea).
It's a little screwy, but there are two selves that we know. One is consciousness, the other is a construct of qualities, characteristics, and such that we think make up "who we are," or what we can be in a definitive and historical sense. I am a white mental health counselor male, for example, but I'm also a lot of other things; the self can be defined according to a potentially infinite number of things, but in the most technical sense it can only be defined according to the qualities or actions the person has or is doing in the moment. I am only a fisherman when I'm fishing, and at other times when I identify as this I'm creating something that doesn't exist, even if I'm positive that I'll be fishing in an hour. For some reason we still consider ourselves as those things or actions that we're not even doing, so long as we plan on doing them in the future.
Sam Harris encapsulates Sartre's position on the self by saying:
Our encounters with other people constitute the primal circumstance of self-formation...[E]ach of us is perpetually in the position of a voyeur who, while gazing upon the object of his lust, suddenly hears the sound of someone stepping up directly behind him.
This is an insanely profound point, and you can try this experiment yourself to see how the self (as an idea) blooms into awareness from a previous selfless sense of experience of whatever once you get a sense that someone else is looking at you, especially if it's something you're not supposed to be doing. That's the self as identity, not the self of consciousness -- the self which it's impossible to become self-conscious of, just as (according to Alan Watts) it's impossible to bite your own teeth. The self-as-idea comes upon you (consciousness) as an idea when you get the sense that you're not alone.
But there's a problem. If the self identifies itself with an idea, and in the process becomes an idea, this means that to the degree that the idea becomes threatened is also the degree to which the self is threatened. We feel attacked when the idea with which we identify is attacked, and there goes our happiness given the sense of loss that comes with this attack. This is why people become angry when someone attacks an ideal they have attached themselves to, or why many become depressed when the idea they have of themselves (their potential selves) are out of reach or inaccessible. It's also a supreme reason why people don't just change their minds when evidence or reasoning comes their way: they have identified with the idea they seek to defend. That's the whole meaning behind saying a person "identifies" with any specific belief: they attach their self (as idea) with the idea they believe in. Weirdly enough, the self becomes the belief it (as consciousness) defends.
Underneath all this all the while is the self as consciousness. Nobody considers this guy because he's very much the lens through which all other things are considered. Is it possible to identify with our consciousness only? That would mean that we identify with nothing, because consciousness is ultimately nothing, no-thing in an objective sense, and it's always the consciousness (subject) that objectifies everything else, except other subjects (but that's a complicated discussion).
Okay then, next step. Perhaps it's possible to identify with nothing, but that would take a lifetime of discipline and possibly defeat, given that our natural inclination might be to continually be identifying with things. The discipline we should develop, then, is how to realize that the things we identify with ultimately aren't who we are in a heavy sense, but are just like clothes we wear on any given day, loosely attached to ourselves but ultimately not ourselves, items we can and should cycle through and discard as much as possible to remind us of this fact. One trick would be to identify ourselves with as many things as possible rather than putting arbitrary emphasis on one or two big important things. We learn to identify ourselves as readers, writers, people who love Fall weather and disc golf, rather than identifying ourselves primarily with our careers or anything big that can be realistically taken away. That's what happened to me a few months ago: I had to take sick leave again to dabble with medications because my symptoms were making the strenuous concentration involved in counseling impossible at times, and I went through spurts of anger and depression because, after all, I'm a counselor, and what am I supposed to do or be if I can't be that? It only took a week to realize that I love reading and learning, love playing guitar, even if I don't place a heavy emphasis on these things. I realized that identifying myself with my career is silly, because there's more to life than identifying. I realized that "counselor" was an idea just as learned and contingent as anything else.
Or maybe that's it: that by constantly reminding ourselves that we're not anything or any action but qualitatively more as the elusive sense of consciousness that underlies it, we can gain relief from realizing that we're not being attacked or threatened when any of these ideas are also attacked or threatened. This is part of why the ideal of self-transcendence is so valued: because it helps us get beyond this false sense of self as identity and really enjoy the world.
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