We’ve all been taught it’s important to know who we are. How can we ever amount to anything if we don’t discover our identity?

So, who are you as a person? Are you sure you really know? Have you pinned your identity down?

It’s commonly said by those who are on a spiritual journey, “Look inside for answers.” There’s certainly a truth to the idea that our answers come from within.

However, if we look inside ourselves seeking something specific we can call our identity, what do we find? Peering deeply into ourselves, can we locate something we can identify as “myself”?

When we look inside ourselves, we don’t find anything tangible we can put our finger on and say, “There I am! That’s me.” Instead there’s just infinite awareness.

This is because we are each unique expressions of consciousness, a presence that makes itself known as us.

There’s nothing definitive to which we can point, like thrusting a butterfly net into the air, catching a butterfly, and saying, “I’ve got you!” We can thrust our net into our inner being as often and as deeply as we wish, but we never capture who we are.

Like searching for ourselves in the world around us, going within with the intention of “finding ourselves” is an equally futile search.

What if it’s not necessary to know who we are in the sense of having an identity? What if having an identity, instead of enhancing our life, limits us?

The moment we define ourselves, we put ourselves in a box of our own imagining, operating from an idea of ourselves that’s largely a construct of what others have told us about ourselves over the years.

Any such identity we define for ourselves restricts us to only a tiny fraction of the infinite awareness of which we are an expression.

Whenever we attach ourselves to an egoic interpretation of who we are, we set ourselves up for disappointment, which results in suffering.

If our identity is that of a football player or a tennis star, what happens when we can no longer play? We are going to feel like a has-been, with life passing us by.

With our identity riding entirely on what we once were, which recedes ever into the past until hardly anyone remembers us anymore, who are we now?

Identity is a product of thought and has nothing to do with who we really are.

Though our ego likes to define itself, put boundaries around itself, feel secure in how it imagines itself, who we are needs no definition. Life is simply something to be experienced and enjoyed.

An identity has nothing to do with our true self; it’s just a fad of the ego.

There are roles we fulfill at various times in our life, but none of these are our identity. They are a particular articulation of an aspect of ourselves in which we engage for a time, which doesn’t begin to capture who we are.

*Editor's note: The Compassionate Eye appears several days a week. Eckhart Tolle's second books The Power of Now, Stillness Speaks, and A New Earth speak about being “present” in our life. Now Michael Brown, author of The Presence Process (in book form, downloadable audio, and as a downloadable ebook) shows us precisely how to become present in Alchemy of the Heart. To go more deeply into living in the present moment in an ongoing state of consciousness, especially as it relates to being true to ourselves in our relationships with others, also join us in the daily blog Consciousness Rising.