Loosening the Hold of Our Many Identities by Acknowledging Them Fully

An Excerpt from Teachings Given by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Winter 2024

I have been encouraging you for quite some time to look inward at the many aspects of your relative self. Specifically, your primary identity or personality, and then the various sub-personalities or identities. I don't know how many other Tibetan lamas speak in this way, referring to these different personalities, but as many of you know I am not just simply coming up with this. Rather it's related to the Bon teachings on the six lokas. According to those teachings we have six energy centers located within our body, and there are different elements underlying these energy centers. And these six centers are associated with six different negative emotions. They are anger, greed, ignorance, jealousy, pride and laziness. The term negative emotion as it is used here might better be understood as an affliction which causes suffering. These six negative emotions are manifestations of our not knowing our true nature, and subsequently they're the cause of various events and situations in our life.

We have a different pain identity related to each of these six negative emotions. And clearly, these six different identities, what I call subpersonalities, are most of the time present within us. Do we get angry? Yes. But are we simply this anger? No. Do we get jealous? Yes. But are we simply this jealousy? No! You see, we don't identify ourselves with those emotional experiences, but we do have them all of the time. So, you have all of them, but you are none of them. However, you do think or feel that you are some combination of them, for sure, and so you identify as that. And that is what I call your primary identity or primary personality, which ultimately is also not you. It is simply your current general sense of yourself, which is conditioned by temporary circumstances.

What we have been saying from the beginning of the retreat is that ultimately you are none of these identities, and that is important. You're more this potentiality, the possibility, the energy, the space, the light, the purest level of quality - you are that. You are not a product of these thoughts and feelings, and it's helpful to know that, because we are so attached to this primary sense of ourselves. And I am adding the distinction here between this primary sense of oneself and one's sub-identities. To repeat, your primary identity is more or less who you are, relatively speaking. It's in charge. And it has rules, it has a purpose and it's trying to regulate its life. And each sub-identity is interfering with its existence, because each one can at times threaten to overpower the primary identity.

The main point here is this aspect of your having different personalities or pain identities manifesting any time, day or night, because they are present with you 24/7. And when they are coming up, those pains are very predictable. Some pains will come up only when you are alone. Other pains will come up only when you begin to have a relationship with someone. And still other pains will come up when you have a question about a given relationship. They are very predictable and will come up at exactly a particular time and place or in a particular situation. If you know yourself very well, then you can almost predict when that will be. Tomorrow morning I am meeting this kind of person in this situation, and I know exactly which personality is going to show up, so I want to be ready for that! You are so familiar with your predictable personality that it's as if this other person is also coming along to the meeting. [laughter] So it's better that you arrive half an hour early to meet first with this predictable personality, and have a good conversation with it. Then you can say, you can go now. And I will schedule the next meeting with you, because I can't have two meetings at the same time. And then let it go away, and you can have a very quiet, calm and focused meeting with the person that you're scheduled to meet. For sure it will be far better.

In our meditations here at the retreat I've been guiding us to look at what subpersonalities we may have, and then to generate compassion for each of them. It's because really you are more an absence of any single one of those identities. You are more a potential for any of them to arise depending on what's needed in the moment. That is healthy. For instance, with regard to anger, say, I think it's not bad to get angry, but you need to know balance. If you have an experience of anger, then you will naturally feel it within you, you cannot deny that. However, the key is in the way we experience it and express it.

When we go to bed at night, we have a great opportunity to see these predictable personalities very clearly, because lying still, we are not distracted at all by the actions that we normally engage in during our day. That's why I've been encouraging you during this retreat to use your time in bed to try to be aware of, and come to know well these old friends, your familiar sub-personalities that just show up without any invitation. Some may be waiting for you to simply come to bed, and they will keep you from falling asleep. Others may barge in on your sleep and disrupt it in an assortment of ways. Clearly, some of those personalities have been around for all these years, but you just haven't looked at them well and met them.

So let's say that you are going to go to bed, and all of these friends, these familiar personalities are just showing up. And which friends are they tonight? You can see them, okay that one showed up, this one showed up, that other one is missing tonight. You can see that not all of them come all of the time. And among those who show up, there will always be one of them who's the most dominating. But that will depend on what's happening during those days in your life. And it will also depend on your characteristics, for instance, which country you live in, which family you're in, what kind of background you have; it depends on many factors.

With practice you more easily become aware of the subpersonalities that may show up there in the nighttime, and as a result you can maybe better optimize your sleep, getting longer more continuous sleep. Or you may just simply come to recognize that a struggle is going on there that you had never recognized before, and you are okay with that struggle. That's a success, too! But you also recognize that this struggle eventually has to be acknowledged fully and cannot be left unacknowledged like it has been for all of these years. That is a conclusion that should definitely be there, as well.

And why is that? Because in the end its very simple, right? There is a pain and there is no acknowledgement. There is a need for change, but there is just not enough clarity and strength - or enthusiasm there. Up until now, all of these friends were showing up in the night, and you didn't know what to do with them. Rather, they had a clearer idea of what to do with you - to just interrupt your sleep! Which you now see that they have been doing for years, right?

So once you pay closer attention and see the struggle, you now can have some idea of what to do. You start by simply saying, welcome, I love you. I respect you. I care about your opinion. I know that you have some concerns that I am very willing to address in the right time, but not now. And for those personalities who are very demanding, then you give them the schedule for when you can meet with them. And for those personalities that show up who are less demanding, then you can simply say, I will see you sometime in the future, but it will be only during the daytime. And that's it! Then you immediately have some greater sense of peace there in the night, because they now know they don't belong there.

I'm not sure how this all sounds to you, this idea of working with our many personalities. We don't have to fully realize it, but somehow, we should be curious enough about it. And at least not get too attached to this current primary identity or personality, because that's a problem. Again, your primary identity is not who you are. If you look back at your life over the past 20, 30, 40 years, you can see that there have been many, maybe three to five, primary identities. There was the middle school identity, the high school identity, and with finishing college you have another primary identity, and so on. If looking back you can see clearly that none of them are the you who you identify with now, then that means that whatever your current identity is, you will have to say to yourself, this is not who I am, rather this is the role that I am serving now. And the best view to have toward this current roll will be to do my best with whatever opportunity or platform that it gives me and then, of course, to also be able to let it go when the time comes to do so.

So, we start feeling more space toward this current primary identity, and more space within it too, in order to integrate it with the rest of the sub-identities. Having compassion for our sub-identities may feel foreign, because actually most of the time we don't have any compassion for these sub-identities. The feeling at night might be, when I am going to sleep, I hate all of those personalities. In fact, when I get into bed I am already afraid that these identities will show up. I really don't want them. Secretly we do hate them - we fight with them, we struggle with them, we don't like them. Yet they are a part of us. We are also used to holding similar expectations regarding our sub-identities arising during the day. Maybe we had started off expecting something good to happen in association with a particular subpersonality, but then we find that it doesn't seem to be working, so we begin to hate that personality in us. But the more you hate that personality, then the stronger it becomes. Through hating it, you strengthen it and then become more dependent on it. Because it is part of yourself.

So basically, the message here is twofold. At the core it is to know that none of these personalities is you. That's the primary message. They are not you even though they have been pretending to be you for quite some time, and as a result, they do have an effect; they have consequences. So, the only way to be free from them, is through total acknowledgement of them. That's why in dzogchen, it is said that it is not the path which renounces things, rejects things, but rather it is the path which liberates things. And the path of liberation is through seeing. So, when you see something, then you can acknowledge it and give a voice to it, or a color, or an image or give a story to it. And when you do, these are ways of breathing into it, and breathing it out. And as a result, you go back to a clearer space. That's what's happening here.

In these dzogchen teachings it's so beautiful that you're always paying attention to these different layers within yourself. And it's okay for them to be there as long as you are aware of them and they don't take over everything. Rather, they are cared for, they are loved, and their presence is okay, because you are spacious enough to accommodate them, yet strong enough not to let them take over. That's the practice. The practice of awareness is always like that. Okay?