Today I wanna share with you a profound thought – in connection with a podcast we recently released on the same topic – and I want to call it the “Mother” of all distortions that we live through.
In a time when identity has become both a badge and a battleground, we find ourselves increasingly defined by what we choose to represent—our beliefs, our titles, our past, our gender, our politics. But beneath all of these layers, what truly remains?
Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
In this episode of Voices of The One Mind, we invite you into a rare and necessary conversation – one that doesn’t offer answers, but gently dissolves the question itself. Bear Saorin and Kosho Zen Monk explore not who we are in the eyes of the world, but what lies underneath when we stop performing the “I” altogether.
Today, identity is no longer just personal – it’s performative. It’s curated, shaped by algorithms, reinforced by cultural narratives, and increasingly disconnected from presence. We explore how the self has become fragmented not only by technology or ideology, but by the very desire to be someone – to be seen, understood, categorised. But what happens when we stop trying to hold ourselves together in this way?
This is not a denial of individuality – it’s an invitation to look through it. To notice where our identities become cages. To question the need to constantly become someone in order to belong, succeed, or be validated. The episode touches the subtle but profound realisation that true clarity does not arise from more self-definition, but from less. From silence. From presence. From undoing.
If you’ve ever felt the weight of trying to hold your identity together – spiritual, social, personal – or sensed there’s something more real underneath the performance, this dialogue may feel like a mirror, or perhaps, a doorway.
What if the crisis of identity we're facing—personally and globally – isn’t a detour from growth, but the path itself?
You think of yourself
as a citizen of the universe.
You think you belong
to this world of dust and matter.
Out of this dust
you have created a personal image,
and have forgotten
about the essence of your true origin.
This week episode, welcomes a powerful exchange dialogue between Bear Saorin and Zen Monk Kosho that enters the quiet terrain beneath the stories we tell about ourselves. Stories of who we are, what we’ve overcome, what we represent. For most of us, identity is a survival structure – made of memory, pain, belief, and longing. But at some point, that structure begins to crack. You may recognise it as restlessness, a subtle sense that something essential is missing. And we rush to fix it – through achievement, reinvention, rebellion, or belonging. The deeper truth is not found by reinforcing the self. It’s revealed by enquiry.
The conversation echoes that what most of us call “me” is simply a dense layering of thought, history, and unconscious roles – an echo chamber of the past masquerading as the self. We cling to these fragments for meaning, yet they leave us feeling increasingly fractured. The world will offer you endless forms of identity: victim, victor, seeker, success story, outcast, influencer, even spiritual rebel. But all these roles share a subtle fear: that without the story, we are nothing.
This illusion of identity is seductive precisely because it offers just enough affirmation to keep the deeper discomfort at bay. “Normal equals insane” in todays world – because it has become normal to live cut off from the deeper dimension of being.
Yet in the midst of this fragmentation, something essential is trying to break through. Therefore, we invite to step out of identity altogether – to touch the stillness underneath the stories. To raise to a higher consciousness – s not an achievement, but a return. And it begins when we stop mistaking thought for truth, and roles for reality.
This episode is a mirror. And if you listen carefully, it may reveal the part of you that was never fragmented to begin with.
With presence,
Bear Saorin & The Voices of The One Mind Team
🎧 Watch the episode on YouTube:
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