What do you identify with?

What do you identify with?
by Jerome Dechant
Feb. 1, 2011

Who are you? What are you? The answers to these questions will reveal to you and others where you assign your identity.

Jack Canfield has told a story in some videos I’ve recently viewed about the golden Buddha. In case you haven’t heard this story before, I will summarize it briefly by going right to the key point of the story.

There was this huge solid gold statue of Buddha which was hidden within another statue of Buddha made of clay. I don’t know, but I’m gonna guess the clay version of the Buddha was very beautiful and appropriately represented the Buddha with honor and respect.

The story goes that the land in which the golden Buddha resided was being invaded. The monks of the ashram/temple where the golden Buddha resided knew the invading forces were eventually going to make it to their temple. They also realized if the golden Buddha statue was left in plain sight, it would have been destroyed, melted down for its precious gold, therefore they undertook the task of crafting a clay Buddha over the golden one to keep it safe from pillaging.

By the time the invading forces came to this temple, the clay Buddha statue had been finished and looked perfectly in place in the temple so that it wasn’t disturbed by the invading forces. As the story goes, either all the monks were killed or took the secret of the golden Buddha to their graves without telling anyone.

Many years later, due to some need to relocate the statue, the clay statue was cracked during the attempt to move the statue, and it was at this time when the golden Buddha was discovered within the clay statue.

The reason I tell this story is because of the question titleing this blog. What do you identify with? Most of us, because of what we’ve been told or been exposed to, identify with the clay of our expression, not realizing we are in fact the beautiful and valuable golden Buddha hidden within.

If we never seek to uncover, to break the clayness of our expression, we will never express our true magnificence to the world, even though it truly resides within our clayness right here, right now.

I suggest, you sit quietly from time to time and delve deep within your own identity to find the gold of your being, the true YOU, and reacquaint yourself with your true Self. Re-identify with the true and eternal being of magnificence that you actually are. At first you might not believe this to be true, you might not even bother to look deeply within because you feel so certain that you are the clayness, not the goldness. As long as you don’t seek, that is the time through which you will suffer the deterioration of your clayness which will certainly be extended.

When you come to know your true identity through first hand experiencing, you might only at first get a glimpse of your magnificence. That is the crack in the clay which allows your magnificence to shine through. And so, the tendency will be for the crack to expand, and elongate and spread until finally, your clayness just naturally falls away, and you step forth embodying your magnificence for one and all to see.

There is another possibility too, one in which once a crack begins to form, you get out fresh clay and repair the crack, fill it back in because you are afraid to be exposed for what you truly are, or you’ve become so accustomed to identifying with your clayness adopting another identity just doesn’t seem feasible.

Whichever path you choose to take, I assure you, during it all, your true identity persists within you, awaiting your expression in being.

“I am here right now.” Self speaking.

Do you want a chisel and hammer, or do you want a bucket of fresh clay? Both choices are the right choices regardless of which one you make.

One thing to note is the Self doesn’t suffer but rather endures in its magnificence. Suffering arises out of misidentifying with that which is not your true being.

So, now again I ask the questions I posed at the beginning. Have your answers changed?