Once you label me, you negate me.
—Søren Kirkegaard
The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.
—Albert Einstein
One of the most interesting and powerful ways that attachment shows up in our interior landscape is through the process of identification. As we’ve discussed, the ego stays secure when it latches onto things that it perceives will offer it protection. The ego continually works to incorporate these things into its sense of both what it is and what it is not, and then building an identity out of these perceptions.
For example, consider any opinion that we might have. This opinion comes from our mind’s bound sense of what it judges to be right or wrong, good or bad. The ego is only at home if it has something to either go after or something to avoid, so holding onto an opinion gives the ego a place to stay—a place that gives it an identity. If we take this a step further, we can see that when we attach to anything, be it a person, an ideology, a framework, a type of food, or a style of fashion, the seeds of identification are automatically sown. In other words, the more we cling to any viewpoint, preference, or position, the more threatened we become that we might lose it. The more threatened we become, the more defensive we get. The more defensive and protective we get, the more pain we eventually feel when we lose whatever we’re fighting to keep. The more pain we feel, the more desperate we are to find relief. The more desperate we are to get out of our pain, the more aggressively we will do one of two things: reach for things that we think will make us feel better, or resist the things we think will make our circumstance worse. And so this cycle of suffering continues, endlessly turning from the moment we attach or identify with anything.
