A Sliver Of Our Identity

The woods would be silent If no birds sang there Except those that sang best.

John Audubon, the naturalist and painter, published his collection, Birds of America, in the first part of the 19th century. The collection consists of 435 life-size prints of birds. Audubon became an instant hit in England and Scotland during his 1826 tour of Europe.

If we focus on birds in their natural habitat, we would discover a personality within each one of them. Just like us, they possess certain qualities that make up their personality. And just like the birds our personalities are different, so our reality is never quiet.

Personality is one of those words we use to describe something about a person, but we really don’t do the word justice. We use terms like great, vivacious, wonderful and other words to explain what we see in others, but those words only express our feelings about different personalities. They don’t actually define what personality is.

We often think that our personality and our identity are one and the same, but there are differences. Our personality is a reflection of certain aspects of our identity. Those aspects are actualized in our three-dimensional reality. Personality is molded by physical circumstances, and identity operates in many dimensions.

The personality we consider the whole part of us is just a sliver of our identity. What we see in the mirror is just a drop of our true identity. We don’t see the ego, our subconscious, or our spirit in the mirror, but they are part of our identity. We see what we consider to be the whole self, but the whole self is much greater than our reflection.