Yogi Bhajan: You have identical identity, which is your imagery, how you feel you are. It is your imagination, which is very loving to you. It is very beautiful, very creative – call it anything you want. Plus you have your identity which you have to look at and deal with. 
Personality is identity plus projection. Your personality is your personality, and your reality is your reality, and your identity is your identity. Sometimes you go to your identical personality. You might be day-dreaming; you might be thinking things which you are not supposed to think. Sometimes you can totally confront yourself. You can practically confront yourself and find out you are hopeless, you are miserable, you are depressed, you are useless, and you are no good. You know all that stuff? Why do you say all this to yourself? Have you ever thought about it? When you put yourself down and abuse yourself, at that time nobody is telling you to accuse yourself, nobody is telling you to put yourself down. What is happening is your identical personality and your personalities are in conflict. It is that conflict which makes you put yourself down.
Do you think if somebody tells you that you are an idiot, you are going to agree to it? Impossible. If God comes before you and says you are an idiot, you say, “Forget it. You are an idiot, you made me. I am not.” You can fight back.
But sometimes you’ll be shocked how abusive, negative, and depressed you can be. You tell yourself things which you cannot believe, do things which you cannot believe, and relate to things that you cannot relate to. Why do you all that? What makes us do that? Does somebody telephone you and say, “Abuse yourself.” No, not at all. It is because the conflict between your identical personality and your personality is so great. You have sweetness in your identical personality, and bitterness in your personality. The conflict makes you mad.
You know, you blame other people for putting you down. But you do not realize that you put yourself down because of this duality. Normally, identical personality is an undying situation, it can’t go away. But it can be reduced to 10%. In the normal powerful man it is 20%. But when it becomes 30%, you are out of your job. You are not going to be happy, it doesn’t matter what. When there’s a 20-25% relationship between your identity and your identical personality, it is borderline. Beyond that, no, no, no.
The situation we are confronting is our personality. Why do people freak out when their marriage falls apart? I have the privilege to counsel a lot of people, and I hear, “What the hell does this bitch have to do with me?” And, “Who is this dog I married?” You get angrier and angrier. Yesterday you were poochy, poochy, poochy, and today it is daggers drawn and plates flying round. Fifteen or eighteen hours later, abusiveness, anger, rejection, “Get out of my sight.” She says, “I married you, you elephant, and I never want to see you again. Call the attorney, let us divorce. Forget about all this.” What happened? Stars changed in the heavens? No. When the personality develops to the identical personality and the relationship is established, it is extremely dangerous. Your identical personality beyond 25% is stronger than your 75% identity. The problem is the identical personality is beautiful, soft, and lofty, on a pedestal. It is all imagination, it is the focus of the mind, and the personality is a hassling, sweating, yelling, screaming, living, earning person. Real. Level to level real. Unreal and real balance and clash with themselves and the entire world.
Why did God create this? He wants you to be creative. He wants you to have understanding. God gave this to you because He loves you. He wanted you to realize the infinity of God in your finite form. Sometimes that which is given to us for our good becomes our enemy. You know, you have white blood cells and red blood cells, right? That’s what the blood chemistry is. And they have certain proportions. Suppose the white cells become equal to the red blood cells, what will happen? You won’t live. That is where the problem is. The identical personality and personality, if they are in the proportion of 20/80, you can keep going. If it is 10/90, you will pull through anything.
Anything. If it is 5/95, you’ll be extremely sensitive, totally isolated, with no peer group. But if it is 35/75 or 40/60, neither money can make you happy, nor any woman can make you happy, nor the Universal power can make you happy.
Do you know Napoleon Bonaparte? He became Emperor, he was unhappy. He became a prisoner, he was unhappy. It’s called “Napoleon Bonaparte syndrome.” A little guy asking for too much. He was not little, he was kind. He was the only king who crowned himself, and he crowned his queen too. He could bless anything, he could be anything, and it is true that he lost the battle at Waterloo. The British were beaten; the French were beaten. Then came their German friends, who sided with the British, and they won the war. At that time he knew what was happening, but he couldn’t pull the whole thing off.
Napoleon Bonaparte had one personality as king, but as a prisoner he didn’t have sensitivity or feeling. When he wanted to run away from that little island, he ran away. I’m just explaining to you, when the identical personality becomes powerful, it takes the place of sensitivity. A lot of people in life are insensitive to themselves. For them there is no difference between having a successful career and a destructive career.
Sometimes you might be amazed, “Why is this man destroying his marriage, why is he destroying his practice, why is he destroying his profession? Why is he destroying his home, why is he destroying his neighborhood?” You ask these questions, and you’ll continue asking these questions. It is because once the identical personality becomes a realized reality to you, there’s nothing you can do about it. Then you become self- destructive. You become angrier and angrier, self destructive, self destructive, self destructive.
I was talking to a gentleman one day, and we joked, and he said, “Hi Yogiji, love you, how are you now?”
I said, “What are you doing now?”
“Oh, living a life.”
I said, “You are going through a divorce.”
He said, “How did you know?”
I said, “‘Oh, living a life.’ I have heard that sentence so many times.”
He said, “But this time I did better.”
I said, “What was this time?”
He said, “We have been married a year and a half.”
I said, “Yeah.”
He usually gets married and never crosses the eight month. I think this must be his eighteenth or nineteenth marriage. He works three months and prepares for a divorce three months, and then he thinks about getting married to somebody for another three months – that’s almost a year. It’s a set pattern. But this time he wanted me to know that he had this kind of a woman and should he marry her or not? I said, “Look, the woman who sits in your imagination, she sits in your head. She doesn’t sit in your heart. And the woman who is sitting in your heart doesn’t fit in your head. So my opinion is that you do what you want to do. I cannot counsel you on this issue. Because what is in your heart, if it is not in your head, you are miserable. And what is in your head, if your heart doesn’t accept it, you are horrible.
Fight is between heart and head. Your heart is your identity. Identical identity of your personality is your head. Actually, we bow our heads, we never bow our hearts. That’s Sikh Dharma. The head has to obey the heart, and the heart has to beat in consistency with the truth. Otherwise, you can’t live happy.
You create problems, and you seek solutions to the problems. Just understand that. You create problems, and you don’t solve problems. You understand the irony of the fate? You create problems, and if you solve your problems, fine. But, no. You create problems, and you seek solutions to the problems, but you never solve them. Whosoever creates problems should solve them. What happens is your heart wants something, and your head wants something else.
You must have heard someone say, “Well, I talked to Gurumukh Singh last night. He was very nice, but boy, I called him this morning, and he was a savage.”
“Well, what happened? You must have been talking about a different subject.”
“Oh, no, no, no, no. I was pursuing the same subject. God, he lost his temper.”
You are dealing with two situations – what you are and what you feel you are. What you are and what you deal with you are. What you are and what you think you are. What you are and what you want to be. I am dealing with what you are. You are dealing with me with what you think you are, so it doesn’t matter what I say, and it doesn’t matter what you say, it’s going over each other.
A person who can go along with you and not get involved himself or herself is called a spiritual teacher. Spirit is consistently constant and is above all and is below all. That is why sometimes you cannot relate to your spiritual teacher because he has no emotions involved. There are emotions but there are no emotions for you. There’s nothing you can do about it because you are living in your identical-identity, and you are pursuing your identity.
You are here, but you are not here. And if you are there, you don’t know. So you come out with a statement and a proposal and an idea. But you don’t have any plan abut how to execute it, to fulfill it, and to complete it. Then you have one word in America which I have learned, “Freaked-out.” “Freaked-out” is a trauma which you play. It’s called “S.O.S.” It is a mid-term call for help before going down the tube. Sometimes you feel very angry with people going through this trauma business, and you say, “Well, you are laying a number on me. I don’t like it.” Just like it. It’s a call. It is an unconscious, conscious call. It is the most nonsensical behavior of a sensible person.
When we are not in touch with our soul, and our identity and our real identity, which is our soul, are not together, then our mind creates another identity, and we are another identity. But when our classified projections start mixing with each other, then identity does not remain identity, it becomes personality. Then the conflict is one between personality and identical personality. Do you understand that? In the greatest mysteries of the Unknown there’s only one thing to know – that there’s no mystery. In the vast wisdom and ocean of knowledge, there’s one thing to know, that there is only one acknowledgement one has to live by. In the vastness of productivity and richness of the earth, there is only one thing to know – the rich are those who are rich in patience. The blessing of all blessings that one has to know, is that giving is the only blessing one can enjoy. Lord God, give us the strength to live by values and grow by strength so that we can become Thy servant in Thy grace. Sat Nam.
