Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

Glossary Menus

identity

For many, a person’s identity is their most precious possession, which, in the extreme, they are willing to kill for to defend and protect. We clearly see this in all the wars that have been fought during the patriarchal epoch in the names of religion, nationality, and ideology, for instance.

This notion of identity, as ‘individuality, set of definitive characteristics’, derives from the root sense of “something always being the same or always being itself (rather than something else)”.

But such a conception of identity arises from the fragmented mind and split psyche, believing that we humans are experientially and cognitively separate from the Divine, which is the Genuine Identity that we all share.

We can thus only find Inner Peace by realizing our True Nature, accepting everything with an all-inclusive, both-and approach to life, not rejecting those who seek to unify mysticism and mathematics, science and spirituality, reason and religion, and East and West.

See also: 

Etymology

Original meaning in 1603 ‘sameness or oneness’, from Middle French identité, from Late Latin identitatem (nominative identitās) ‘sameness’, from Latin īdem ‘the same’, related to id ‘it’, from PIE base *i- pronominal stem.

Identity has a rather complex etymology, as the OED tells us. The need was evidently felt for a noun of condition or quality from idem to express the notion of ‘sameness’, side by side with those of ‘likeness’ and ‘oneness’ expressed by similitās and ūnitās: hence the form of the suffix -ty, which derives from Latin -tās, like beauty and liberty, from *bellitās and lībertās, from bellus ‘pretty’ and līber ‘free’, respectively. However, idem had no combining stem, so there are some speculations about how the Late Latin word identitās was formed.

Furthermore, the PIE base also gave rise to Latin iterum ‘again, a second time’, the root of iterate ‘to repeat’, and identidem ‘repeatedly, again and again’, from idem et idem, which also influenced the formation of identity.

Common ancestor(s): 
i-