We are all prisoners to some degree as we are all bound and limited by false identities. Some of these identities allow more freedom than others, but except for the few souls on the planet who have transcended the mind (which is the creator of all identities), then we are limited by these identities.

When people are content with their roles in life, they are trapped in illusion. They never strive to discover the infinity of being. The idea that they are infinite beings, or even more than they experience, never occurs to them. They don’t hear the inner question that is within all of us (some hear it more acutely than others). The question is “Who am I?” And it is this question that propels consciousness to discover greater and deeper levels of it own existence, and opens up the vistas of intuition.

Consider these words from Emerson’s Self-Reliance essay:

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue.

Consciousness is always in a state of becoming. That is the significance of life. The consciousness we have of ourselves is intended to expand from a limited identification to one that encompasses the whole. Just because you do something does not limit you or define you. A farmer is not a farmer. He is an infinite being occupied with farming. A drunk isn’t a drunk. He is an infinite being with an addiction to alcohol.

Everyone has grown to abhor the caste system that had its origins in ancient India because it prescribed limitations on what people could do, where they could go, and to whom they could associate with. But in a sense, the whole world lives in a caste system. We have prescribed roles, based on the perception of others and ourselves. These perceptions are created from, among other things, by the clothes we wear, the house or houses we live in, the friends we have, the cars we drive, the words we use, the level of our education, but what does this have to do with anything?

This is how our roles are defined in the world today. And it may seem perfectly normal to you. However, things are not as they seem. In NLP, for instance, they say “the map is not the territory.” As holistic beings, we are multi-dimensional. We cannot be pigeonholed. We cannot be labeled. We are infinite and eternal beings. If you were somehow able to go back into the myriad of your past lives, you would discover lifetimes of diverse characteristics. Some were tremendously successful; some were abysmal failures. Some were filled with happiness. Some were filled with unrelenting sorrow. But in each and every one of these lifetimes, you were always something more. Each lifetime was but a small chapter in a multi-volume saga.

Here is a hypothetical example. Say you are a famous movie star, and you get a chance to play role after role in movie after movie. Well, as an actor you wouldn’t get caught up in the dramas of the characters’ lives. You wouldn’t lose sleep over the fact that the character you played was cheated out of a fortune, or because the spouse of your character had an affair with your character’s best friend. If you are a good actor, you feel the feelings that the characters go through, but you don’t hold onto them when you are not standing in front of the camera. You know that the role you are playing is not your true identity.

But the roles we play in real life are not who we really are, either. We are way more than what we appear to be. Our mind has taken an identity for the purpose of learning, for a lesson, for the balancing of a characteristic. But eventually, there comes a time for unlearning. This time of unlearning is the mystical process, a process of knowing the false self as false. When the role is seen for what it is (a temporary role), then the reality of our being shines as the self-evident truth of who we really are.

Relating this back to the metaphor of the actor, he or she is now taking off the makeup and stepping out of the costume, and re-entering his or her real life. He or she is finally able to stop acting and start living.