A chapter from Candice O'Denver's "Clarity in Everyday Life: A Handbook and Guide"

1. REAL FREEDOM
We are trained from an early age that we are an individual identity and that
this identity is fundamental to us. People give us various descriptions about
ourselves, like for example, “You’re a boy, your name is this or that and
you’re from this kind of family,” and we believe this. One after another all
these ideas are accumulated into a personality, and we cling to these ideas
tenaciously because we don’t know anything else. Our parents tell us lots of
things and we also learn about ourselves from others, and we start to decide
who we are by using these descriptions to form an identity.
But it’s much easier to not have to appear to be anything! Freedom is the
complete release from holding to any point of view, so that we no longer
need to hold to any beliefs about who we are. If we are truly fortunate, our
life circumstances will unfold in such a way that we will be forced to ​not see
ourselves as a personal identity any longer. To not see ourselves as a person
with a worthwhile reputation or a worthless reputation and to not see
ourselves as negative or positive data—this is what gives us the freedom
that is beyond all conventional limitations, and this is the only real freedom
there is.
There’s never any real freedom in what requires a descriptive support.
Whether we see ourselves as good or bad or neutral, or whether others see
us as good or bad or neutral, all of these are nothing other than data, and
none of them are a worthwhile pursuit at all.
Even though we may think that the descriptions about our life constitute
our identity, they never really do. We know that anything that we believe as
constituting our identity can be snatched away, and this is why we have an
underlying anxiety that things might not quite be right. We can’t rely on the
datum of our personal identity, just as we can’t rely on any other datum.
Even if we do consolidate all kinds of factors that we consider to be
necessary to our self­identity—money, power, prestige, people, places,
things, food, the right sexual experiences—we never trust them completely
and we are always looking for more. There is always the underlying anxiety,
“It isn't quite right yet. I need something else to make it right.”
Many of us have had a lifelong project of rehabilitating our ego in order to
make it into a better ego. As a result, we have essentially spent our whole
life in rehab, so to speak, and everyone else is pretty much in rehab as well!
When everyone is pretty much in rehab, it’s a scary situation.

2. Getting real with who we are doesn’t mean figuring out our personality,
our neuroses, our disorders or our personality type. All those are merely
data, so that makes them easy to deal with. If we’re worried about our ego,
we need to remember that when it appears, it’s only a datum appearing in
open intelligence. That’s it.
There isn’t anything that has ever been solidified or made into anything.
Anyone who tells us that we have an ego is way off course. By the power of
short moments of open intelligence repeated many times, we loosen up the
hold of this identity that we’ve established ourselves to be.
There never is a moment where all the right data congregate, other than in
the split second release of the here­and­now. That is the perfect moment of
the congregation of all data—the total, pure, lucid presence. The crystal
clarity of what is spontaneously self­releasing can never be grasped, caught
or measured. It is always immeasurable, always fleeting, always pure.