Tapas is dropping inner and outer Identities
Real tapas demands that you drop not only your outer identity, but also your inner identity.
We are often afraid to take the leap into spirituality, because we cannot tolerate being anything less than perfect.
Understand: perfectionism is madness. The search for perfection is a mad search. Living people are always imperfect. A living system is always imperfect, because it is growing, it is changing all the time. Living with the insecurity of constant change is tapas.
A graveyard is a perfectly secure place, but it is not a place to live in; it is only for the dead. A ship is secure in the harbor, but it has to move out in order to sail in the wide ocean. In the same way, we don't like to lose the safety of our old identity, because who knows what we may find outside it?
It is not just a question of social identity. Real tapas demands that your drop not only your outer identity, but also your inner identity.
There are two types of identities: ahamkara and amamkara, the outer identity and the inner identity.
Your outer identity is your social identity, what you show to the world. Your inner identity is what you actually think of as yourself. Even the outer identity is possible to drop. You can live even if your ahankara - your outer identity - is destroyed.
Because you yourself are conscious that it is a false identity, it is a little easier to drop it. On the spiritual path, people manage to cross the barrier of the outer identity. Only some seekers will collapse when their outer identity is destroyed. Most seekers can handle this.
The greater danger is the mamakara - the inner identity. This is because, most of the time, you are not even aware that this is also a false identity! You are not even conscious that whatever you think of as yourself is nothing more than a bunch of beliefs that you are carrying.
If you see, your outer identity, the social identity which you project to the world, will always be a little more than what you think you are. But inside, you will be thinking of yourself as something much less.
You will be suffering inside, because you know that the identity which you are showing to the world is not true. But very rarely are people intelligent enough to realize that even the identity that you show to yourself is no more than a false idea!
Breaking the outer identity is not a great job, you don't need an enlightened Master to do that job. Sooner or later, society will do that job for you! Actually, you don't even need the whole of society; just your spouse is enough to question your whole outer identity! But the inner identity is very cunning. Only an enlightened Master is qualified to perform that surgery on you.
All your deep-rooted fantasies, your most concealed fears, your past guilt, your anxieties for the future – whatever you call as you - is no more than all these put together. It is the same raw material, put together in different ways, different forms and different personalities. Different personalities are nothing but the same ego playing in different ways, using different combinations of desire and pain.
If the disciple permits, the Master can perform that surgery and remove the cancer of the ego, so that whatever you are beyond all these things can be revealed. No outer technique can help you do that, because you don't even know where the enemy is hiding!
When the Master works on your inner identity, there will be pain, because you are habituated to thinking of all your desires and sufferings as part of yourself. So you are going to feel some pain when it is being removed. Enduring that suffering with courage is what I call tapas.