RE: Reality, Consciousness and Symbols, and the Identification, Valuation and Attachment to Beliefs
Quite advanced concepts, It took me many years to understand emotional attachements and identity myself.
A way to explain identity which made it more clear to me was the following.
Imagine you are watching a movie and you see a certain actor. what you see is his charactler and the actor himself with his entire story and what he has done in the past, what he likes or not, what he looks like, how he thinks.What you see in reality are just pixels on a screen and everything else are just ideas constructed by your brain.
When you see yourself as the pixels on the screen, your view of yourself is much more in line with what you really are instead of the identity and story about yourself that your brain constructs. (you are your consciousness, an ever changing unit without center).
Anyway, you might like the Real Talk Podcasts , they really made a difference in my life explaining all these concepts on how the brain works and how to overcome social conditioning and how to adjust your emotional attachements.
Identity has multiple aspects: 1) individual body that all consciousness individuals have, making it a universal requirement for consciousness 2) individual consciousness within the individual body, making consciousness a universal quality of the body we all have in common (that some call the "spirit") 3) the ego-personality-identity construct as I call it (that some call the "soul"), which is an individual expression of "I"-self-consciousness-individual on top of consciousness-universal basic emergence (2) from human bodies (1).