Roles

The parts we play which define separation

You're in a role. Actually, you are playing many roles. Maybe you realize it, maybe you don't. You've taken an incarnation and have been given your baseline set of roles. However, you've adopted role after role throughout your lifetime. Some of them you've let go, others eventually, and some you refuse to let go. Most of them, you hold onto tightly. These roles tend to be the foundation of your identity.

What is a Role?

A part you receive or take on in this play of life that helps define the illusion of separation. It gives you a lens of which to look through and color a version of reality you hold as true.

You might be holding roles like:

• The parent who defines themselves by their children's success

• The victim who finds identity in past trauma

• The hero who needs to save others to feel worthy

• The provider whose value comes from what they give

• The rebel who exists in opposition to authority

• The perfectionist who measures worth by flawlessness

• The spiritual seeker who builds identity around enlightenment itself

• The caretaker who loses themselves in serving others

• The successful one who fears being ordinary

• The broken one who fears being whole

These aren't just things you do. They become who you think you are.

You might hold one role, or dozens. You might wear different roles in different situations, parent at home, professional at work, victim in certain relationships, hero in others. But underneath all of them, you've forgotten something fundamental:

None of them are actually you. None. Zero. You've actually never been any of the roles you've held.

How Roles Form

Roles don't appear out of nowhere. They're constructed, carefully, unconsciously, over years.

Some roles are handed to you at birth. Family position: oldest child, middle child, only child. Gender expectations. Cultural identity. These baseline roles become the scaffolding upon which you build everything else.

Other roles you adopt through experience. You fail at something, and "I am a failure" becomes a role. Someone hurts you, and "I am wounded" becomes a role. You succeed at something, and "I am successful" becomes a role you must now maintain.

The mind is what takes experiences and transforms them into identity. It says: "This happened to me, therefore this is who I am." An event becomes a permanent definition. A temporary state becomes a permanent role.

And once you take on a role, the mind begins to gather evidence for it. You knowingly and unknowingly seek out people, situations, and information that validate the role. You interpret new experiences through the lens of the role. The role becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Most of this happens unconsciously. You don't decide one day to become "the victim" or "the hero." The role forms quietly, beneath your awareness, until one day you realize: this is who I've become. This is who I believe I am.

But belief is not truth.

A Comfortable Role

We prop up our roles. Whether we realize it or not, we live in a state of desiring to seek out information and people that validate the role we are comfortable in. This eventually finds its way to justifying and operating solely within a comfortable and fabricated view of material existence. The truth is, without validation, you'd feel discomfort.

We say: "I am this." I feel it. It makes sense. I feel good when I live in this role. I feel love from this role.

The role becomes comfortable not because it's true, but because it's familiar. It doesn’t challenge the intellect which created it. The role gives you a place in the world. It tells you how to act, how to respond, what to expect. It provides certainty in an uncertain existence.

So you protect it. You defend it. Oftentimes, you build your entire life around maintaining it. And your words, thoughts, and actions reflect it.

A Supporting Role

You support roles by sitting in one. In order for a role to exist, you must take either that role or an opposing role based on your intellectual identification of those roles.

We speak to others based on their roles. We commit actions based on the roles we hold for ourselves and others. We need others to commit to their roles to support our roles.

If you're the victim, you need a perpetrator. If you're the hero, you need someone to save. If you're the caretaker, you need someone dependent. If you're the rebel, you need authority to oppose.

Roles are inherently relational. They don't exist in isolation. They require the participation of others playing complementary roles.

This is why it's so difficult to leave a role. When you try to step out, the people and or circumstances around you unconsciously pull you back in. They need you to stay in your role so they can maintain theirs. The system of roles depends on everyone and everything playing their parts.

The Illusion of Separation

You've taken existence and roles to overcome and release them, not perfect them. Nothing is separate. Duality, the illusion that things exist in opposition (good/bad, victim/perpetrator, success/failure), is something to transcend, not swim in.

Roles create the illusion that you are fundamentally separate from others. That you are "this" and they are "that." That you are parent and they are child. That you are victim and they are perpetrator. That you are successful and they are struggling.

But these divisions are fabrications. Roles are the mechanism through which “The Veil” maintains separation. They keep you believing that you are a separate individual with a fixed identity, rather than recognizing the truth: you are an infinite divine essence experiencing itself.

Every role is a limitation. A boundary drawn around the limitless. A definition imposed on the indefinable.

During my life review in death, I experienced this truth directly. In that space, roles did not exist. There was only the knowing that nothing is separate. I could see how I had held every role, victim and perpetrator, giver and taker, lost and found, and none of them had ever been real. They were tools, illusions designed to be used for transcendence, to guide me back to the understanding that separation itself is illusion.

Why It's Hard to Let Go

Here's what terrifies the ego: if you are not your roles, who are you?

If you're not the parent, the provider, the victim, the hero, if none of these define you, then what's left?

The thought of existing without a role feels like annihilation. The ego believes that without the role, you will cease to exist. That you'll be nobody. Nothing. A void.

And in a way, the ego is right. When you release the roles, the fabricated self does dissolve. The identity you've spent your entire life constructing falls away.

But what the ego and the intellect don't understand, what they cannot understand, is that this isn't death. It's birth. This is beyond the grasp of the intellect.

The resistance you feel when you consider letting go of a role isn't just preference. It's survival instinct. The ego fighting for its life. It will offer you every reason to hold on: "But this is who I am. This is what I do. This is how people know me. This is how I know myself. This resonates with, ME."

All true. And all illusion.

Suffering in Separation

A role is not a badge. It is a lens of existence that is to be released, not to be used to define yourself.

Holding onto the role is like watching a professional athlete try to retire. The role that allowed the identity to exist eventually fades, and because of this, the identity suffers in its separation from the whole.

When the role begins to crumble, through age, circumstance, or spiritual awakening, suffering intensifies. You scramble to maintain it. You fight against the natural dissolution. You grieve the loss of who you thought you were.

But the suffering isn't coming from the loss of the role. It's coming from the belief that the role was real to begin with.

Loving the Role

The role is a tool that gives us a glimpse into our own misconceptions about reality.

Rather than hating the roles you've played, or judging yourself for having them, you can recognize them as teachers. Each role you've held has shown you exactly where you've placed limitations on infinite truth.

The victim role taught you about powerlessness, so you could transcend it and recognize your inherent power.

The hero role taught you about ego and the need to be needed, so you could transcend it and serve without attachment.

The parent role taught you about identity through relationship, so you could transcend it and love without condition.

Every role contains within it the seed of its own transcendence. The role exists to be outgrown, not perfected.

Love the role for what it taught you. Then let it go.

The Transition: What Releasing Roles Feels Like

When you begin to release a role, there's often a period of disorientation.

You might feel afloat at sea. Lost. Like you don't know how to be in the world anymore. The familiar scripts are gone. The automatic responses no longer arise. You find yourself in situations where you used to know exactly what to do, and now you don't.

This is normal. This is necessary.

There's often a void, a space between the old identity and what comes next. The ego hates this void. It wants immediate replacement. Comfort. "If I'm not this, what am I?" It demands an answer now.

But the void is sacred. It's the fertile ground where truth can emerge. Don't rush to fill it with a new role. Don't trade "the victim" for "the healed one." Don't trade "the seeker" for "the enlightened one."

Sit in the not-knowing. Let the discomfort be there without fixing it. Let yourself be nobody for a while.

What emerges from this space isn't a new role. It's presence. Being. The part of you that was always there, underneath every role you ever played.

Beyond the Roles

Waking up. Recognizing that roles are what keep you from greater understanding. That the many roles and their lenses, simply existed for you to get to greater understanding. To transcend, to overcome roles and their limitations.

Beyond the roles, you don't become someone new. You recognize what you've always been.

You move from doing to being. From performing to presence. From identity to essence. Embodiment.

This doesn't mean you stop functioning in the world. You might still parent, still work, still relate. But you're no longer defined by these functions. You're no longer trapped in them.

You act from being, not from role. You love from wholeness, not from identity. You serve from overflow, not from need.

The roles become transparent. You are no longer attached to them. You know they're costumes, not skin, you surpass identity.

The Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh understood this paradox of roles, that we can simultaneously be all of them and then none of them, that the role is an intellectual creation. And I believe he captured this understanding very well in the following poem:

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Please Call Me by My True Names – Thich Nhat Hanh

Don't say that I will depart tomorrow — even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion.

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This is the truth beyond roles. You are not one fixed identity. You contain all possibilities. And in recognizing this, the door of compassion opens for both you and others.

Who or What Are You?

You are an infinite being here to experience a progression through the release of roles. The roles only exist in your reality. They do not exist in the space of truth.

You are not the parent, though you may parent. You are not the victim, though you have been hurt.

You are not the hero, though you may serve. You are not the seeker, though you may seek.

You are divine consciousness itself, experiencing existence through temporary forms, temporary identities, temporary roles, all in service of remembering what was never actually forgotten.

The roles were fabricated. And now you're seeing through them.

Retiring Roles

Retiring a role isn't a single event. It's a practice. A daily choice. 

Recognize when you're operating from role vs. being:

• Role feels performative, being feels present

• Role requires validation, being requires nothing

• Role reacts from pattern, being responds from awareness

• Role needs others to play their parts, being is complete in itself

Catch yourself in the role: When you notice you're performing, pause. Name it: "I'm in my victim role right now" or "I'm playing hero again." Don't judge it. Just see it clearly.

Question the role: Ask: "What would I do if I weren't trying to maintain this identity? How would I respond if I weren't this role?"

Sit with the discomfort of role-lessness: When the role falls away and you don't know who to be, resist the urge to grab a new one. Breathe. Be nobody. Let the discomfort teach you that you don't need an identity to exist.

Navigate others' expectations: When people try to pull you back into a role ("But you're always the strong one!" or "You're the one who takes care of everyone!"), you can acknowledge their need without assuming the role. "I understand you're used to that, and I'm choosing something different now."

Practice being over doing: Before acting, pause and check: Am I doing this because my role requires it, or because it's a genuine expression of what's present right now?

Release gradually: You don't have to drop all roles at once. Start with one. Notice how identity shifts. Let that inform the next release.

The goal isn't judgement or condemnation. The goal is to no longer be trapped by roles.

Conclusion

Give up the role and the limitations of what you believe reality to be.

This doesn't mean you've been wrong. It doesn't mean you've wasted your time. Every role you've held has brought you here, to this moment of recognition, this possibility of release.

The roles served their purpose. They taught you. They showed you where you placed boundaries around the boundless. They gave you a way to experience separation so you could finally recognize unity.

Now they've done their job. And you can let them go.

Not all at once. Not perfectly. But consciously. With love for what they taught you and clarity about what they're not.

You are not your roles. You never were. And in seeing this, you become free to be what you've always been.