YOUNG GENERATION
Who Controls Your Identity? By Rishi Zaveri
Rishi Zaveri lives in Detroit and is a software engineer at Salesforce. He is a proud member of the Jain Society of Greater Detroit. rishizaveri1994@gmail.com
I recently came home from work one evening and found that I had received mail from Kohl’s. I opened it up to find an invoice for nearly $1000 on a Kohl’s Charge card under my name. Supposedly, I spent $900 dollars one evening at Kohl’s a couple of months earlier and had not paid it off. Thus, I also owed Kohl’s a late fee. The problem was, I did not even own a Kohl’s Charge card! Obviously, my identity had been stolen and someone had created this fraudulent account under my name. Luckily, an investigation by Kohls’ determined that this account was fraudulent, and I was not liable to pay the fee.
This got me thinking: “What is identity?” There are, of course, many ways to define this, but my thoughts traveled towards the Jain definition of identity. I thought about the effects of that identity and how it can be exploited or protected. As I dug deeper, I began to see parallels between the Jain definition of identity and our financial/social identity. The following is just a summary of my thoughts and discoveries. I hope that by the end, you will have a better understanding of what identity really means in Jainism and maybe even learn a little bit about how your credit works!
First, let’s think about identity from a financial perspective. When we try to open a new credit card account, there are a few universal pieces of information we must provide: name, address, social security number (SSN), email address, and phone number. This is all information that points towards our true identity, which we would consider our own physical existence. Even though we may think this information is secure and private, someone can get a hold of it by stealing our emails or passwords. If that happens, it becomes harder to prove who is who. One way to catch an identity thief is to look for erratic, destructive, or reckless behavior. Generally, people
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act in their best interest, so any action outside of that becomes suspicious. Once we catch the thief, we protect our identifiable data even more and become more alert about who and what gets access to it. So, what about our spiritual identity? According to Jainism, our true existence is not the physical body, but the soul, which resides in the body. But just as we use artificial surrogates as forms of identity in financial situations, there are similar surrogates as proof of our soul in our daily lives. These surrogates are called ‘Upayog’. Simply stated, Upayog is the utilization of our mind, speech, and body. Jainism believes that only a body with a soul can utilize these three and therefore, Upayog is proof of a soul.
Solely based on this, it is hard to imagine how our spiritual identity could be stolen. On the surface it seems like it is completely under our control; it is not possible to give someone or something else our ‘Upayog’- no one else can control our thoughts or actions. In Jainism, the soul wants to direct its Upayog - its attention - towards itself. This is because, for the soul, the soul is enough. What does this mean? Think about our financial identity. To be able to buy food, a car or a house, we need money. To save money, we need a bank account. To create a bank account, we need the proof of identity, proof of residence, and contact information. These are all substitutes for our own identity. If we were able to self-sustain ourselves, then we would not need any of these proofs of identity. Our self would be enough; having an email address or SSN would not make us any more ourselves than we already are. Similarly, the soul is self-sustaining; it is the source of life and bliss itself, so putting our attention elsewhere does not make us any more alive or blissful.
