Meet someone new and listen to what comes out first. Your job. Where you live. Whose partner or parent you are.
The meditation course behind this traces how that list gets built. From birth: my mother, my home, my city, my country, my religion. Later: my profession, my partner, my children. Every item is temporary, and the course names what a self built from them tends to breed: fear of losing them, and insecurity whenever one is challenged. The role changes, someone dismisses your work, and it lands as an attack on you.
The same labels sort other people. A better education slides into 'I know more than you.' Being older slides into 'why aren't you listening to me?' Yet the younger person may have the greater wisdom, and grey hair may or may not mean any. One teacher quotes a line often credited to Gandhi: labels are for jars, not people. The course's phrase for the mistake is confusing the actor with the role. Its answer to who the actor is: a soul, something it sees as lasting under every costume. Telling them apart is hard, because the roles feel like all of you.