Leslie McQuade

Most people move through life assuming their identity begins and ends with the body they inhabit. They touch their face, recall their memories, look at old photos, and say, “This is me.” Yet something in you has always known that this story is too small. Something has always whispered that your existence is older, deeper, vaster than the single life you remember.

You can feel it in déjà vu.
You can feel it in the strange familiarity of certain people.
You can feel it in the sense that your awareness is far older than your age.

But if the body is not the full story, then what is?
What lies behind the face you present to the world?
Who is the one who watches your thoughts rise and fall like waves?

To explore this, we must look directly at the assumptions that shape our sense of self — and be willing to let them die.

Who Are You Really? The Secret Hidden Behind Your Body

Who are you really? Are you truly who you think you are — the personality you defend, the identity you narrate, the face you see in the mirror each morning? Or is that everyday self merely an appearance, a fragile shell that limits you far more than it protects you?

Ancient Hermeticism suggests exactly that, calling the ego a shell: a thin barrier between your deeper consciousness and the vast, unbounded reality that lies behind it. The shell is convincing. It feels solid. It feels essential. It feels like “you.”

But what if that shell is the very thing that blinds you? What if it keeps your consciousness bound to matter, clinging to a bundle of habits, stories, fears, and labels that were never your true identity? What if the “self” you think you are is only a costume consciousness wears on its way through experience?

The Hermetic view is stark, simple, and radically liberating: Death is a lie. Consciousness cannot perish. Everything transforms.

Once this truth is glimpsed — even for a moment — you can never look at your own existence the same way again.

This is the turning point — the moment where identity loosens its grip. When you look honestly, you discover that your “self” has shifted countless times. The body you have today is not the one you had ten years ago. The personality you identify with now is not the one you carried as a child. And yet, through all those changes, something has remained.

There is an unbroken thread of awareness traveling through your entire life — a witness that stays constant as every layer of your identity evolves and disintegrates. That witness is not the body. It is not the mind. It is not the ego. It is something deeper, older, and immune to the changes that shape the physical world.

When you begin to realize this, fear starts to dissolve. You no longer cling to your identity with the same desperation. You no longer panic at the thought of endings. You begin to recognize that what you are cannot end — only the form you are using can.

And as this recognition stabilizes, something even more astonishing emerges:
You realize that consciousness does not belong to any one body, any one story, any one lifetime. Consciousness appears to express itself through many forms, many perspectives, many identities — but behind each of them is the same silent field.

This is why the boundaries between people sometimes feel thin.
This is why empathy can feel like memory.
This is why the eyes of a stranger can feel like your own reflected back at you.

If the true self is consciousness — and not the body — then consciousness is not divided. It appears divided only because bodies appear divided. When the body falls away, the fundamental unity behind all experience becomes impossible to ignore.

In this light, “Let your body die” does not mean abandoning your physical life. It means letting your identification with the body dissolve so you can see what has always been here. It means letting the shell crack so the light behind it can emerge.

The illusion of “my body, my identity, my life” falls apart, and in its place arises a deeper truth:

You are not one person — you are the awareness behind all persons.
You are everyone.

When you truly see this — not as a belief, but as a direct recognition — the fear of death evaporates. The loneliness of individuality fades. The bitterness of separation softens. You begin to live with a quiet, powerful knowing that consciousness is one continuous presence playing through infinite forms.

And from that moment on, life looks different.
People look different.
You look different.

Because now, when you look into the eyes of another, you no longer see “someone else.”
You see yourself — another version, another perspective, another expression of the same consciousness that reads these words through you now.

The shell no longer confines you.
The illusion no longer traps you.
The truth no longer hides.

Let your body die — not physically, but psychologically.
Let the false self fall away.
Let the deeper presence step forward.

And once it does, the secret becomes obvious:
You are everyone.

Explore the first-year curriculum of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn:
https://golden-dawn.com/courses