Who we actually are ?

I read the most amazing book called The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying written by Sogyal Rinpoche. He explains an essential truth I believe so I added it to my book of essential truths !!

I plan to post my favorite parts from this book now and then - heres the first one with my understandings an notes below

"So like an amnesia patient 'we' (our souls) have lost their ability to remember or experience who we actually are - and in desperation of 'forgetting' there is this instinctive grasping and self preservation. Grasping is a desperation to find an identity to replace the one we cant seem to find.

Therefore we replace it with our physical and mental identities bot are not our real identities and we know it and that is why we grasp and cannot let go and try by any means to preserve our 'selves' our of fear of the truth [and because we have no identity to put in place of our so called 'selves' because we do not know it or recognize it] which is unknown and unexperienced by us at present as we have forgotten.

Frantically and in real dread we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continuously into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is ego. So ego then is the abscense of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result : a doomed clutching on at all costs, to a cobbled together makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitable chameleon, charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence...."

Sogyal Rinpoche