Identity: Who or what you are. In mathematics, A = B.
Crisis: A stage at which the trend of future events is determined; a condition of instability or danger; a turning point.

A. What you're searching for, knowingly or not, is what you are.
B. What you are is what you're looking for.

A = B     | "=" as a reflexive operator; a
B = A     | more complete definition of identity

Isness = identity.
Identity = oneness.

Living is an identity crisis, although it may be obscured by prides and paranoias. Dying while living peels away the instability, revealing the Oneness of identity.

A crisis is a potential turning point in one's life. An identity crisis turns around the question of one's identity.

The ultimate identity crisis is not an issue of "am I x or am I not-x?" but of "what am I, really, at the core of my being?"

The ultimate identity crisis will not present itself in a predictable or expected way. For example, I went through upsetting periods during the dozen years after my college graduation when I would feel that I had everything that should have made me happy, and yet something was missing. I would "scan the horizon" looking for what that missing something might be … but I could fast-forward mentally to the attainment of anything I could think of and realize it wouldn't do the trick. I couldn't identify a potential solution to the painful problem.

When I was 33 I heard a man whose words rang a bell inside me (the existence of which surprised me). The words that formed in my mind were: "This man is telling the Truth, which I've never heard before," and his talk produced a temporary state of ecstasy. A day or two later I was trying to figure out what the message was that had produced the great joy, and I recalled it was the words "the answer is within." I had been searching for the answer outside, never intuiting that there was an entirely different direction in which to look.

There's a longing inherent in the vibration of the life force coming into the mind, or producing the mind, hinting at the harmony of its (our) source. The message is "come Home." Its language is nostalgia – the vague memory of having come from a place of perfection, to which we long to return.

To answer this longing, no gain or sacrifice will be sufficient, although both may be necessary along the way. To return Home while living, we transcend our identity as a person, as an individual and separate being. This transcendence reveals a Knowing beyond the separation of knower and known.