Understanding Identification
Who are you? Beyond being a difficult question to answer truthfully, this is one of the most famous ancient koans in Zen Buddhism. A koan is a paradoxical anecdote or riddle used to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment. This rhetorical question is designed to take you beyond the ‘thought’ version of yourself and into direct experience with who you truly are.
Understanding identification has a lot to do with attempting to answer that question, moment by moment. Whatever answer is true for you, is who you experience yourself to be. If you believe you are so and so that does this job and has that car and doesn’t like olives, and has these preferences, so on, you are identified as a smaller version of yourself than what is possible. You are identified with your ego-self.
Your ego-self is the biologically created and limited self that is constructed by conscious and unconscious conditioning. It exists to limit your light within, blocking you from experiencing the light that you are in order for you to overcome this limited self and achieve self-realization.
If you were told over and over that you weren’t smart as a child, you will likely internalize that idea and fold it into your ego-identity. You will tend to not express your intelligence around others. If you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see, you believe (reinforce) negative messages about yourself and live them as truth, not believing you deserve loving flattery about your looks.
Are either of these self-conceptualizations objectively true? Of course not. You aren’t unintelligent in this example, you have just limited your capacity of intelligent expression by believing you weren’t smart enough. You aren’t unattractive, your body just doesn’t look like what image you’ve idealized in your mind, conditioned through media imagery and beauty standards of the time. You’re gorgeous and someone in the world finds you attractive, I promise.
So you can construct a ‘self’ in your mind that is based on judgment thoughts. If you believe this or that to be true about who you are, it becomes true as long as you identify with it.
Of course you can also carry certain observations about your character that are true, but they aren’t all that’s true. And if they aren’t loving, healing, or compassionate beliefs, what are they good for? Just like the tip of an iceberg, there is more to you under the surface than what can be experienced as just your body. Of course that includes your subconscious self, which is a whole different conversation, but there’s also a mysterious aspect of ego that’s important to understand when it comes to understanding identification.
Ego is the mechanism of separation. In mystical terms, ego is a mechanism that exists to take larger pieces of soul energy and break it into smaller, but complete, pieces, with their own unique identity.
The mystical answer to, “what’s the meaning of life?” can be most simply summarized as: to allow a soul to experience separation in order to overcome challenges so that you can realize self, love who you truly are, and love all of what God is. The role the ego plays in this is to get you to identify as your finite, fragile human-self so that you can suffer and through that suffering, evolve by growing (overcoming obstacles)—learning to let go of the egoic elements that block your light of love—becoming your self-realized Divine Self embodied.
Imagine you have a pretty nice looking car, but this physically attractive car has a ratty interior with stains on the floors and some smells you’re embarrassed by. When you drive this car, you like the attention you get and you feel powerful when people see you unlock and climb into this beauty at the grocery store. You even race people from time to time, but when someone has been a passenger in your car, they have a negative experience and like to talk bad about your car to their friends. You feel personally offended and hurt when you hear these negative comments and because you feel personally ‘less-than,’ become angry at those gossiping. You blame them for the way you feel and attack back by defending your car for it’s virtues like the paint color, the engine performance, and how much attention you get when driving it.
Why would you feel personally offended by comments made about a material object you possess? Would you feel offended if someone said they didn’t care for a book on your bookshelf? The only explanation is that you’ve become identified with your car. You’ve extended your self-concept into a material object that you have little control over how it looks or how people perceive it, and when it gets attacked you feel attacked.
Who you truly are is the conscious operator (guide) of the vehicle, not the vehicle (body/ego) itself. If this is the case, is there any good reason to take anything personally said about your vehicle-self?
The ego’s job is to be a servant to your awakening into lucid presence. It accomplishes this by continually trying to get you to identify with it as your total self. It does that by lowering your energy, blocking your light, generating judgments, creating separation, superiority, and other agents to get you non-lucid—to get you to forget you are consciousness itself.
Understand that any emotional reaction that comes from taking things personally is the ego trying to get you to identify with it. If we identify with the emotion it creates, the way our driver would identify with the smell of their interior as ‘embarrassing,’ we reinforce our ego-identity and it’s power.
For example, to say to ourselves, “I am angry” rather than “I am experiencing anger” seems like only a slight shift but can mean all the difference in choosing which identity we are reinforcing (ego/soul). Even further of a hallucination is to blame someone else for our emotional state, believing they caused it, rather than their showing us an aspect of our-self that is still identified as ego. If we view that emotion as something we are experiencing through our vehicle (viewing the body as the awareness), rather than as an aspect of who we are, we don’t take it personally and thus deepen our connection to the presence awareness that is our Divine Self. We also pierce the veils hiding processes that strengthen our non-lucid state of awareness (anti-presence).
Just like the driver doesn’t feel offended and then retaliate by attacking someone who doesn’t like the paint job, neither should you take it personally when someone presents you with their perspective on a subject or when they share their contrary opinion of your perspective. This is what it means to release your ego-attachments and identification.
The ego-personality we inhabit isn’t defective and it isn’t even personal, it’s the set of aspects that create the unique perspective you chose to experience this lifetime from as ‘human.’ It’s the perfect vehicle to get you to the experiences you came to earth to have, regardless of your’s or other’s opinions.
It’s time to love that vehicle as just that, a vehicle to carry our consciousness experience perfectly, and learn to identify as the operator (guiding awareness). When we do, we put an end to suffering and defendedness. We become the light that heals all being around and transcend attacking/defending ways of being. We find our neutral center of peaceful truth in equanimity.
What does it mean to be identified with your soul-self? Words and thoughts cannot adequately go there, only direct experience realization can do that. To experience more presence, which leads to more soul-self realization, please join me for the first 3 steps in my Awaken Presence Within Program for free.