by A H Almaas
Further, when our experience is truly immediate in the sense that the experiencer and the experienced are in total contact, with no distance between them, then they become one, and we experience that oneness as what we are: “I am just here, I am just what I am.” But what that means is that the I that exists—that is here, that is what I am—is not an idea, not a construct in the mind; it is the very awareness, the very presence, the very palpable consciousness that is made out of luminosity, out of the clarity of Being.
This is a deeper understanding than we have reached before about what it means to be where we are. We can see more clearly now the connection between being where we are and being ourselves, being real. We can recognize that “where I am” means that I—my true self, my awareness, my presence, my very existence, what at this very moment is in this moment—am aware of and am the awareness of all the details that are arising within the content of my experience. And I am aware of all of that with immediacy, with an awareness that pervades it completely.
So, early in our practice, immediacy might appear to be just our inner experience, but eventually all experience becomes immediate. Every time we experience something, we experience the very substance of that something because we are that very substance. We can more clearly understand now how “being where we are” is only separated from “what we are” by the activity of the mind. Truly, we are what we experience.
EXPLORATION SESSION
Observing What Enhances or Limits the Immediacy of Your Experience
You can do this exercise by looking at the way you respond to other people you are relating to, by examining your inner experience when you are not interacting with another person, or some of both. Take some time to reflect on the following questions:
What makes your experience more immediate?
What are the ways that you limit the immediacy of your experience?
What causes you to limit the immediacy of your experience?
What’s right about limiting the immediacy of your experience? That is, what benefit do you believe you gain by doing that? In exploring this question, you are addressing your unconscious, not your logical mind.
How are you limiting the immediacy of your experience right at this moment?
CHAPTER 12
The Trap of Identification
IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTER, we saw that all our ordinary knowledge is based on the subtle mental operation that we call reification: taking an experience, a perception, an impression, or a concept and objectifying it, storing it, and then using it in various situations as a lens or filter for our experience. We learned that our ordinary experience is mediated by this activity of the mind that is constantly filtering our perception and forming our experience according to our accumulated knowledge and history. In this chapter, we are going to take another step toward understanding more specifically how this process works.
For our reified knowledge—our learned ignorance—to form our primary experience or our secondary reaction to it, a specific mental process needs to be in operation. Continuing from our perspective of learning to be who we are, where we are, let’s explore what that process is.
IDENTIFICATION IS THE OBSTACLE
The fact that we have reifications in our mind does not in itself create an obstacle to being where we are. Our reactions, our associations, or even our rejection of a feeling or experience, are not in themselves obstacles to being ourselves. We have to use our reifications in a particular way for them to become impediments. An example from everyday life will reveal why this is so.
Let’s say you are at a party with your husband or wife and you notice out of the corner of your eye that across the room, someone is flirting with your spouse. Your spouse is warming up to that person, obviously enjoying the attention, laughing and behaving in ways that don’t happen with you. You find yourself having the reaction we call jealousy.
Usually, people are totally taken over by the experience of jealousy, but it is actually possible for jealousy to arise without it influencing you in a way that hooks you. If you pay attention, you will see that jealousy can arise as an image, as a thought, as a feeling, or as certain physiological responses in the body. So you could recognize jealousy to be simply the arising of a particular state that you are experiencing. It is possible to be aware of whatever manifestations of jealousy are arising and choose to experience them fully, allowing your awareness to make them transparent. If you could be present in the awareness pervading it, jealousy would transform itself, naturally and spontaneously, to reveal its underlying nature.
However, we usually end up using these experiences in a way that traps us; we get stuck not because of the feeling itself but because of how we are relating to it. We are not just experiencing jealousy; we are burying ourselves in it. We define ourselves by it: “I am a jealous person and I know that is who I am.” Sometimes we recognize that jealousy is controlling us and determining our feelings and actions, and other times we are taken over so much by it we don’t even know that we are jealous. We just express it in our behavior, words, and actions.
We call this identification. It’s not just that jealousy is happening; it is that we are identifying with the state of jealousy. The feeling is actually just a momentary wave, but we don’t see that. We don’t see that we are something bigger that contains this feeling, that the feeling itself is a much smaller thing than we are and doesn’t define us. If we were not identified, we could understand our jealous feeling as something that floats in and floats out of our consciousness. But when we are inside the wave and defined by it, we forget about the ocean; we even forget about the water. Thus, it is this process of identification that is necessary for any piece of old knowledge—any reification—to become an obstacle.
Of course, many mental processes are involved in identification, including remembering, integrating, comparing, projecting, representing, reifying, and so on, but usually these are all referred to by one simple heading—identification.
ALL EGO EXPERIENCE IS IDENTIFICATION
It is not only difficult or distressing feelings that tend to draw us into identifying. All ego experience includes identification; we are always identifying with one kind of content or another. So the first thing to notice is that we can identify ourselves with just about anything. It could be an ego structure or a self-image, a projection or a particular emotion, habitual feelings or thoughts, a desire or an attachment, a plan or an idea or an ideal. It can be a large thing, a small thing, a mental operation, or something concrete. The identification can be a gross, obvious entrapment or it can be very subtle and in the background. Our identification can be based on the past, and it can also be an identification with present experience itself.
Because identification is so pervasive, we want to better understand this subtle activity in which we are constantly engaged. We want to know more about this habit that traps us in a limited, momentary manifestation, while in fact our fundamental nature—our true identity—is actually something completely free, something vast. So we begin by looking at the definition of the term identification.
IDENTIFICATION AS PRESENT-TIME ACTIVITY
The word “identification” as it is used in psychological literature is taken to mean the use of an image, impression, or representation to define our sense of who we are or our sense of reality. In other words, we take an image, impression, or piece of knowledge, and we make it into a basic building block of our sense of self. This is part of the process of the development of the ego—internalizing impressions, stabilizing them inside the mind, and using them to define who we are and what the world is.
The way we use the term “identification” in our work includes this psychodynamic meaning, which views identification mainly as a historical process. But it also includes present-time activity: the action of identifying in this very moment. For example, we might be identifying with a particular structure that was formed by our ego in the past and has remained unconscious, such as “I am a strong woman” o
r “I am a stupid kid,” and we identify with it, which means that we believe that it is true—“that is what I am.” We are living out of that identification, moment to moment, even if we are not saying those words to ourselves.
IDENTIFICATION WITH THE BODY
With this definition in mind, we can see that a more pervasive though subtle example of identification has to do with our own body. It is clear to us that we usually identify with our body; we take our body to be what we are—it is our identity, our very self. We are not only experiencing the body, we are not only aware of the body, we are using the body to define us. In fact, it is hard to consider identifying who we are without including at least subconsciously our experience as a body.
We act as if we were the body, and so our identification with it is ongoing, almost totally continuous. The body is happening this very moment; it is not just a memory, and it is not static. But we identify with it as if it were fixed. So what we are really identifying with is a body image—the image of our body that we have constructed in our mind. This is something from the past that is remembered and brought to bear in each moment. We actually feel our body according to that image. But even if we felt our body in its immediacy right now, we could also identify with that and limit our sense of who we are to only that experience.
To understand identification more clearly, let’s contrast how we feel about our body with how we feel about our clothes. We may be attached to some of our clothes, but we usually don’t identify with them. That is because we change them many times, and they get old and worn, or we just get bored with them, so we give or throw them away and get new ones. They don’t define us. But my body is not something I’m going to exchange for a new version—even though certain people do think of getting a cloned body, and increasing numbers of people are paying large sums of money for surgery to change the appearance of various parts of the body. The very fact that people are willing to do and spend so much to change their body is indication of the degree to which they identify with it.
So it is with our body, not with our clothes, that we tend to have the strongest, deepest identification. That is not to say that we don’t ever identify with our clothing. We may have an attachment to a certain dress or suit, but identification with our clothes is usually in relation to a style of dress rather than to particular items of clothing. In that sense, your style does define you. For example, a woman may be attached to wearing baggy old clothes. If her friends suggest, “Why don’t you wear something more fashionable and that fits you better?” she won’t do it because it doesn’t fit her self-identity; she is identified with her casual, loosely fitted style. Other people always have to wear the latest fashion—that’s part of their identity—while others love to dress with a studied eccentricity that makes them feel unique.
Let’s say the eccentric dresser is attached to a particular item of clothing. If she were to lose it, or it got ruined at the dry cleaners, she would be upset. She wouldn’t give a favorite piece of clothing away, and she probably wouldn’t want to lend it out. This is more of an attachment than an identification.
Although attachment and identification are usually not the same thing, they can overlap. This is because identification is both a way we define who we are and a way we invest ourselves emotionally and energetically in something. The latter sense of identification is quite close to the meaning of attachment. Thus, we can see that some attachments are the same thing as identification. For example, we are attached to our body but we are also identified with it. We definitely don’t want to give it up—partly because we have invested so much of our life in it, but also because we believe it is actually who we are.
IDENTIFICATION WITH THE EMOTIONS
We can experience the same kind of strong identification with an emotion. As we said earlier, the difference between identifying or not identifying depends on our response to the content that is arising, not on the content itself. So when I am feeling angry, I can be identified with the anger, which means, “I want to be angry. I have to be angry. I am going to continue to feel angry. I can justify why I am angry. I have all the right to be angry.” If I am not identified with the anger, I can say, “Okay, so I’m angry; that’s just what is happening right now. What’s the big deal? I get angry a lot; it comes and goes.” So, now we can see the basic principles of identification:
To identify means that we define ourselves with something—who we believe we are is not separate from that particular impression or manifestation.
To identify can also mean that we are emotionally and energetically invested in that impression.
It is our relationship to what arises that defines whether or not identification happens and what form it takes.
IDENTIFYING WITH THE PRESENT MOMENT
Identification most often happens in relation to events, structures, images, and beliefs from the past, but we can also identify with present-moment manifestations that are not reifications. Suppose you experience your True Nature and feel the presence of it as clarity and lightness. Simply being that spacious, clear presence is not the same as identifying with it. That’s because being your True Nature does not involve a mental operation; there is just the recognition that “this is what I am in the moment.” Now, you could identify with that presence once you recognized it, but identification adds something onto it. The mind comes in and holds on to the experience and becomes stuck in it. The mind wants to grasp it, to use it to identify who you are.
So even when we are being ourselves, experiencing the presence of our True Nature, identification is still possible. To identify with that pure presence implies a reifying process, that is, turning the experience into an “object” that can be identified with in some way. Our mind recognizes True Nature, but it doesn’t stop there. It wants to put True Nature in some kind of package. Then it attaches itself to that experience in a particular way that enables us to form an idea of who we are.
From this, we can see that:
Identification always implies reification.
If we don’t reify our experience, the mind can’t identify with it.
Identification can occur whether the reifying process is the result of something from the past or of a new experience happening in the present moment.
Identification happens because we believe that we need to have a self and an identity for the self.
You can see now that when you are identifying with something, you are being taken over by the content of the experience or the feeling. But even knowing that is not sufficient to understand completely how identification functions. You need to be able to distinguish between being taken over by an identification that binds you and being taken over in a way that allows you freedom.
Consider that when you are being True Nature, you are also taken over—but you are taken over and free. You as you usually conceive yourself to be no longer exists. There is just True Nature. In identification, on the other hand, an ego identity—a sense of self—is attaching itself to or defining itself with some kind of an experience or the content of that experience. And the identification is always with a reified content.
This is not to say, however, that you are not supposed to feel things. If you are sad, for example, instead of rejecting your experience, you could welcome the feeling, experience the immediate fullness of sadness, without identifying with it. And the only thing that can do that, that can completely pervade sadness, is presence itself. When we see a limitation of our ability to do that, we recognize that the presence is limited in that situation.
IDENTIFICATION SUPPORTS FALSE IDENTITY
If I am being my True Nature, it is not an identification; it is just simply being, which is not an activity. Now the word “being” is a little tricky in English. Because the verb is “to be,” “I am being” implies that I am doing being. But that is not what the phrase means. It means that I am not doing anything to be myself. I am just myself. I don’t need anything to be it. I am it. However, when I am it, there is nobody, no I, that
is being it. There is no separation. I and it are one thing; there is no I to claim it. So, when I say I am the light, I am the presence, I don’t mean that there is an I that is identifying with light or presence. It is just a recognition, a knowingness, a seeing, an awareness of that which is here.
However, the mind can suddenly come in and reify the content of such an experience by recognizing it as an object of perception, putting a boundary around it, and using it at that very moment to create a sense of self. Thus, I become attached to the experience and I identify with it.
In contrast to being, identification is an activity, a mental action that I engage in to connect myself with something. If I identify with what I am, I first have to believe that I am separate from what I am in order to enact identification.
So, this is one of the central dangers on the spiritual path: whenever we experience something new, we want to put it in a box. We reify it and then separate from it in order to identify with it. Students sometimes ask me, “I had such and such an experience. What is it? What do we call it?” They ask in part because they want to recognize what has just happened to them, but they also ask so they can label and define their experience and hold on to it. The idea is: “If I can package this really nice thing that happened to me, I can identify with it—I can think that it is me, that it is part of me; it’s something I can say I have.” True presence, on the other hand, doesn’t care what it is. It is totally uninvested in itself. It is simply being itself.
We can become aware of the tendency to want to freeze-frame our experience so that it can be known. Having all these snapshots is how we reify, but reality is more like a movie than a still picture. When you are being, everything is flowing.
IF IT’S YOU, YOU CAN’T LOSE IT