The Contraction of Identity
La Contracción de la Identidad
The teacher explores how the infinite openness of early experience gradually contracts into a limited sense of self, and how spiritual realization involves recognizing what was never truly lost.
The Contraction of Identity
The teacher explores how the infinite openness of early experience gradually contracts into a limited sense of self, and how spiritual realization involves recognizing what was never truly lost.
This might be a bit of a stretch to wrap your mind around right now, but there is going to be a sense of what you are, a knowing and an understanding of what you are.
If I ask you, "Who are you?" you could describe yourself. You could say you're a woman, describe your life, your inner experience. There's a sense of an "I," and then there's what follows the "I" grammatically: "I am," and whatever follows that defines the "I." That defining limits the "I," and this limitation is the same thing as saying separation.
How identity creates separation
If you say "I am human," it means "I am not plant." "I am woman" means "I am not man." Any kind of descriptor or image that takes the place of "I" defines it as not everything else.
This is very well known psychologically. It's not any kind of spiritual voodoo. It's well established that babies don't have this functioning. It simply does not exist in newborns, and it develops over time. What happens is that the sense of infinite, open, spacious being starts to get contracted into an idea of "I." This is actually a beautiful, healthy process, but what also happens is that we lose the ability to recognize ourselves as that infinite, open beingness.
What the founders of religions discovered
In a sense, this is what spirituality discovered long before psychology existed: a recognition of oneself as infinite being. This is what all the founders of the great religions realized. They spontaneously came to that recognition, and that is where they spoke from.
It's quite simple. As Jesus said: "When you see yourselves as children, you will enter the kingdom." He also said that you will enter the kingdom "when the inner becomes the outer and the outer the inner." I'm paraphrasing quite freely to keep it simple, but those parables point to this realization and understanding: that the raw experience of reality, the way a baby experiences, is very free. There is a peace there and a freedom there that, in a sense, gets forgotten. It doesn't truly get forgotten or lost. It gets covered. But you cannot really cover it either. This is what I've described as a veil.
The veil of belief
The veil has to do with a belief that the reality the mind starts to create in imagination, in its maps, is more real than the reality of raw experience.
So when I talk about separation, it is the same thing as identification. It has to do with a very deep belief that what I am is limited in some way: "I am this, not that." Every person who develops in a reasonably healthy way will develop that sense of separation and limitation. It's ego development.
That infinite sense of being contracts and identifies. All successful spirituality addresses this. The Buddha said that what is true is what works. So if a teaching is successful and it works, it will help you flip those two around. The identification with a belief in something limited can stop. And what actually happens is the belief stops. When that belief stops, a great deal happens. This can be a wild process, because that belief is very powerful.