The Fear at the Edge of Identity
El Miedo en el Borde de la Identidad
A student describes feeling overwhelmed by self-defeating thoughts during meditation, leading to a deeper inquiry into identity, fear, and what remains when familiar self-concepts begin to dissolve.
The Fear at the Edge of Identity
A student describes feeling overwhelmed by self-defeating thoughts during meditation, leading to a deeper inquiry into identity, fear, and what remains when familiar self-concepts begin to dissolve.
I don't have much to say except that this whole direction is a conversation stopper for me. It's where it takes me. Thank you. It's gold, absolutely gold, and I hope I can receive it more and more.
Nice. Just notice that thought as a worry. It's the mind coming in, saying, "It's something to do and I'll see if I can do it, but I know I can't because that's my story."
Bingo. That's exactly it. That's why anything I want to say is just going to be more of the same.
But it's good to see how your mind works. It's really like going to the Wizard of Oz, hoping he'll give us all the solutions, and then we see it was all a trick. But it's important to see how you play that trick on yourself. What are the rationalizations you like fooling yourself with?
The worry that hides as responsibility
The way I'm framing it, the language I'm using, might sound a bit like I'm telling you you're doing a bad thing. But it's actually addressing the part of you that's fully free and responsible.
It's a noticing. It's just a noticing, right here, right now. That's how I take it.
Yes. And then when that thought comes in, it creates the temptation to believe a story: "Oh, this is a thing I need to do, and maybe I can't do it, because I know I can't, because that's my habitual belief." But that whole thing is designed by you. It's a way you use your mind to create a narrative that pulls you into a mental story. And all of that is being fully accepted, fully received by you.
What I noticed during this meditation was how I wanted to go into the future, and your words kept bringing me back here. I see that that's the game that goes on.
You can't go to the future because it doesn't exist.
Right. But I'm just saying that's the game I notice. That's the form it takes: the form of time.
Believing thoughts versus using them
Think of it as believing thoughts to be real, rather than "going into the future." Going into the future assumes there's a place you can go that is the future, but that assumption is already a belief in a thought. The imagination of future is very different from functioning with the imagination of future as a tool. It's one thing for the mind to create an image of the future knowingly. It's another thing entirely to create that image and believe it's a real place.
In other words, it's about how I relate to it.
You can relate to your thought as thought, or you can relate to your thought as reality, as truth.
I think what this meditation did was bring me to the very edge of that. I was going back and forth, right at that boundary.
Yes. Going into a guided meditation like that creates a contrast with how you normally operate. In that contrast you can see: "Oh, these are thoughts, and how I operate normally is to treat this as the reality I'm living in." By "this" I mean the thinking process. We focus so much on it that we start to believe it constitutes ninety percent of our reality. So the work, in a sense, is to see more and more how much of what we think is reality is actually thought.
Thought is an aspect of reality, certainly. But notice: when you hear a sound, you don't think, "Oh, that's probably a car coming at me." You know it instantly as sound. With thought, it's blurry. We overlay it on reality and start to operate as if it is more fundamental. The work is to notice, "That's thought, that's thought, that's thought," until it becomes as natural as recognizing what a sound is. You don't even have to think about it. You just experience it knowingly as sound. With thought, we don't yet have that clarity. Part of it is clarity, but it's actually a deep awareness of how our mind functions, how it operates.
You describe this pattern a lot in these groups, and you described it today: "This is the thought that comes up for me and takes me." That's you recognizing a pattern. The more you see it, the more I usually try to show you an even more subtle aspect of it, because once you see it fully, it's hard to confuse it as anything other than thought.
The urge to grab hold of something
The simplicity of it is also what's confusing. I want to grab onto something, and there's nothing. It's just this.
That's exactly it. You're going to be constantly tempted by mental structures, mental objects, to fixate on and say, "Okay, this is how reality is." And it's always going to be another thought. I think it was Jesus who said, "The son of man has nowhere to rest his head." There isn't a thing anywhere for us to grab onto. What we're grabbing onto is always an assumption, a thought that we take to be a fundamental aspect of reality.
For example, time. We assume it to be fundamentally real. But actually, time is a mental construct. It's real in the sense that the experience of thought is real, but it's not real in the way we think it is, as a fundamental aspect of reality. It's not what it appears to be. It's as real as unicorns.
I'm something of a science geek, and the most advanced minds in physics today would agree with what I'm saying. This isn't alternative to science. They're trying to find time in reality, and they don't find it. It's just not there. Same with space. What you experience as space is a mental construct. This is already a hundred years old, very well known to science. They wouldn't call it "mental," but they say it's not fundamental, and that space and time are not two separate things.
It reminds me of when my nephew wished me happy birthday. He didn't say "have a great next year." He said, "Have a great revolution around the sun." And I thought, "Ah, that's space and that's time," and it struck me how they're really the intersection of the two, just two different ways of looking at events. The concept fascinated me.
I bring in the notion of science for those who might be a little skeptical. But if you look at your experience, you only find time in your thinking. The past is always going to be a memory, and the future is always going to be an imagination.
We can never experience it more directly than that.
You experience it directly as thought. It's nothing other than thought, a palpable experience, like thinking of a unicorn. It's a thing you can relate to. Same as an emotion has a palpable experience: it's a mental image of a sensation that then triggers your body to produce certain chemical and hormonal releases that match the mental experience. But it's an aspect of mind.
So it's not right to say time doesn't exist. I would be more precise and say it's not what we think it is. Our experience of time is thought. It's very useful, but it can also be misused to torture ourselves.
What do you mean, torture ourselves?
To put ourselves in a state of fear all the time, or in a state of regret. That's a misuse of the experience of time.
The stories of the future, the stories of the past. Right. Thank you so much.
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Thank you for the meditation. I just notice that, over time participating in these meditations, in the beginning I was fully following what you were saying, imagining and experiencing it. But slowly I'm starting to realize I have thoughts that really conflict with what you're saying. Thoughts like, "I'm not experiencing this. I can't achieve this. This is not happening for me." I don't know if it's something I'm starting to realize I have, or if I'm doubting what I'm doing, or if these are new thoughts or just something I haven't noticed before. I want to feel and experience what you're saying, and then my mind tells me, "This is not what you're experiencing. This is not your reality." The thoughts just constantly come. At least today, it was quite difficult.
Two kinds of doubt
Your experience is very natural. There are many aspects to it. Something is coming up that's a deeper, habitual aspect of doubt and self-doubt. But also, what I was describing in today's meditation is very subtle. There's a wide range of people in this group in terms of experience and how much time they've spent doing this kind of work. Quite a few have decades of intense practice, so it's hard to balance the meditation for everyone. If I were guiding a meditation for you alone, it would probably be very different.
What matters isn't so much the words. It's important if you're trying to follow, but I'd say there's something aside from the words. You have in the past described a certain resonance, where something did feel expansive, something did feel different in you. Trust that. I know right now it's a memory, but trust it. And notice that a lot of the self-doubt is going to be battling with the recognition of a different reality of experience.
What you're describing is found in Buddhist texts. It's not something unique to you. It's an aspect of human nature in this process, and it's actually called "doubt." It's a mechanism of the mind that fights the process we're doing here.
There are two kinds of doubt. One is appropriate and healthy. If you have a belief, it's appropriate to doubt it. Usually when we believe something, we don't notice it as a mental thing. It feels like, "This is true. This is reality." It doesn't feel like a thought; it feels like a true thing. That's what is appropriate to doubt. And doubt doesn't mean "it is false" or "it is wrong." It means a healthy skepticism: "Maybe this isn't totally true." Just making a little wiggle room in that sense of "this is reality."
You have a scientific mind and a scientific background, which is partly why I bring in these more scientific concepts, to address you in a place where you'll relate, even if you would disagree with what I'm bringing up. It's a place where we can have a conversation.
Resistance as a sign of depth
What I'm trying to bring to you now is that what you're going through is a very healthy part of the process. When things start happening, there's a natural reactivity. There's a part of us that doesn't want to keep going, that doesn't want to see deeper. And the way that works is by undermining ourselves. It can happen with a thought: "I can't do this," or "This isn't my experience."
I never mean to tell you what your experience is. When I say something that has that flavor, I'm offering it more in the sense of "What if?" Just consider it. Be open to the possibility. But always let your experience come first. Never replace it. Even if I'm saying "you are infinite love" or whatever, don't take it as a statement of fact. Take it as a "what if." And if it doesn't resonate, if it feels completely off and outside your reality, then stay with what your experience is. Otherwise it will turn into a belief, added on top of others.
Over time, and I think you already have, you will learn to recognize a deeper resonance. When something resonates, that word points to something that isn't a mental thing. You'll feel it in the body. It will shift your experience, even if only for a moment, even if only for half a second. Those moments, even if they come every other week in a meditation, are very valuable. Don't forget them. If something shifts for a moment and you experience something a little differently, something you recognize as more expansive and different from what you know, that's a taste of what I would call reality. That's a taste of you. It's deeper than the taste of the habitual contraction we normally live in.
I suspect everyone here would agree: this is a hard process. That's why very few people do it. It's common, and you see this in textbooks too. When somebody begins, they have a few tastes and it's like, "Wow, this is amazing." And then that goes away. But it's enough to keep you pursuing. What begins then is harder work, and there will be these moments, these fruits, where you taste again something that reconfirms the knowing of, "Yes, this is what I want." There are periods, and in my case years at times, where it's just frustration. You're tired, there seems to be no point, and then something shifts, something happens. There's nowhere to get to, really. It's about being where you are now and deepening in where you are now, not somewhere in time.
So what you're feeling right now, if you can put it into words: what is your feeling state?
It's just incredible how self-defeating our mind is. For me, it's super overwhelming, just noticing how constantly the thoughts are always playing against myself. It's so dark.
How does that feel?
It's really hard to identify. It's like: where are these thoughts coming from? It's really scary.
I'm hearing you mention being overwhelmed, and now you're talking about fear. Which of those feels deeper and more felt in your body?
It's fear. Just realizing how my mind is working is really scary.
The question beneath the fear
I know. What scares you? You're afraid of what?
Where do those thoughts come from?
Usually fear is about what will come. Why does it matter where they're coming from? I'm not dismissing the question, but I think there's something deeper. You're afraid of where they're coming from because if they come from this place, then what?
Like, who am I?
And who are you?
Because my mind tells me that my thoughts are who I am.
And what do you think?
Seeing how my thoughts are, I really don't know. My thoughts are all I have to identify with. I know I don't identify with most of them, but they're so much a part of me.
Being without identification
You're very right. You just said something that's very true: your thoughts are the only thing you have to identify with. But there is another way, which is to not identify at all. You can still be without identification, because what we are is being, not identity. The distinction is that identification requires an object; being does not.
You've nailed the whole thing of what we're doing here. There's a lot of clarity in what you're saying.
And it scares the shit out of me.
The process I'm trying to guide is exactly this shift: from identification to being. And that shift, our whole body-mind is going to respond to it as facing death. So fear is a very natural experience.
When you say fear of death, do you mean the death of what we identify with?
I'll say it this way. When we are identified, the object of identification is an idea of what we are, and it is limited. By limited, I mean: it's this and not that, it has boundaries, it's known. We're constantly creating these boundaries. But in our experience, in our actual reality, there aren't any boundaries. So I have to constantly be creating the sense of an object that is separate from something else.
In my mind, there's a very clear boundary between my body and the couch. I can imagine a very clear boundary. But if I go to the direct experience, there isn't such a clear line. So I have to constantly be creating this object that I am.
Identity as a developmental achievement
Now, this is a very healthy developmental process. If humans don't learn to do this, they have very difficult lives. They are not able to function. It's a developmental step. By the time you're two or three years old, this becomes a well-established habitual process, if things are going well. But because decades go by and we do this so deeply, so constantly, we forget. We never stop, because as children we didn't have the awareness to realize what we were doing, and it becomes "what I am."
Then, if we question that, the body is going to receive a signal: "I'm dying. What I am is ending." The brain, the mind sends that signal, and the body responds with a fear response. In this transition, there isn't a way for us to distinguish between "this is just the ending of a belief" and "this is me dying," because the belief in question is not any ordinary belief. It is identity.
If our identity is attached to other beliefs, it will feel threatened. For example, if my identity is attached to being a strong alpha male and somebody tells me I'm not, my body-mind is going to react as though there's a threat to my survival. Identity is created by a lot of beliefs, and this work, in a sense, is unraveling that. To a point where I can question even something as basic as, "Am I a man?" I experience a part of me as a male human being, but I experience the male human being as a part of me, the way I experience my hand, the way the computer appears. There is something experiencing the male human being. So if my identity is founded on being a male human being, anything that threatens my maleness, if I'm attached to being a strong male, will trigger a reactivity to defend. The brain and the mind have very specific ways to respond: fight, flight, or freeze.
Standing at the edge
What you're experiencing now is that you've come to an edge, and it's a really valuable edge. It is what this work is about. It has activated a fear response in you, which is in a sense a really positive sign that you've arrived at this edge. Now you have the opportunity to take the question "What am I?" and look at it more deeply. A year ago, the answer would probably have been very straightforward, simple, and superficial. Now you are in a place of "I don't know what I am." There's a confusion, and that's a positive confusion, because the false identity is shaking.
What you can look at is what you just said: "All I can identify with is my thoughts." But thoughts appear to you. They come and they go, and you are there before, during, and after the thoughts.