The Ending of Identification
El Fin de la Identificación
A reflection on how identification shifts through progressive stages, from thought to body to spacious subjectivity, and ultimately toward an emptiness that cannot be named.
The Ending of Identification
A reflection on how identification shifts through progressive stages, from thought to body to spacious subjectivity, and ultimately toward an emptiness that cannot be named.
When we speak of a change in identification, it is important to understand that this does not mean you stop identifying with the body-mind or the image of a separate self and then identify with something else. It is more like a cessation of identification, because there is nothing else with which to identify.
Stages of identification
That said, we can talk about it in different ways. One of them is indeed a change in identification, because we can identify with very specific, contracted thoughts, or we can identify with far more spacious thoughts. In a sense, that is an improvement. But ultimately, what I am pointing to is emptiness: the ending of identification altogether. You simply cannot call it anything.
Still, more often than not, there is a change in identification as a first step. It happens in stages. You can be so identified with a really defined mental structure, and then you move out of identification with thought into the sensations, into the body. Now the identification in mind is not just the image of a body; it includes a deeper relationship with the body and the sensations within it. That is already an expansion, an opening up, a freeing of identification from purely thought to body-mind.
From body-mind to spacious subjectivity
Then that can move even beyond the confines of body-mind into a more spacious subjectivity that starts to include what lies beyond the body: sensation, perception, sound. If I touch the couch, the couch no longer feels like "other." The same holds for the universe at large. All objects are included. But that is still an object. You could call it the one object of the universe. There is still an identification with a subjectivity, a spaciousness, that remains a subtle object. Once that becomes your ground, however, there is a great deal of freedom compared to the contraction of identification with thought.
So it can be a subtle object that includes you being part of everything, and everything being part of you. But it is still a subjectivity. You could call it the ultimate subjectivity, yet there is still subjectivity versus objectivity, versus the world, versus the universe as object.
The trap of language
This is very tricky to talk about. For example, you could recognize that your thoughts, your sensations, and everything you experience of the world (sound, sight) are all happening in the same space. Now there is no dividing of perception into "I" and "other," no dividing of sound into "I" and "other." The sound of my voice is me; the sound of someone else's voice is other. There is a subjectivity that includes all of that as the object appearing within it.
There is a lot of this language in contemporary Advaita: the universe is appearing within consciousness; you are that consciousness; the universe appears, your body and mind appear within that consciousness; consciousness is primary, the universe is secondary, the body is secondary. That pointing gestures toward something real, but as language it remains duality.
Levels of ground
It depends on the glimpse, because you can glimpse at different levels. What I am really talking about is when a particular seeing becomes your ground, meaning: for the greater part of your day, what is your experience of self? If the self is the image in the mind of "I in time," that is one level of identification. If, instead, there is a subjectivity and then the body-mind and world appearing within it, that is a freer self, a freer identification.
And then there is something further still. You could say you are nothing at all. But saying "you are nothing at all" already does not work, because being nothing is already something. You cannot put words to it. You cannot even try to imagine it.
Emptiness
The word that has been used, the one I relate to most, is emptiness.