The Stages of Disidentification
Las etapas de la desidentificación
A general overview of how awakening unfolds through stages, beginning with the dissolution of belief in a fixed personal identity and moving into the collapse of psychological defenses.
The Stages of Disidentification
A general overview of how awakening unfolds through stages, beginning with the dissolution of belief in a fixed personal identity and moving into the collapse of psychological defenses.
I have a very intellectual kind of mind, so I know the potential for really obsessing on stages. There is also a lot of mystery around stages. There are no ultimate maps. There are many different kinds of maps. I am quite familiar with some, only vaguely with others, and much of the time I operate very intuitively. I know some other teachers are really deep into a particular map, and they use that map, and it might be very powerful for them. But personally, I work differently.
What the stages are really about
All of this is by way of disclaimer: you cannot really know with certainty. But what it is really all about comes down to a couple of things. The core issue is what you believe yourself to be, in the sense of what your lived experience tells you about what you are.
The more you are convinced that you are this person with this story, who was born and has had the life you have had until now, the more that is believed to be absolutely, truly, really what you are, the more you are in a beginning stage.
Glimpses of seeing through the construct
Then we can have glimpses. Usually it is glimpses where we see, sometimes very briefly: "I thought I was that which I was conceiving of, and suddenly I see I am not." Those glimpses can be partial or total. Usually they are partial, in that it is a gradual disidentification. That is what starts to move the needle in the stages.
What the maps are mapping is usually what happens in this process as disidentification begins. Certain kinds of experiences can be predicted.
One way to recognize this in yourself is to notice whether you have ever had even a second in your life where you saw clearly that you really thought you were this person, and then you realized it was a construct in the mind. You see it is just a construct, and there is a sense of going back into the looking itself, the seeing itself. There is this experience of a separation. That can come with a lot of effects in the experience of the body and the mind: a sense of expansion, well-being, some pleasant experience, or even fear. All of that starts to point to a movement in awakening.
When feelings begin to break through
A different stage, very generally speaking, is when we start to become unable, in a positive sense, to not feel what we are feeling. Feelings simply start breaking through, and we are unable to suppress or disconnect from them. This is when the defense barriers and the repression barriers start collapsing. You could say the shadow starts emerging. The separation between the psychological conscious and the unconscious begins to dissolve. That is a next step, and it happens in very different ways for different people.
There are further stages beyond this, but most people engaged in this work are somewhere around these first two parts of the process. I would say that simply having this teaching resonate for you is itself a sign of awakening.