Meditation for the Original Sin of Identification

Humans are bundles of identification. We identify with simple things: our emotions, feelings in our bodies, thoughts. We identify with the patterns of those things, and call them “personality” and assume that we are our personality.

We identify more grandly. Perhaps we are a Muslim, and someone burns a Koran and we get upset. A person like us is hurt, and we are angry or sad.

Perhaps we identify with ideological positions. We believe in God, and someone says God doesn’t exist, and we are upset. Or, perhaps we believe there is no God, it’s impossible, ridiculous, and stupid, and when someone says there is a God, we get upset. (And yeah, I’ve seen this many times with more hardcore atheists.)

We want to use a group as slaves, on the other hand, so we decide they aren’t human. If they aren’t human, but sub-human, we won’t feel bad when they’re hurt. (Lack of pain from someone being hurt with whom you don’t identify is something that shows up, or rather, doesn’t, on brain scans.)

A terrorist attack happens in London, and Westerners are upset, but one happens in Baghdad, and we don’t care.

It’s all degrees of identification. From that which is close to us – from our daily sense objects of feeling, emotion, and thought in the body, to people living thousands of miles away or even ideas and ideologies.

One of the primary tasks for cultivating any spirituality worth the name is learning how to deal with this confusion. Generally, there’s two ways of doing it: Either you’re all of it, equally, or you’re none of it.

If you don’t identify, you suffer less. It’s that simple. If you have a bad thought but don’t think of it as “yours,” it bothers you less–if at all. Even pain is reduced if you don’t think of it as yours.

This is one reason why a major milestone on the path, in almost all traditions, is the realization “I’m not the body.”

But the key point is this: Less identification is less suffering. And, oddly, it doesn’t reduce the good things in life. It improves them. This has been my experience, and it’s the experience of advanced meditators I’ve talked to as well.

All right, all the introductory verbiage aside, here’s a simple exercise.

Find a sense object: It could be a thought, an emotion, or a feeling. (Nothing exists in consciousness except sense objects.)

Ask yourself this question:”If this was not here, would I still be me?”

Answer it.

Move on to another sense object.

And that’s the entire exercise. Do this over, and over, and over again.

Yeah, that’s probably going to be boring. That’s the thing about meditation, despite all the blather about bliss (which does happen sometimes) a lot of it is boring. What you’re doing is a directed inquiry into your actual existence and reprogramming what might be termed your subconscious. That takes repetition, repetition, and repetition, until suddenly something clicks, and a new way of existing takes place.

The difficulty of meditation is only in doing it right, and then doing enough of it.

Give this one a try if you’re so inclined, see what  you find out. Do enough of it, and see what changes.

Disclaimer: There are two particular psychological dangers to meditation: de-realization and de-personalization. These are dangers because the core insights of meditative traditions amount to “I am not what I thought I was.” This particular type of insight meditation aims directly at such a realization, and it can cause psychological problems if it goes askew, or in people who are already prone to these issues. If you have reason to think that might be you, you shouldn’t be doing this meditation.

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