On Identification

”As I look around me, I listen to the sounds arising. I have a sense of what is producing each sound and of where each sound is coming from. I look to sources of each of the sounds and have a sense that ”that is where they are coming from”.

I close my eyes and continue to listen to the sounds. I try to focus my attention purely on the sounds themselves, and let go of any inner picturings that may arise. I try to let go of my imagined view of the space around me. I try to cease to ‘project’ any visual content connected to the sounds and their sources.

I focus purely on the sense of the sounds themselves, I focus purely on the sensation and feeling of the ‘impact’ of the sounds upon me. As I do this, all visual content connected/associated with the sounds and their sources ceases/disappears. Along with this, all sense of the sounds and their sources having a ‘location of origin’ disappears. There is no longer any sense of the sounds originating from a location that is any distance or direction away from myself.

The sense of the ‘impact’ of the sound upon me remains, and I see that the ‘impact’ or reception of the sound ‘is’ the sound itself. There is no ‘source’ of the sound which is separate to the sound itself. I do not know a ‘source’ of a sound and the sound itself as ‘two separate things’. I know sound purely as the/its impact upon me. ‘Where’ I experience the impact is ‘within me’, the experience of the impact is a vibration/reverberation of me. The impact itself is ‘made out of” me, my sensation and feeling.The sounds are then seen not to be ‘impacts from without’, but vibrations/reverberations ‘from within’.

The sense of impact or contact becomes one of ‘self-contact’. In the experience of the sounds I am experiencing the activity of ‘self-contact’, a kind of ‘touching myself’. There is both the sense of contact as the interaction of two (or more) separate or distinguished elements, and also the sense of the two elements in question both being one/oneself. There is the physical reflection of this in, for example, the action of washing one’s hands, where ‘one hand washes the other’ yet both belong to the same one body.

In the recognition of the nature of this ‘self contact’, I see that this form of contact is present in all bodily experience, that each and every ‘impact’ of sensation and feeling (and thought) is a ‘self contact’ ‘from within’ rather than the impact from without of something separate to me. As I see this, I wonder why I do not experience each and every ‘impact’ or arising of sensation and feeling in this way, why sometimes the ‘impacts’ appear just as that; as the impact from without of separate things.

I see that, in the experience and recognition of the nature of this self-contact there is the realization of a greater degree of freedom. There is the release from a certain sense of ‘confinement’ and ‘tension’, and there is also the marked increase in the ‘intensity’ of the experience of such ‘impacts’ themselves; meaning that sensation and feeling themselves become more intense in their quality and ‘tangibility’. With the realization that each impact or contact is a self-contact comes the increase in the sense of ‘intimacy’ in the impact/contact itself, and with this an increase in the sense of ‘sensitivity/receptivity’.

Along with the relative sense of release there is also the greater sense of ‘belonging’ or ‘being one with’ one’s ‘environment’. There is a greater sense of communication and interaction/inter-relation when the nature of all impacts/contact is realized to be one of self-contact. The communication and interaction/inter-relation is a self communication/communicating and self interaction/inter-relation. This form of communication and interaction is seen to be authentic and genuine as compared to the previous experience, which is seen to be a ‘mis-communication’ or ‘false’ communication in which there is no real relation and interaction and only an image of such.

I see that, in my general experience of impact/contact I turn myself into an ‘object’, an object among and interacting with other objects. This brings in the sense of certain limitations that are related to objects and their nature. My general experience of contact affirms/re-affirms my sense that I am an object (or certain kind of object) with its related limitation and separation. Such an object is limited in its ability and capacity to communicate and interact/inter-relate.

My identification of myself as an object goes hand in hand with my identifying with objects (impacts of sensation,feeling,thought). Identification itself appears as a form of ‘dis-association’ or ‘self dis-association’ in which the apparent ‘affirming’ of ‘the other’ (and losing of oneself in process) is really a denial of the ‘true other;-‘ which is oneself in the dual/multiple aspect of one hand washing the other etc.

In losing myself to an apparent affirmation of ‘other’ (a certain form of ‘self affirmation’ that is really ‘self denial’) I lose myself to the true experience of ‘other’ in the form of myself, the true experience of ‘self relation/communication’ (real communication/relation) which is the true experience of ‘knowing the other as oneself’ and ‘loving one’s neighbor as oneself’. I cannot ‘enter Purgatory’ while there is identification/identifying.”