About identification (Douwe Tiemersma)

Gouda on May 22, 2002, continued.

About identification

Q. What about identification which occurs again and again?

Just let an identification actually take place. What happens when you identify with someone? What does it mean? When you actually become identical to someone, the other as form, with a particular body, with characteristics, and so on, is no longer present as such. That’s also the case with your body when you walk and do all kinds of things during the day. Then too, your body isn’t present. Why not? Because you have identified with it. When you dive in somewhere, then you have an internal viewpoint there and a whole world seems to develop itself from there. That happens constantly, when speaking with someone, when viewing a painting or photograph, everywhere.

Considering the Origin as starting point, every identification is a limitation. But beginning from your own world, which has to do with the structure of your own organs and your past, an actual identification with someone else appears to create a greater space. That's why everyone thinks it is such a positive experience. But what does that mean? Yes, that the space of this other is added to yours. You become more spacious. Just take a look what happens when you identify with a group with ideals. Everyone thinks it’s great, because more space comes to your own sphere and an incredible amount of energy comes free. But, by identifying with a group you experience boundaries once again. So the process of expansion can continue ... See these processes. See how it works: experience the expansion and the limitation. These processes always occur. When you begin to look at it more precisely, you will see that the process of expansion can proceed beyond all specific things, that it can become universal. That happens in the same familiar way as the daily processes. So then all the boundaries of identification disappear. In the end you can only say that you are identified with the whole reality, the whole cosmos.

Q. But then you’re still within an experience.

Up until the end there is a certain self-experience, yes. Then there is no longer a perceiving from a distance, but an internal self-experience, without qualities, without form ...

Q. Tensionless ...

Yes, there is a tensionless knowingness.

Q. Is that also there even when you sleep?

When your sphere has actually become a bright emptiness, without forms, then this is consistent with the deep dreamless sleep. Then you are identified with everything, on a level in which the specific forms with their separateness disappear. You see your hand. Just bring it up to your eyes. Do it once: hand, gone. Actually, this hand is no longer there because you have absorbed it into the realm of yourself as first person. That which is the core of the subject can never be perceived as an object. So when you have identified with all these objects, you can let them reenter your core, in your own unobjectifiable source. Then nothing is objective any more.

Q. What do you mean by ‘let them reenter the source’?

You let everything return, sinking back into the core of yourself, the core of your own aware being. See how that goes, not by making a certain picture of it. No, really go back to yourself, to your own self-being. That is your true identity.

Q. You are something and that disappears, but at the same time you remain as that self-being?

There is always that same self-being. You start out from a self-being that is limited, an I-person. Then you start looking at what that I-self-being is in its core. Nothing more. Of course, there is constantly self-being. Everyone begins from that. Only, when you go back and you start exploring what it actually means, then all the characteristics of that I (I-think, I-want, I am so and so) disappear. From a limited form of that self-being, you can let yourself sink backwards into this ground. Then the forms dissolve. Of course that means a surrender; you let yourself totally sink into the source-ocean. Then it is good to realize that you yourself are this source-ocean, that you in essence are That, that you are That in the highest sense, more than whatever you can contemplate. And, you experience it yourself: the letting go in this sphere in which you are yourself in the highest sense.

Secondarily from there, a differentiation of an I can emerge, an I that draws itself up against a world, that wants to do some things and not others.

Continue to look at where you are and in what way you are there. Do you still have a support? Immediately confirm: this is how it is and just let the process of dissolution continue. That is an ongoing self-inquiry, continually looking to see how it is, which form you actually still hold on to, but also a radical letting go.