Identification: Who are you really?

Identification and Oneness go hand in hand.

Identification is one of the simplest concepts in psychology and spirituality, however it’s one of the hardest to truly understand, realize, and master. Identification is your sense of identity, which means who and what you think you are (and are not). It covers vibrations (or different aspects of the self) as well as space (or different things in the Universe).

For example, we can identify as our physical body, our emotions that allow us to feel and react, our mind that allow us to think and process, or our conscious awareness behind it all. It is much more than just consideration of some idea, but is the actual state of being (much like the difference between looking at a map and walking the actual terrain). The quality of compassion develops when identification expands to include other people, and similarly the condition of being a sociopath is when one can’t identify with anything outside of themselves at all. Much of the practice of meditation is ultimately based around contemplating identification, and refining it upward to new heights of consciousness (which is the basis of spiritual growth), and/or expanding it outward to include other people (which is the basis of altruism and Oneness). Identification is also a fundamental cause of why people can be fans of a sports team, political party, or spiritual belief system.

When identification includes mind and emotions (as it does for almost everybody physically incarnated) then it usually results in expectations. An expectation is a mental thought about the way things are or should be, combined with surrounding emotion that reacts based on whether that expectation is being met. For example, a child becomes furious if their sibling gets more allowance than they do, or even a slightly bigger piece of cake. That’s because their identification is wrapped up with their family, and they have the expectation that siblings should be treated equally. The child is less annoyed about some billionaire’s kids getting ponies and such, because they fully expect that there are richer and poorer families, and they don’t wrap their sense of identification around other families like they do their own. We usually get more upset about injustice towards ourselves, or a person of our own family, nation, or ethnicity, as opposed to people in a random tribe half way around the world or extraterrestrials in a different solar system. It follows that becoming aware of and dropping expectations can improve our sense of identification, and result in evolution.

Identification is just as much a belief and experience of what we are not, as of what we are. Very often we define ourselves by what we’re not, or by what we reject or dislike. For example, I’m not a child anymore, I hate unevolved racist people, I’m a unique person different from everybody else, and so on. Many types of rejection are negative, however rejection can also be approached in a positive manner. (After all, we don’t want to reject the concept of rejection! ;-) Ultimately, all of creation and all manifesting is a limitation, or a specific choice made out of infinite possibilities. Painting red on a canvas necessarily means that it can’t be any other color, but some choice or limitation is necessary to produce art and avoid the canvas eternally remaining a womb of potential. Physical incarnation (whether of a human or of a Universe) is a specific area being marked out to work with or a role to experience.

The whole concept of consciousness itself can be defined in terms of identification, or the continuous process of alternating assertions and negations of “I am this” and “I am not this”. Changing identification is a fundamental aspect of evolving consciousness. For example, the difference between the consciousness of an animal and being a galaxy can be described in terms of identification. Physical death is basically no longer identifying with a particular dense form. No longer identifying with form in general results in what’s classically called “ascending”, or no longer being drawn to physically incarnate in the future (except out of love and service). On a deep level, identification can transcend consciousness altogether. Consciousness consists of a self, and that which is outside the self being experienced. Therefore all physical and psychic senses, and the general concept of sensitivity, are based around concepts of the non-self impacting the self. Once there’s no longer a limited self (or at least the classic "self" as we know it) then awareness can expand to unprecedented new levels of being. ♥