What is disidentification really? To understand disidentification, you need to understand identification. To identify with anything, any state, means simply that your mind takes a certain state for identity. Your mind holds on to an expression, or a feeling, or a state, and uses it to define you. The mind then contracts around the state in the activity of holding onto it. This very contraction of the mind creates what we call “identity.” – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life
Essence is gradually lost or covered up (veiled from our perception) as the personality develops. We tend to identify more and more with the personality that develops in response to our environment. By the end we forget that we even had essence. We end with the experience that there is only our personality, and that we are that personality, as if it always had been thus.
This gives us the hint that in order to allow our essence to emerge again, we need to learn to disidentify from the personality and the sense of ego identity. This, in fact, is the main method that most systems of inner development employ. This disidentification, which can culminate in the experience technically termed ego death, is the main requirement necessary for the discovery of essence, – Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment: The Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 3
Disidentifying with an ego structure often exposes a sense of deficiency, lack or weakness, which is sometimes experienced as an emptiness, or more specifically, an empty hole. Allowing and understanding the deficient emptiness precipitates the emergence of the Personal Essence in consciousness.
The most important step for our discussion here, and in fact the most crucial in the whole process, is that of moving from identification with part of the ego structure to the state of deficiency. It is clear in all the cases we have given, as well as in the rest of our experience with students, that this identification, although it gives a sense of identity, is also used for a defensive purpose. It functions partially, in fact primarily, to ward off or cover up the deficiency and its painful affects. When the student abandons the defensive posture, the deficiency is revealed. – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, An Object Relations Approach, Ch. 11
Whenever we become free from our identification with any self-representation, we experience ourselves as free from the structure patterned by it. This always manifests as some kind of space, as an inner field that feels exactly like empty physical space, but it is a state of consciousness, a pure manifestation of Being. When the self-image is part of the self-identity structure—which functions to provide the self with the sense of identity—the space that arises is a black space, like the empty and starless night sky, or the depth of intergalactic space. When the self-image is part of the self-entity structure—which functions to provide the self with a sense of separating boundaries—the space that arises is clear, colorless space, like the clear space of daytime. The experience of black space goes through a deepening and a refinement, depending on the depth of the self-representations whose dissolution precipitates the experience. – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 33
Many people think that disidentification is an activity: “I see my identification, and I do something to it—I disidentify. In the same way that I identify, I can disidentify.” But this is not the case. Identification is an activity, and true disidentification is the absence of that activity.
Disidentification means:
• Recognizing the inner gluing of my identity or consciousness to a specific content
• Seeing this adherence to the content for what it is—an identification
• Not believing the identification or going along with it
• Not pushing it away
• Understanding it and letting it dissolve or reveal itself as True Nature.
The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, Ch. 12
There are actually two ways of working on the personality: one of them is seeing the personality, thus becoming separate from it, which is called disidentification. The other method involves complete immersion in the personality. In the state of self-realization, based on disidentification and separation from the ego, the personality is not matured and integrated with Essence; it is not clarified completely. The personality has merely been set aside, not worked through and transformed.
In using the second method, we need to understand more thoroughly what is meant by immersion in the personality. There is a willingness to clearly and completely experience the personality itself without resistance, without the attempt to escape from or “transcend” it. In this process you have to be the personality itself, to completely embody it. You see, conceive, and experience yourself in action as the personality. You have to experience for yourself that, “I am the personality completely, I am that and my very movement is suffering.” This must happen completely, not by disidentifying—by looking from above and witnessing—but by being it. The experience must be sensual, physical, and intuitive. It is not a reflection or a thought. This is direct perception, beyond the discursive mind. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, Ch. 1
This process of becoming aware of and disidentifying from ego identifications begins to shed light on the nature of the personality as a substitute for true Being. For instance, a typical development in students going through this process is a tendency towards increased selfishness and self-centeredness. Self-centeredness is a basic quality of the ego self, which becomes increasingly obvious as the ego identifications, which are the building blocks of the self, begin to dissolve. But this dissolution threatens the stability of the ego self, and hence there results the reaction of holding on more tightly to this self. The desperate clinging to this identity exposes the basic quality of self-centeredness, the attitude of perceiving and relating to everything and everyone in the world from the perspective of oneself, considering what is for me and what is against me. What will I get from this and what will I lose from that? As the ego identifications dissolve, one can see more clearly how pervasive, invisible, deceptive and convincing is this attitude, pervading almost everything in one’s life. Everything is considered from the perspective of whether it will support one’s ego or not, without much regard for others or for the truth. – A. H. Almaas, The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach