The Text - Section 113
113. IDENTIFICATION WITH THE SELF
Greetings, my dearest friends. Blessings for every one of you. Blessed be this hour! May all
of you again derive benefit from these words, even though the real understanding often comes only
later, when you reach within yourself those levels to which the contents of a particular lecture apply.
When you find your corresponding inner conflicts, then these lectures really make sense.
Sometimes this happens only years after you have heard or read a lecture. But when it does happen,
you reach an entirely new understanding. You then grasp the difference between intellectual and
emotional understanding.
For my new friends, this lecture will not be easy to follow, for the very reason just mentioned.
Even those who already pursue this path are not always able to really understand the material. How
much more difficult then is it for someone who is not involved in self-exploration. Even intellectual
understanding is not possible if you are unfamiliar with the talks leading up to this one. Still, you
might feel a deep inner echo from some thought advanced here, which might sooner or later help
bring you to this path of liberation. A seed may be sown that will come to fruition later on.
And now, my friends, I wish to discuss a topic I have not gone into before, identification with
oneself, as opposed to identification with others. Last time I talked about humanity's relationship to
time. I said, in essence, that very rarely do people live in the now. They push into the future. They
pull back into the past. Often these two contradictory movements happen simultaneously. In both
alternatives, you strain away from the now.
Only when you live in the now do you live in reality. You cannot live in reality when you
strain into the future, because such a future may never come to pass in exactly the way you hope,
imagine, or fear it. But let us suppose, theoretically, that it were possible to imagine the future
exactly as it will be -- which, of course, can never be the case. Even then, you would still be living in
illusion, because the outcome does not happen at the moment you think of it. Therefore you do not
experience the future in reality, but only in fantasy.
Likewise, if you pull backward, into the past, even if you try to relive it exactly the way it was -
- if this were possible, which again it is not -- you would still be living an illusion, because that
moment of your recollection is a new segment of time. You react in fantasy, live in fantasy, and not
in the reality of the now. One of the characteristics of reality is its constant state of flux; it is not
static.
Needless to say, you cannot exactly duplicate the past, any more than you can imagine a future
and live it. Your own subjective colorings, stemming from your desires and fears, distort reality,
blind you to factors that existed or will exist, including changes in your own state of mind and
feelings, even though you deliberately try to deny them and thus stunt growth -- in order to live your
fantasy. You are afraid to allow the natural flux of time to become part of your soul because of your
misconceptions.
If you could trust the flux of time, the benign quality of its movement and the growth it can
foster, you could allow yourself to bring your inner faculties in harmony with it. You would then
not need to manipulate time by holding it back or pushing it forward. You would not need to fear,
or wish for fulfillment in the future. Nor would you have to reach back into the past for fulfillment.
This, after all, happens only because you do not trust the future; you do not trust yourself to live the
now when the future comes.
This distrust is often partly justified, because your destructive, unrealistic concepts and
attitudes prevent fulfillment in the now. But by either pulling back into the past or pushing forward
into the future you seek the wrong remedy for these obstructions. You seek an easy way out rather
than tackling whatever prevents you from living as fully as you are meant to.
In order to live in the now, in reality, you have to have a keen sense of your own reality. All
too often you lack this. In fact, most people do not experience themselves in reality. This happens
mostly through a subtle process. It can rarely be pinpointed or proven, except in very advanced
states. Most of you are probably convinced that you do have a sense of your own reality; however,
upon closer examination of certain symptoms, you will eventually find that you do not. Discovery is
always the first step toward eliminating a destructive condition.
All my friends have gone through similar experiences before. Outwardly and consciously
nothing seemed to indicate that anything was amiss. You were convinced all was well with you in a
given respect. Only after closer inspection did you find, deeply hidden, the very opposite to be true.
You then understood how this hidden distortion destroyed so many possibilities for fully living, for
happiness and meaning.
Finding what is can never harm you. It is not seeing what actually is that harms you! You will
eventually discover this.
Before I talk further about self-identification, I would like to describe a few symptoms by
which you may begin to detect the lack of living in the now and therefore feeling real. The crassest
symptom is not feeling that your own death is a reality. To experience oneself as mortal is not
negative or morbid, as is commonly believed. A realistic sense of one's own mortality is never a
burden. It is never depressing or fear-producing. It never diminishes the now, nor the reality of
living, regardless of what beliefs one holds about the afterlife. Quite the opposite. Those who never
experience the reality of their mortality are morbidly afraid of death. For if you do not feel your
mortality as real, you cannot possibly feel your aliveness as real.
There are, of course, many other less extreme symptoms that indicate your lack of self-
identification. For instance, in a fleeting moment you may discover that how your thoughts,
feelings, or words in a conversation appear is more important than what they actually are. The
distinction is not easily drawn because it is subtle, but once you discover it, it stands out and is
bound to show you the vital difference between identification with self and with others; between
experiencing yourself as real and not. Even the most vital feelings, thoughts, and inner experiences
are often shifted this way, to obtain an effect, an impression on others.
Or you may discover, in a fleeting and vague way, that your attitude about your actions,
thoughts, and feelings is governed by the idea of, "If only others could see me act, think, and feel
this way." In such a moment of discovery, you will detect that you shift your sense of identity from
yourself to others. Therefore your sense of your own reality becomes dependent on others. You
live through others.
Now, please, my friends, I do not want to be misunderstood. I do not want you to believe
that when I mention these symptoms, I reprimand you, that you are invited to change quickly. As
with any other inner distortion we have been concerned with on this path, trying forcefully and
deliberately to eliminate it will only make the condition worse because you would then identify with
me, instead of with yourself. You merely obey another authority. You have merely shifted your
identification.
Rather than immediately trying to correct what you observe, greet it as a symptom that will
lead you, like a well-marked road, into deeper understanding and awareness of yourself.
And now we will approach the topic of identification more directly. To a degree, your
present-day psychology has, of course, addressed this subject, but I wish to go into it a little deeper.
When the infant is born and grows into a child, its ego is still so weak that it cannot sustain
itself. As we have discussed in other contexts, the child is dependent on the more powerful adult
world. Everyone understands this dependency. Children are dependent for nourishment, for
protection against danger, for shelter.
But the subtle bodies have their own life, which functions according to laws similar to the
physical laws. The child is dependent not only for its physical existence, but also for its emotional,
intellectual, and spiritual existence. Children need love as much as they need food. They cannot
obtain either solely from the fruits of their own resources.
Mature adults do not wait helplessly to be loved, however. Love comes to them by their own
capacity for loving and relating. They never feel insecure and helpless because they do not have
love. Whenever you find such insecurity in yourself, you now know that it indicates emotional
immaturity. Love is an essential ingredient in life. But the weak ego of the child is in reality
dependent. The mature adult is no more dependent on others for love than for physical subsistence.
Similarly, children are not capable of forming their own ideas. They cannot discriminate
between reason, common sense, logic, and their opposites. They depend on being supplied with the
ideas and principles that serve as guideposts to growing up. To deny children such guideposts
would not promote independence. On the contrary, if you let children starve, they do not become
better equipped to cope with the struggle for existence. If you do not give children love, they do not
become better able to love. Just the opposite is true. Only when children grow, provided this
growth occurs organically, will they gradually cut the ties to the parents by standing on their own
feet financially; by developing their capacity to love so they do not depend on love being given to
them; by discriminating among the ideas they have learned and discarding what they cannot accept,
or perhaps returning to the same ideas after discovering them by themselves.
This process establishes soul and spirit. The bond of dependency on parental authority is cut.
The healthy spirit will cut this bond, even if the parents do not encourage such severance, but
possessively try to hold it intact.
Yet the spirit, or soul, that is burdened with unresolved problems will not desire to cut this
bond, but instead will do its best to maintain it, often in precarious, hidden, and distorted ways.
Unfortunately, emotional independence is often misunderstood as isolation, whereas withdrawal
from involvement while frantically holding onto dependency is interpreted as the ability to love. If
you ponder the above, you cannot fail to see that the very opposite is true. Mature people stand,
outwardly and inwardly, on their own two feet, and this stance allows for the mutual exchange in
relationships.
Beneath the inner and unconscious refusal to cut ties with protective authority lies
identification with such authority. Children need a good example from which to mold their ego,
which later affords the possibility to stand free. But if the good example serves only to perpetuate
the identification, and thereby prevent self-identification, the original purpose has been
misconstrued. In this case, children want to become the parent with whom they favorably identify
and later try to be that parent, rather than find and be themselves.
It is important to understand that such identification may not be at all obvious on the surface.
It is also necessary to look for negative identities. In other words, a parent whom one hates and
certainly does not want to emulate, can, on an unconscious level, also be identified with. In one's
very fear of ever being like this parent, coupled with suspicion that one might be, is an embedded
identification with perhaps a vague sense that this parent may be better off despite unlovable traits.
In short, this entire preoccupation, though very often unconscious, may be a negative identification.
The tie to the undesirable parent may be even more difficult to sever than the tie to a cherished
parent. It is very important to understand this, my friends.
For the child, positive identification is desirable. For an adult, a positive identification is often
as undesirable as a negative one because both prevent the evolution of the self.
I would warn you against trying to adjudge or evaluate how you identify with others merely
with your intellect. This may be very misleading. Only extensive work on this subject will reveal the
truth. You may consciously admire and wish to emulate one parent and despise the other. Yet, in
the course of this work, many of you have found that you have attitudes and behavior patterns
similar to those of the despised parent. This often came as a shock. But such insights indicate that
you identify with the very parent you least wish to be like. So beware of quick judgments.
You unconsciously substitute others for your parents, who were the original objects of
identification. Often such substitution not only occurs among individuals, but also among national,
religious, and political groups. In this psychological distortion, even minority groups, rebelling
against the majority, can serve individuals as means to identify with. Conformity is a consequence of
the need to identify with someone more powerful. Conforming can occur under the guise of
nonconformity, especially if such individualism is very strained and too great a point is made of it.
So often, a rebellious minority believes they are free, and, according to all appearances, they defy
conformity. But whenever the stringent need to prove something exists, one can certainly find a
flaw underneath.
Truly independent, free individuals do not have to make a show of it. They do not have to be
militant about it. So, a rebellious nonconforming minority may very well serve as a substitute
authority to identify oneself with.
People may also identify with causes. No matter how good the cause itself may be, if it serves
as a substitute for self-identification, there is harm. The harm is not in your embracing this worthy
cause, believing in it and working for it -- all this could very well be done with inner freedom -- but
in your need to substitute something other than yourself to lean on because you have not found
where within yourself you are still as weak as a child. As long as you have not understood your
hidden motivation for embracing the cause you are still compelled to identify with an outer
authority.
I do not advocate a life in which you separate yourself from all ideas, groups, loyalties, and
causes. This would be isolation, and even irresponsible toward society. But there is a great
difference, my friends, between embracing a cause out of a healthy conviction and inner freedom,
gaining sustenance from your inner resources, and using worthy causes to replace the well that exists
within you, waiting to be tapped.
The extreme form of identification with others because of a weak ego is conformity to public
opinion, parroting the views of others. This condition exists in almost every human being, in one
form or another, only in a subtle way that is difficult to detect. That certainly does not mean that it
is not important to find it and grow out of it.
Some time ago I lectured on self-alienation. Needless to say, there is a connection between
that topic and the one we are discussing, although they are not the same. Self-alienation comes from
the failure of identification with the self. In other words, self-alienation is an effect, while self-
identification is a cause. Whenever you find an emotional dependency on others, you can be sure
that you have, in some respect, failed to establish your selfhood. Whenever you feel a vague fear
that others do not supply you with what you need and expect of them -- be it financial help,
approval, love, or acceptance -- whenever anxiety indicates that you are dealing with more than the
natural need for human interdependence, which never causes anxiety or other negative emotions,
you might very well visualize a need for receiving your inner lifeblood from sources outside yourself.
That such a state of affairs is not natural or necessary hardly needs to be emphasized, once you see it
clearly. From this insight it follows that you can change; that you do not have to live in such useless
dependency, which weakens rather than strengthens you.
Do not overlook your rebellion against the need of being accepted or agreed with. You know
from past experience that behind such rebellion you very often find a stringent need for the very
thing you rebel against.
When the emotional and spiritual umbilical cord has not been cut, the self cannot possibly
grow. It can grow to only a very limited degree, as the baby in the mother's womb can grow to only
a certain point. In order to effect further growth, the baby has to evolve; the umbilical cord has to
be cut. Only then is further physical growth possible.
The process is no different for the inner personality. When the inner umbilical cord is not
cut, you are, in the truest sense, dependent on others for your right to exist. All the psychological
aspects of appeasing, betraying, and self-alienation simply indicate that you have not yet been able --
at least in certain areas -- to identify with yourself. Therefore you have no sense of your own reality,
and cannot experience each living moment in its fullness.
Wherever such lack of selfhood, such dependency on others exists, you are bound to find that
you try to use others. Since you condemn yourself to living a parasitic life, you cannot help using
those on whom you depend. In this hidden using, the distortion of your imagined "love" can be
found. You pretend love when you merely need and have to use because without such
manipulations you feel yourself sinking. You feel you have no reality other than the reality accorded
to you by others.
The more you use those whom you need, the weaker you become; and, therefore, the more do
you believe that you need others to strengthen you.
Living in the now is living in the wave of time. In your dimension, time flows in a certain
rhythm. This movement can be determined by the seasons, by day and night, by the positions of the
planets constantly orbiting through space. Their movements create rhythmic waves. Over the
centuries, humanity has sensed to a tiny degree certain laws of the rhythmic movement of time, for
example in astrology. Yet only very limited understanding has been gained here. But everyone
knows and often even expresses this sense in terms of having good or bad times. Whatever one
undertakes during good times has good results. One feels freer than usual, in spite of problematic
conditions. One has a hopeful outlook, and fulfillment comes at least to a degree. And then there
are times on the downward curve of the wave when everything seems to go wrong. Those who
persevere with a wholehearted desire to look at themselves in truth will, sooner or later, come to
these so-called bad times. They are actually manifestations of the disharmony people have created in
their relationship to time. When these times yield victory and understanding, you will no longer
experience the rhythmic downward curve as depressing, upsetting, or disadvantageous. For each
living moment, fully experienced in the reality of the now, will then yield adventure, peaceful,
harmonious excitement, worthwhile vital living.
But this cannot happen unless you first learn to understand and evaluate your negativity and
thus your bad times. Then you will be in harmony with your time dimension. Then you will
experience yourself in reality. This peace, this inner anchor, cannot be described in words. It
cannot possibly be replaced with any other goal.
There are riches contained in each individual soul. They are yours for the asking. It is often
sad for us to notice how people turn in the wrong direction to seek the fulfillment they vaguely
sense to exist. For only when you have tapped your inner wealth will you stop straining away from
the now and cease to be estranged from yourself. You will not derive this sustenance from other
sources. As long as you remain dependent on a foreign life source, you have to resort to all sorts of
tactics that weaken your real self even more.
It is so important to understand inwardly what I explained to you about using others. Do not
apply my words only to the extreme outer manifestation of using others; try to see it in its more
subtle version in which you have to use others since your life seems to depend on them. You
conclude therefore that you need to be in control. So many of my friends have begun to see in
themselves this strong tendency to need control. Each individual resorts to different means to exert
control. Now each one of you has to find how this applies to you; what your particular means are;
how you fear losing control; how you destroy relationships through a mutual battle for control, each
one acting as though it were a fight for survival; how you distort issues in this unrealistic fight for
survival; how you spoil the growth of mutuality and fulfillment. The need for control causes you to
manipulate others, yourself, and your vital natural feelings. By this very process the self cannot
evolve strongly, freely, and independently.
Wherever you find a stringent need to be in control -- of others, of a situation, of a
relationship -- you have a direct clue to your nonidentification with yourself. If you look at this
tendency from the point of view discussed here, if you use these little clues as points of departure,
understanding the harm of inner stunting, you will certainly come to the nucleus of your deliberate
self-denial, which causes so much unnecessary hardship. You will then be able to go about bringing
your real self out. This will be easier than finding the negative conditions has been. But first, you
have to be fully aware of your parasitic clinging to others, of identifying with others and depending
on them in one way or another. You will see the ties you have so far refused to cut and
consequently could not establish what their roots are within yourself. Once you find these roots, it
will be comparatively easy to cut the ties and become yourself.
And now, my friends, you have a few weeks to ponder this lecture. Since you will have an
opportunity to ask questions pertaining to each lecture at the discussions, we will now deal with
questions that have no bearing on this lecture.
QUESTION: Will you kindly explain the phenomenon of sleep?
ANSWER: Your subtle bodies need to shed the burden of the physical body, of gross
physical matter. You could not sustain a lifetime without this rest. Physical matter is a burden to
the real personality. I mean that literally. You need a respite from this burden in a different
dimension where you can move and be free. In this other, wider, freer dimension there is relaxation
and a gathering of strength. This is essentially the main reason for sleep. To free oneself of gross
matter and to move into a wider dimension actually restores the physical organs through the psychic
bloodstream, which is regenerated during sleep. The psychic, or subtle bodies are always the cause;
the physical body is the effect.
With great love I now leave you, blessing each one of you. This blessing contains a great
strength; a substance that can bring truth and regeneration to your soul, so as to find the necessary
stamina and will to establish yourself in yourself.
Be in peace. Be in God!