This article is part of the Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course.
To end our suffering, we need to stop identifying with forms.
In the recent articles, (Experiencing Disidentification with False Thoughts and Testing the Effectiveness of Our Investigation ) we hopefully are starting to get an experiential understanding of what it feels like to fully or partially disidentify from a false thought. This article introduces you to some helpful ideas and theory behind what is happening when we disidentify from thought.
Later in the Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course, we will explore how to disidentify from our sensations, which includes our emotions, physical sensations, and behavior impulses. To do this, we need to challenge one of the most persistent and widely-believed falsehoods: I am my body. This article plants a few seeds on ways that we may challenge that belief.
First, let’s explore some important differences between ordinary consciousness and mindfulness consciousness, to further explain how this helps us disidentify with falsehoods.
Ordinary, Conceptual Consciousness
Ordinary consciousness is the same as conceptual consciousness. It is consciousness that operates on the level of thoughts. Thoughts may arise as words or images in the mind.
On this level of consciousness, the my-thoughts-are-true bias is fully operational. We assume the thoughts we think to be truthful, personal, and important. This means, that when we believe a false thought we mistake it to be reality. Please pause and take the full significance of that in. When we believe a false thought, we mistake it to be reality! For example, If you believe you are destined to fail, then that’s your reality. This understanding of reality may lead you to feel sad, miserable, depressed, and hopeless. This view and those feelings will then lead you to unconsciously sabotage your efforts and fail to further reinforce that belief. Yikes! We really don’t want to do that.
In the above example, we see the pattern of believing a falsehood. When a false thought is in the mind, that is the first falsehood alarm. If we believe it, our body understands that falsehood to be reality, which causes it to create unpleasant bodily and mental sensations called emotions and moods. These are the second falsehood alarm. Finally, this suffering, regardless of how tiny it may be, then encourages us to act unskillfully in ways that harm ourselves and others. That is the third falsehood alarm.
To add insult to injury, thoughts are never the full truth. How can that be? Words and even mental images are symbols. Symbols necessarily simplify the object they refer to. To simplify something is to distort it. So, the conceptual level of language and words is full of distortions and falsehoods.
For example, take the word “tree.” We know what this symbol points to. But the word by itself does not capture the full life, beauty, and dynamically changing nature of actual trees. Nor does is it acknowledge the amazing diversity that our world has over 64,000 different species of trees — all of which are unique and wonderful in their own right. Nor does it distinguish between a tree that’s two years old, or one that’s 2,000 years old! I hope this helps you see that to attempt to fully encapsulate all of the complexity, diversity, and life of a tree into words would be both cumbersome and impossible. The same thing is true with all words, which are symbols pointing to something else.
Zen Buddhists have a saying, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” This saying reminds us to not believe the words, but to look nonconceptually beyond the words (the finger) to the reality which they point (the moon). We call this falsehood of mistaking our thoughts to be the truth, fixed-views, and we will explain it more in-depth later in the course.
Therefore, when we live from conceptual consciousness, it’s like we are dreaming a dream and believing the dream to be real. People who experience a flashback of a traumatic event while in ordinary consciousness, believe it is happening in the present moment. This causes them a lot of suffering, and spurs them to act out their unfortunate conditioning in unskillful ways that often causes more harm to themselves and others.
This leaves us asking, what alternative do we have to ordinary conceptual consciousness?
Nonconceptual Mindfulness Consciousness
The answer to that question is mindfulness. Mindfulness consciousness is nonconceptual. It can view the world directly, without the use of concepts. This allows mindfulness consciousness to see the truth of things clearly and accurately, without the distorting aspects of words and language.
We may also call mindfulness consciousness “awareness” or “presence.” It is helpful to think of awareness as living behind our conceptual consciousness because it is able to lovingly observe the thoughts of our conceptual consciousness in a curious, peaceful, kind, disidentified, and allowing manner.
Living continually from awareness is like enjoying a lucid dream where you know you are dreaming, and can even control the dream so you can experience the freedom of flying. Strong awareness allows people who experience flashbacks to view them as memories and thoughts of long ago, deactivating their identification with them, and allowing them to hold them with compassion, rather than view them as the truth of reality in the present moment. This brings them more peace, ease, and control over their behavior.
This is why we meditate, take mindful pauses, and do other practices to strengthen our mindfulness. Strong mindfulness allows us to see things more clearly. With mindfulness, we see thoughts as the impermanent, conditioned, impersonal, and immaterial arisings that they, are and relate to them as such, rather than mistaking them to be the truth.
Certainly, we will still use language, and others will use language to communicate with us. This is the primary way that humans communicate with each other. Only now as we use language, we will mindfully remember languages drawbacks, and be looking nonconceptually beyond the words to better understand the truth of the reality to which they point.
Contextualizing Jarring and Trippy Sensations
Sometimes transitioning between ordinary consciousness and mindfulness consciousness can feel a bit jarring. During meditation, when that moment of mindfulness arises and you realize you are no longer paying attention to the anchor, that moment may feel a bit like a slight mental whiplash. Over time, as your mindfulness grows stronger, that jarring sensation will become smoother and eventually disappear.
Because this course aims to help you relate nonconceptually from mindfulness consciousness, some of the written or spoken ideas shared may make you feel slightly disoriented. This happens when you are in ordinary consciousness and the words both bewilder that consciousness, and also ring true to you on an intuitive, nonconceptual level. This kind of trippy, disorienting feeling is a good sign that you are connecting more with your nonconceptual awareness. But if you never experience this, do not fear. The content and practices from this course will still benefit you.
Let’s turn now to define two other important terms we will be using.
Form and Formlessness
In this course, we define a form as anything that can be known with the traditional six senses of Eastern wisdom traditions. Those senses include the five we recognize here in the West: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. It also includes the sixth sense of mind. Mind knows thoughts, emotions, moods and physical sensations, which means we also consider those things to be forms.
Forms include all beings and all life forms. Forms may be visible - like a tree - or invisible - like the thought, “I love trees!” Forms may be tangible like a windmill, or intangible like the wind. Forms are anything and everything we can know from our six senses.
This may lead you to ask, well, what else is there besides form?
The answer to that is the formless. The formless is the infinite emptiness and nothingness that permeates and surrounds all forms - be those forms human beings or the molecules of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen we find in the air.
This leads us to the next obvious question: Why does the formless matter? Well, later in the course we will explain its significance, and help you investigate the formless to fully appreciate that significance. But to give you a taste of why the formless is significant, we look at another important question.
Who Am I?
Understanding our true self is a fundamental aspect of most wisdom traditions. In our culture, it is common to think of the brain as the source of our awareness. But science has not found the part of the brain responsible for our awareness. Might it be located elsewhere?
Many wisdom teachers say that just as the eye cannot see the eye directly, neither can awareness be aware of itself directly. They say awareness arises out of the ever-present, never-ending formlessness that is inside us and all around us. They say this formless awareness is our truest and deepest self.
Awareness, with its direct, nonconceptual understanding of our experience embodies true wisdom, making it the source of all wisdom.
Awareness also allows all experiences to be as they are. In other words, awareness is free of aversion, judgment, craving, and clinging. Thus, awareness embodies the qualities of unconditional love, making it the source of all love. This is why numerous wisdom traditions consider the four kinds of love to be states of being, rather than emotions. Because they are the perfume given off by our formless awareness.
Granted, this is a lot of unusual information to take in: formless awareness is our true self! It certainly doesn’t feel that way. It feels like we are the body and all of its thoughts, feelings and emotions. In future classes we will provide experiential evidence to help you question these assumptions. For now, we offer some possible evidence based on the experience of others, and wisdom tradition teachings to help you remain open to (not believe) the idea.
Possible Evidence that We Are Formless Awareness
First, many genuine and committed spiritual seekers have had liberating insights, out-of-body, or other paranormal experiences that confirm this fact to be true for them. This includes the spiritual teachers Peace Pilgrim, Dipa Ma, Jesus, Buddha, Mooji, Eckhart Tolle, and Delson Armstrong. If you diligently stay on the path, you too, will eventually experience these liberating insights as well.
Secondly, some people who have had near-death experiences remember that after they died, their awareness left their body and floated above the scene. From this perspective they saw their body and whatever was happening -- like doctors and nurses furiously taking actions to try and save them -- while feeling the deepest sense of love and peace they had ever known. When their body was resuscitated, their awareness re-entered their body. Experiences like these, have shown those who have them, that we are not the body, but the formless awareness that inhabits the body.
Thirdly, wisdom traditions refer to this formless awareness using a variety of different names. Jews may call it nefesh, neshamah, and Yahweh. Hindus may call it Ātman and Brahman. Pagans refer to the divinity in all life. Muslims may call it rūḥ, nafs, and Allāh. Christians may call it soul, spirit, the indwelling Christ, and God. Animists also refer to it as the spirit or soul. Buddhists may call it anattā, emptiness, Buddha nature, and formlessness. Other wisdom traditions refer to it as being, beingness, awareness, the higher self, the true self, our essential nature, God-essence, divine-essence, the Field, divine spark, Inner Light, and on and on.
These words all point to same thing that can only truly be understood nonconceptually. However, each tradition’s conceptual understanding of it is often different, leading many of their followers to fail to understand that they are all pointing towards the same thing.
We share this long list of different names to help you contextualize what we are talking about within your own wisdom tradition, and point to it as additional evidence that maybe there is some merit in this idea of formless awareness.
However, there are two major wisdom traditions that do not currently recognize or speak about the formless: Atheism and Science. Science is all about investigating, testing, and understanding the world of form, so it makes sense they have little to say about the formless. Atheists are also understandably skeptical about believing anything that cannot be experienced first-hand, and where evidence for it is dubious.
Thankfully, if Atheism and/or Science are the main wisdom tradition you belong to, then this course is for you. Our course uses the scientific method to mindfully investigate and test what benefits ourselves and all life, and what doesn’t. Through these nonconceptual investigations, you will gain insights that help you know from direct experience the reality to which these words point.
Moreover, during this course, belief in anything that we say is neither required nor important. You need never believe anything we say until you confirm it from your own experience to be true. We prefer you make these confirmations from the insights you receive from your mindfulness practices and not from a near-death experience. Haha!
But seriously, until you experience the truth of what we are saying for yourself, we just ask that you remain open to the ideas and be willing to test them with your own mindful investigations. In future classes, we will provide you with investigations and meditations to help you start seeing this reality more clearly.
Awareness’ Adventure
Finally, it is important to note that formless awareness has a very consequential aspect to it: It is willing to forget itself and merge with our conceptual consciousness. Once awareness merges, we are back in ordinary, conceptual consciousness with its my-thoughts-are-true bias. We then identify with the thoughts we think, the body, the feelings and sensations we feel, the roles we play, the relationships we have, and even the possessions we own. And since all of these things are constantly changing and beyond our full control, the grief, loss, and suffering caused by their constant change may be extreme and intense for us.
The purpose of that suffering is to remind us to be more mindful. So when we suffer, we take a mindful pause, we meditate, or we become aware of our breath, and this allows us to transcend ordinary consciousness and regain mindfulness consciousness, which allows us to relate to our experience with more love and wisdom. Then through investigation, we see how identification causes suffering, and learn how to transcend that identification and let go of suffering.
Of course, one may ask - why would our awareness merge with ordinary consciousness like that? To answer that question, we invite you to read this untitled poem by the anonymous author of The Book of Aquarius. We have slightly altered it to make it more inclusive, and easier to read, but changed none of its intended meaning. Please feel free to substitute the word “God” for the Higher Power of your understanding.
Untitled by Anonymous
If God knows everything there is to know,
Then I ask: how can God learn or grow?
If you knew all that was and all that will be,
Then how can any decision you make be free?
If you were everything and everything was you,
Then there would be nothing for you to do.
And there we find God, in this very position,
Imprisoned by the power of God’s own condition.
But there is a way to escape from this net,
All that God would have to do is forget,
Forget what God was and in ignorance find
Choice and free will, from confusion of mind.
And so God created a plane of limitation,
That confusing place we call creation,
A place of ignorance where we’re free to choose,
Free to make mistakes and free to lose;
For only a being who knows not what is true
Has the free will to choose what to do.
Through us, God can live, think, feel, and see,
An experience God knew, and now God can be.
Yet though we’ve forgotten where we come from,
The closer we get, the happier we become.
With control of awareness you can return,
But you have less choice the more that you learn.
Each mortal longs for the infinite’s touch,
Yet the infinite longs to know not so much.
We Are All One
Yes, this poem is saying that you are the Higher Power of your understanding (HPYU) and that the HPYU is you. Everyone else is too, so don’t let it go to your head. Haha.
Enlightened beings tell us that all that exists is the HPYU. HPYU is the source of all love, wisdom, creativity, creation, and the laws that regulate creation. HPYU exists as the formless and also as the essential awareness, intelligence, and force that animates all forms, as well as all of the forms themselves.
So, not only does formless awareness merge with the consciousness of all humans, the formless awareness also merges with the consciousness of every being and every life form (rocks, water, air, etc.), so HPYU may experience their reality as well. This happens not only on our world, but on all worlds; not only in this plane of existence, but on all planes of existence.
This is why several wisdom traditions say some version of: We are all one, HPYU is everywhere, and HPYU is all-knowing. HPYU is both everything and nothing at the same time.
HPYU knows that the essential nature of all life cannot be harmed, because they are all eternal and everlasting aspects of HPYU. This is also why some wisdom traditions talk about reality being a “dream of form” or an act of divine play. At the same time, the fact that all life is essentially eternal, must not be used to justify treating these mortal forms with anything less than the utmost respect and dignity.
Of course, this is me trying to put the great mystery of life into conceptual words, which means that the symbols themselves are not the full truth. You must look beyond the words in a nonconceptual manner to see what they point to for yourself. This course will help you to do that.
You’re All Good
If you don’t fully follow what is being said in this article, that is fine. This introduction is here to simply plant a few seeds. We will return to these ideas and explore them more thoroughly throughout the Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course.
The Key Takeaways
Let me now summarize some of the key takeaways from this article.
To end our suffering, we need to disidentify with all forms.
Living from conceptual consciousness keeps us believing falsehoods, suffering, and behaving unskillfully in ways that harm ourselves and others. This course aims to help you live more and more from a nonconceptual awareness that is the source of all love and wisdom. Mindfulness, coupled with investigation, helps us see how suffering is created through identification, and how suffering can be extinguished through disidentification.
If new to meditation, transitioning between ordinary and mindfulness consciousness may at times feel a bit jarring or even trippy and disorienting. But this will go away as your “mindfulness muscles” grow.
To learn how to disidentify from the emotions, feelings, and sensations we feel, we need to stop identifying with the conditioned idea that we are our body. Wisdom teachers and traditions talk about our true selves, or essential nature, as formless awareness, not any of the forms that awareness knows.
Moreover, awareness has this way of forgetting itself and merging with the ordinary, conceptual consciousness of human beings. This is so the Higher Power of your understanding can pretend to be a human being, with all the drama, excitement, and risk that that entails. Of course, the Higher Power of your understanding also merges their consciousness with the consciousness of all beings, and all forms, making everything alive, so HPOU may experience their realities as well.
As we learn to disidentify with thoughts, sensations, and the body, having an experiential knowledge of who and what we truly are will be a great help.
Finally, we will continue to explore these ideas throughout the course. You need not believe any of it on faith, just be open to testing these ideas to see if they are true in your own experience.
Thank you for reading. I wish you boundless mindfulness, love, and wisdom!
More Resources
1. To experience these realities more and more in your life, please take our Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course if you are not already taking it.
2. Read Investigating Self-Judgment to learn how to see how self-judgments are untrue, unkind, unhelpful, impersonal, impermanent, and safe to allow.
3. Read Experiencing Disidentification with False Thoughts to learn what it feels like to disidentify from false thoughts.
4. Read Testing the Effectiveness of Our Investigation to learn how well your investigation deactivated your identification with a false thought.
5. Read Investigate Thoughts to be see clearly what a thought is, and learn how to relate to them more skillfully.
6. For more info on near-death experiences, children who remember their past lives and reincarnation, check out these resources. And if these topics do not interest you, that is fine. You do not need to believe any of it to benefit from mindfulness and the practices we teach. These resources are just listed for those who want to know more about them:
Read Chapter 7 of the book Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, where she describes her own near-death experience. The book is available for free here. Peace Pilgrim is a US wisdom teacher who was not raised in any wisdom tradition. Through her investigations and many insights, she became a fully enlightened during her lifetime.
Watch episode 1 of the streaming series Surviving Death titled “Near-Death Experiences.” Available on Netflix.
Read Dr. Jim B. Tucker’s fascinating book Before: Children's Memories of Previous Lives. Dr. Tucker is the Director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. His book draws on decades of research into children from all over the world who remember their past lives.
Watch episode 6 of the streaming series Surviving Death titled “Reincarnation.” Available on Netflix. This episode introduces you to children who remember their past lives.
Banner photo credit: Mohamed Nohassi @coopery