Dismetaidentificationism

Introduction

What Dismetaidentificationism is Not

• Dismetaidentificationism is an impressively long word (24 letters) describing the essence of my spiritual teaching. This teaching is not religious; I do not intend to draw you away from your current religion, whatever that might be. My teaching does not provide answers to questions like "Where did we come from?" or "What will happen to me after death?" or even "How can I be a good person?"; it just answers the question "How can I escape from suffering?". Because of its narrow focus, my spiritual teaching is compatible with most religions.

What do you mean by spiritual?

• You may wonder how I can claim that my teaching is spiritual but not religious. I define spirit as "your pure awareness or consciousness." Whether or not your spirit is capable of surviving death or has other mystical properties is not for me to say because these potential properties of spirit are inconsequential to escaping from suffering in this lifetime. My teaching is not religious because I do not ask you to accept any of it on faith. If you test my assertions, you can determine for yourself whether or not my teachings are true.

The Difference between Pain and Suffering

• Pain
  • When I say pain, I am either referring to unpleasant physical sensations or unpleasant emotional experiences. Time or drugs are required to escape from these, if escape is even possible, because no amount of spiritual growth can completely anesthetize you against these.
• Suffering
  • When I say suffering, I am referring to the discontentment that you experience in response to unpleasant physical sensations or unpleasant emotional experiences. This half of the unpleasant experience can be escaped through spiritual growth.
• Elaboration
  • Pain is "Ouch!" Suffering is "Make it stop!" Pain is "It hurts." Suffering is "I don't want it to hurt." Feeling sad is a form of pain. Wanting to be happy again is a form of suffering.
  • Technically, the desire to end pain isn't suffering unless that desire is part of an identity with which you identify, but aside from that small inaccuracy, the previous paragraph illustrates the difference rather precisely.

The Causes of Suffering

• There are many causes of suffering and it would be fallacy to single out one cause as the "actual" cause. Fortunately, you only need to remove one of the causes in order to prevent suffering that would have resulted. Here are some of the general causes:
  • Pain
    • Pain, whether physical or emotional, is the most direct cause of suffering. It is so direct that people often overlook it or equate it with suffering and then go on to blame their suffering on whoever or whatever seems to have inflicted the pain. Although this cause is avoidable in many cases by avoiding its causes, it may not always be avoidable. The measures needed to avoid all the causes of pain would most likely be overwhelming and paralyzing, if even possible. Even drugs will fail to completely eliminate some types of pain. Thus, pain does not seem like a suitable candidate for removal.
    • In Defense of Pain
      • Saying that pain is one of the causes of suffering is not to say that pain isn't a good thing. It is. Without pain, our efforts to survive would be greatly impaired, no matter how strong our survival instinct was. The failure to feel chest pain could result in a preventable death by heart attack. The failure to recognize a sharp pain on the back could result in bleeding to death before one even realized there was a problem. The failure to feel anxiety could result in fatal carelessness. And the failure to feel anger could result in continued vulnerability to those who would take without giving anything in return.
      • Obviously, pain is a good thing, even if it is unpleasant. It is suffering to which I object. Why suffer if it is not a necessary part of life? If one can be content with pain, then why be discontent with it? Even if you are content with pain, that does not mean that you can't or won't take action to avoid it if it is avoidable. Accepting pain isn't the same as inviting it. I think that pain can have the same beneficial effects as suffering in the absence of suffering, and yet in the absence of suffering, the malefic effects of suffering are mostly lost.
  • Transience
    • When you are thrust into a completely new situation, you may experience discomfort, fear, discontentment, and thus suffer. If you are robbed of something that you valued, you may grieve and be discontent, and thus suffer. In effect, change can lead to suffering. It has been said that the only constant in the universe is change. This isn't technically true, but it is spiritually relevant. To us, it means that transience isn't a good candidate for removal either.
  • Desire
    • Unfulfilled desire and the associated discontentment practically lead straight to suffering. The removal of unfulfilled desire from your life is certainly possible! If you can learn to be grateful for and content with what you have, then you can take your focus off what you want. Unfortunately, and perhaps counter-intuitively, fulfilled desire is not so easy to remove; we call it attachment.
  • Attachment
    • Buddhism correctly identifies attachment as a cause of suffering. When we assume that transience is inevitable, then attachment to an object, a person, or a situation will inevitably lead to suffering when the object is lost, the person leaves, or the situation changes. Buddhism aims to eliminate this cause of suffering. The removal of attachment from your life certainly seems more plausible than the removal of pain or transience, and it is a laudable endeavor, but it involves the long, tedious, soul-searching process of identifying all attachments, and then somehow letting go of them, which is easier said than done!
  • Identity
    • Buddhism identifies a sense of self, which I call "your sense of identity", as one of the transient objects, in this case, an illusion, from which you must sever your attachment. I propose that the attachment to your sense of identity is the only attachment which you must sever, because, by eliminating it, you eliminate the link between you and the thing which has attachments and desires, namely, your sense of identity, which is easier than eliminating all the attachments and desires individually. What attachment to your sense of identity means, how it leads to suffering, what is meant by eliminating it, and how you go about doing this are the primary topics of my teaching.

What is identity?

• Identity
  • Your sense of identity, henceforth identity, is the collection of all notions relating to who you do or could readily perceive yourself to be. In lay speak, it's your idea of who you are.
• Metaidentification
  • Identification with your identity, henceforth metaidentification, means that your identity has significance to you; it matters to you; it defines who you believe you are.
• Identity Addiction
  • Addiction to metaidentification, henceforth identity addiction, means that you would continue to identify with your identity even if you realized that it was not in your best interest to do so.
    • When this addiction is overcome, the sense of identity remains, but you no longer identify with it.
  • In other words, identity addiction is the compulsion to derive a sense of identity from your thoughts, feelings, and/or body. When you believe that you are these things or have these things, then the inevitable conclusion is that if any of these things are unpleasant or hurt, then you yourself must be hurt or otherwise discontent.
    • However, when you tell someone that they are not their thoughts, emotions, body, or some combination of these things and possibly more, even if they want to believe you, their initial inclination is to distrust you, much the way an alcoholic would distrust someone who told him that he could cope with life's challenges without alcohol. Most people have had a sense of identity for so long that they cannot imagine a life without it. Even if they think of themselves as an immortal spirit, they still allow pain to destroy their serenity. Even if they try to believe that they are just their awareness of things, the moment pain arises, they forget this belief and react as if the pain has power over them, which, ironically, is what gives pain the power to lead to suffering. This is the addiction.

Who am I?

• Mental Models
  • We form a model of our perceived environment in our minds. We are conscious of ourselves because we include a model of ourselves in relation to this mental model of our environment. If this model of ourselves is allowed to become confused with things in our environment, that is, if our mental model of ourselves is not just in relation to the environment, but is formed from a part of it, then we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to suffering because people (or chance events or paranoia) can attack or chip away at our concept of who we are by changing our perceived environment, which we experience as suffering.
  • If it's possible to eliminate this mental model of ourselves, I haven't found it yet. My advice is to eliminate the confusion between the two models. Define yourself as something which is not a part your environment; I consider myself to be the awareness of my environment. Since you are aware of your body and your mind, it follows that neither your body nor your mind is part of who you are, even if they both form a part of your sense of identity. By thinking thus, you can protect yourself from suffering. Certainly, people will still be able to cause your body physical pain and your mind emotional pain, but if you classify your mental models of your mind and body as part of your mental model of your environment instead of as part of your mental model of yourself, then pain will not bother you.
• What does that mean?
  • You are only your awareness or consciousness.
    • You are that which is aware of your situations, your body, your feelings, your thoughts, but you are not these things which you are aware of. This is an essential viewpoint to becoming free from suffering and it can be seen from a Descartesesque line of reasoning: Is there anything that you can know for certain? You are aware therefore you exist. From this follows the answer to the question "Who am I?". You are that which is aware; you are the awareness.
  • You are not who your sense of identity would have you believe you are. Your sense of identity is comprised of everything that you explicitly or implicitly believe you are.
    • For example, you may explicitly believe that "I am male" or "I am female". These explicit beliefs can and sometimes are stated as declarations of identity, but ultimately they are illusory. You may find yourself in a male or female body, but your body is part of your environment. To believe that your body is part of who you are is to confuse the model of yourself with part of your environment.
    • Implicit beliefs are rarely stated in explicit terms. An example is the thought "That's my brother" which means "I am his sibling". It's an undercover declaration of identity. The very fact that you believe your thoughts is to implicitly believe that "I am whoever my thoughts say I am" in relation to the world. In the case of implicit beliefs about identity, it is easier to see how they constitute a confusion between the mental models of yourself and your environment if they are stated explicitly, but since they are rarely stated explicitly, it is actually harder to see these errors in practice.
    • Usually, thoughts perpetuating the illusion of identity can be recognized by their inclusion of the words "I", "me", or "myself" for explicit beliefs about identity, or "my" or "mine" for implicit beliefs about identity.
  • My assertion that the belief that you are only your awareness is necessary to freedom from suffering is not to say that a belief that you are a child of God, or a spirit which inhabits your body will impede your progress in escaping from suffering. These religious beliefs about who you are are beliefs about who you will always be even after death. The belief that you are a spirit may be true; it is beliefs about the transient realm such as "I am a worker" that will inevitably lead to suffering if not relinquished.

Last Updated: 2009-05-06

The author, Marq Thompson, wished the content of this website to be uncopyrighted after his death.