Sogyal Rinpoche on Discriminating Awareness

[our many selves]

From yesterday's Rigpa Daily Glimpse:

The more often you listen to your discriminating awareness, the more easily you will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even laugh at them for the absurd dramas and ridiculous illusions that they are.

Gradually you will find yourself able to free yourself more and more quickly from the dark emotions that have ruled your life, and this ability to do so is the greatest miracle of all.

The Tibetan mystic, Tertön Sogyal, said that he was not really impressed by someone who could turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion.

~ Sogyal Rinpoche

This may be the single greatest gift I have received from Buddhism -- the ability to free myself from dark emotions when they come up. In the past, I would get angry and stay angry, or get depressed and stay depressed. Even when I wanted out of the feelings, I had no tools to free myself from the energy.

But as I have learned to separate myself as subject from my emotions as objects, I have become much more able to say, "I feel hurt," rather than "I am hurt," and then let it go. The first phrase treats the emotion as a thing I experience, the second phrase treats the emotion as a thing that I am -- a fusion with the emotion where "hurt" becomes the subject, the me.

We can do this with parts of ourselves as well. All of us have many selves -- we "contain multitudes," as Walt Whitman said. These parts, or selves, or subpersonalities have developed for many reasons, but usually to protect us (as vulnerable children) from pain or trauma. When we outgrow them, they do not go away. If we encounter an event or a person or an experience that mirrors the one that engendered the subpersonality in the first place, it will be triggered to act. A sub can literally take over our personality and displace the self. [In some forms of mental illness, a sub or an alliance of subs have completely displaced the self.]

If we can disidentify with a sub that has been triggered -- through discriminating awareness -- we can relate to it as a separate object rather than only being able to see through its eyes. And that is exactly what happens when a sub is triggered -- we are literally possessed unless we can disidentify with it.

If we can learn to think in terms of "I have many subs, but I am not my subs, Who am I?" we can begin to break free of the trance state that subpersonality activation produces. We can refine that phrasing to me more specific:

I have an angry self, but I am not my anger, Who am I?
I feel my anger, but I am not my feelings, Who am I?
I think angry thoughts, but I am not my thoughts, Who am I?
I have angry needs, but I am not my needs, Who am I?
I experience all these things, but I am none of these things, Who am I?

This is simply a variation on the disidentification exercise that is used in psychosynthesis, a variation of transpersonal psychology created by Roberto Assagioli.

As we learn who are subs are and what they need, we can reintegrate the ones we no longer need, learn to manaage the ones we still need, and learn how not to let them take over who we are. It's no fun to look back at something I have done and wonder who in the world that person was -- cause it sure wasn't me.

Tags: Discriminating Awareness, Sogyal Rinpoche, Buddhism, selves, subpersonalities, psychosynthesis, Roberto Assagioli, disindentification exercise