When we notice that we’re believing a lie and living as if it were true, we become present outside our story. Then the story falls away in the light of awareness, and only the awareness of what really is remains.
~ Byron Katie
To understand what identification with a separate self is, it is important to begin by realizing your main belief, your central story about yourself.
Many people, actually most, experience an undercurrent of unfulfillment, emptiness and longing, feelings which are closely related to a mental story based on their past experiences. The diagnosis of one's central story is incredibly sobering, and freeing oneself from it brings great relief. Our central stories usually revolve around different versions of being unloved, unseen, abandoned, different, unimportant, or around an all-too-common sense that “something's wrong with me”.
Even if you hold a belief that you're a born leader, a queen or king of life, deeper probing will probably reveal a feeling of some lack, grounded in an early-childhood story you still believe. Almost everyone of us holds this kind of core beliefs, perhaps unknowingly. They are the basis of our habitual, mostly unconscious thinking. What's more, this central belief is largely the driving force of our actions and root of our separate self-identification. Although the separate self has never really existed, most of us live as if it were real and defined who we are.
Now try to get to the main story you're telling about yourself. When the central story is diagnosed, smaller stories will probably fall off by themselves so don't worry about them now.
The central story manifests in almost all of your relationships. Not only the intimate ones, though that's where it is evident most clearly. To be precise, it shows through the pain these relationships trigger in you, and your interpretations of that pain. The pain points to the root of your identity, and at the same time, the core of your leading narrative. It is from there that a certain belief stems, formed in our early childhood as a result of the circumstances we live in. Then, a pattern emerges which we go on to re-create in almost all of our relationships.
If you still don't know how that sense of lack, being unseen or unappreciated might relate to you, I will give you a few examples of its manifestations that may strike you as your own behaviours or reactions. It is when you look for love and attention in others, when you compare yourself to them, when you judge yourself as better (or worse) than them; when you try to convince someone that you are right, to control and manipulate; when you are judgemental, complaining, avoiding difficulties, aloof, jealous or lying. As you can see, the sense of lack accounts for a wide range of behaviours, and I have only mentioned a few.
Your leading story can be revealed in many ways. For example, the tendency to perceive others as successful usually shows that you see yourself as one who fails. When somebody acts differently from what you expected you may believe yourself to be unaccepted, or unloved (depending on the type of the relationship between you). When others seem to be powerful, it might be a sign that perhaps you perceive yourself as weak. If you're constantly looking for happiness, it's clear that you feel unhappy deep down. Your constant pondering on past events probably indicates that you still believe you are a victim.
All kinds of so-called external circumstances can lead you to realise one crucial thing: the way you see yourself. The story you keep telling yourself. If your happiness depends on how other perceive you, it is in most cases tainted by a sense of something missing. Realise that this type of identities (while you may think them most obvious and indisputable) are like flags in the wind – completely unstable and dependent on “others”. They are based on stories of your own making.
True self-confidence has nothing to do with a mental story. Nor with defining yourself through relationships. It comes from being settled in oneself, in what you really are outside of all stories. When you no longer look through the filter of identification with your mind, you will understand how it works. Whoever believes in a story that is woven around a sense of lack, will encounter circumstances that confirm that story, people who remind him or her about it.
Waking up from your central story will give you more confidence, clarity and openness. The feeling that “something is wrong with you” will start to fall away. You will no longer judge people by the stories you created about them. You won't have to resist or deny your own individuality. On the contrary, you will naturally start expressing yourself, your aptitudes and talents in a natural way. You will not have to control reality or hide in the history of how “you” were harmed. Once you stop believing in your separation, freedom will become your natural element.
Now sit for a couple of minutes and try to see what your central story is.
Are you beginning to recognise it? Review your relationships, especially those moments when you felt rejected, hurt, unwanted. What conclusions ask to be drawn? Take a good look.
In other words, see how you felt then and how you do now, as you recall those situations. Name the feeling and notice what it's based on. Contemplate this.
Did you feel unloved, offended, worthless or insecure? Did you feel that you had to prove something to the world, show it how great or important you are?
Stay with it for a while, feel it and continue to contemplate.
Look within and try to find the person who is concerned with this pain, this story. Can you locate that person? How is he/she manifested? You may find that your concept of that person is overlaid with emotions of sadness, anger, annoyance, irritation...
Are you sure those feelings are you?
Are you a story about all that, or does it just appear in you?
Notice that the emotions come with a story about being rejected, harmed, treated unfairly, and lacking.
Have you been harmed by somebody else, or are you doing harm to yourself when you believe the story that the mind keeps suggesting?
Is the story true for right now?
Who is it about?
Do you miss anything when you're not thinking about that thing?
Notice: How many (thousands of) times have you heard that same story in your head? That the world is unfair, or that you're superior, special, unique.
Is it really a story about you, or is it just a mass of transient thoughts and feelings taken for reality?
How do you feel when you don't take this up?
How do you feel when you wake up from the story?
This type of inquiry is not at all about avoiding painful emotions, quite the contrary; allow yourself to feel them now, just see that they are stuck to the central story.
Is it true?
Don't rush… Think of the idea of being unloved, or for that matter superior: is that idea really you?
Can you find the entity inside whom that idea is about?
Do you really find such an entity?
Probably not… It's just the longest-running mental rut you still follow. Wake up. It isn't you. It's just an old story.
Now realise that the story within you has no owner. No author. Nobody to feel abandoned, unloved, unimportant, or great. These are just thought-and-emotion reactions triggered by some circumstances that once happened. You don't have to replay them again and again. All you need to do is stay aware and catch yourself any time your mind recurs to them. As you may see, they say nothing about you. For there is no owner of such thoughts, only a resulting feeling that belongs to no one. The moment you discover this, an awakening follows, and the impression dissipates.
Sometimes the awakening from our leading story is so radical that our side stories evaporate with it. Then we see that the separate self has only been an invention. Often, however, the old rut of the central story reappears very soon. It comes and goes. It's a natural process. Nothing's wrong about it.
In this case, simply go on exploring, inquiring into your nature. Keep on probing until the rut no longer impresses you. This coming week, contemplate the manifestations of your central story, contemplating the above tips.
The article is a fragment of the book “Enlightenment 24/7: Practices and contemplations for the whole year”. Each practice proposed in the book (there are 52 of them, one for each week of the year), each contemplation, encourages introspection, internal testing and emerging from oblivion. You can find the book here: