I’m now back after a few weeks away on retreat and thought I’d share a practice I came up with while away. It involves an exploration of what we identify with.
On this topic, the philosopher Thomas Metzinger has a great concept he refers to as the unit of identification. In his words this is:
The phenomenal property with which we currently identify, exactly the form of currently active conscious content that generates the subjective experience of ‘I am this.” (source)
In other words, the unit of identification is what are currently identifying with as ‘us’.
Insight meditation can be thought of as a process of dis-identification and this process results in progressive changes to our unit of identification. While there are many practices that move this process along (including this one we did back in November, which involves an intention to notice that phenomena are not us as they arise), there is also a more direct way to bring the ‘phenomena known as us’ into the light. That’s what we’ll be getting into this week.