Identifying with our emotions and body is a major obstacle to spiritual development. It creates a veil that distorts the reality of who we are as a pure center of self-awareness and will.

By Roberto Assagioli, Unrevised notes of Lesson XI,  March 29, 1931, and Year IV Lecture X – March 22, 1931, From the Assagioli Archives in Florence, Doc. #23250, #2872. Translated by Jan Kuniholm

(Editors note: I have put together two documents in this text. Disidentification from the emotions and Disidentification from the body. The latter is only an extract of the original document, which can be viewed in full in the archive – KS)

In past meetings we have seen that in order to awaken spiritual consciousness, to ascend to the luminous regions of superconsciousness, it is necessary to do a twofold inner work:

1. A direct and positive one, of elevation and expansion of ordinary consciousness.
2. A negative one, of detachment, liberation, and disidentification from everything by which the consciousness is absorbed, seized and enslaved; that is, from almost everything that constitutes our ordinary personality.

We have already talked about the first liberation to be attained, that from identification with the body. We have shown that we are not our body, that we have to regard it as a tool that we use but that is not part of our true being. Today we are going to talk about another liberation, another more subtle and more arduous disidentification: that from our emotions and feelings.

Man generally is completely identified with his emotions; in fact, he derives his sense of living and being from them. When he “vibrates in a contrary way” and does not feel, he does not even seem to live or to exist. He prefers to feel pain rather than not feeling at all. This explains so many facts of life.

The search for sensation and excitement is revealed:

1. In the craze for stimulants such as alcohol, opium, morphine, cocaine, etc.
2. In the thirst for spectacles (bread and circuses), especially exciting and dramatic, even brutal spectacles such as circuses, wrestling contests, bullfights, adventures . . .
3. In adventurous readings, romance, etc., in the passion for play, for risk of all kinds . . .            

Yet identification with emotions is an illusion. A vital demonstration — given to us and imposed on us — that we are not our emotions, consists of the stages of aridity.

Aridity could be defined as the temporary paralysis of emotional and affective life. Just as one may have a paralyzed limb or other part of our physical body, so a paralysis of emotional and affective life may occur . . . A most painful state, of a special sorrow, not sharp pain; but a sense of emptiness, of nothingness, a deathly chill. It seems to the person that he no longer lives, that he does not exist, that he has lost himself, he seems to be a living corpse. . . .

In fact, the part with which she identified vitally is temporarily paralyzed, practically dead. Yet, the person realizes that in spite of everything she continues to live. If she knows how to observe herself and has psychological finesse, she realizes that she is a paradox. That is, while she does not feel anything, she must also recognize that she knows that she does not feel. Indeed, emptiness, barrenness, internal death are perceived by the person in a clear, continuous and nagging way — it is like a negative feeling, a keen realization of what is missing, and this is what makes the condition so tormenting. The person tries to distract herself, to forget, but she fails: that negative feeling haunts her, continually gripping her attention.

How do you explain this? The only explanation is that there is a different center of consciousness in us, superior to the emotional consciousness: a center that perceives this paralysis. Gradually the person realizes that one can live — that one can live even without emotional consciousness. This is the great lesson. But there is more: in the absence of ordinary emotions and feelings, in that emptiness, in that inner silence, spiritual consciousness sometimes awakens. This consciousness is a new path, quite different from the previous one; instead of the particular emotions and feelings, one has a sense, a direct perception of the Spiritual “I” or Self that is different and detached from them.

Important practical conclusions

If this is the path of spiritual development, of seeking and discovering the true “I” or Self, we should not passively wait for life to impose itself on us, to drag us along this path. We can follow it spontaneously, willingly: it is done faster and we suffer less, it is done gradually and more harmoniously, with fewer crises.

Program:

1. Recognize intellectually and convince ourselves of what was said above.
2. Discipline and curb the thirst for feeling.
3. Exercise mastering the emotions. Stir them up and drive them out at will. Inner silence, recollection. We come to feel that we are not our personal emotions. They come and go and the “I” remains; they arise and fade away, transform and alternate, while there is a fixed center of consciousness in us that does not participate in that flow. It observes as a spectator, it assimilates the vital lessons given by emotional experience, it develops and enriches its self-consciousness through the play of emotions; but by nature and essence it is fundamentally different from them; it belongs to another, higher sphere of reality.

Other aids to disidentification

Cultivate peace. Do emotion-inhibition exercises; in this opposition between “I” (self) and will on the one hand, and emotion on the other, diversity is realized. Meditation on the infinite and the eternal. Important warning: being wary of trusting one’s emotions does not mean you no longer feel, becoming pieces of stone, cold, hard, or inhuman (an oft-repeated slander). Instead, it means becoming masters and not slaves: to be masters of our emotions and choosing among them, cultivating the good, useful and elevated ones, and mastering the others. This is a more conscious feeling. Indeed, the higher life of feeling is refined, expanded, and enriched. For every violent and overpowering emotion that is overcome, new and more exquisite feelings are acquired.

Just as in the field of art, savages and boys know how to admire flashy colors and striking contrasts, but they miss all the harmonies of half-tones, nuances, etc.; and in music they love only deafening sounds and superficial, obvious, trivial melodies, and are deaf to complex harmonies, to the beauties of classical polyphonies, of a Bach fugue or a Beethoven symphony. So it happens in the whole field of feeling.

Whoever overcomes, abandons and transcends the lower, conquers the higher. Also, and especially in the life of feeling, the very profound esoteric warning of Jesus is true:

“Only he who loses his soul will save it.”

Disidentification from the body

… So in order to rise to the superconscious levels, to reach spiritual consciousness, it is necessary to realize our deepest self, to feel its reality to discover its true nature. And to do this we must first of all distinguish it from the not-self (not-I) [1] — from what it is not — and with which it is instead continually identified and confused in us. Method of discrimination of disidentification of the ego from the non-ego (Viveka of the Indians). The self (“I”) has this peculiar tendency: to identify with the not-self (not-“I”) — to immerse itself, almost to lose itself in something to the point of forgetting, to the point of denying its true nature.

Maya[2] – Avidya[3]

This [originally] had a purpose, a most important reason: the acquisition of self-awareness, of a sense of individuality. But enough of that now — it’s time to awaken to the consciousness of our true nature, to liberate ourselves, to manifest our latent powers . . .

The first step on this path is to differentiate ourselves — to disidentify ourselves from our bodies.  Indeed, it can be said that for a certain number of people (not so small), we have to start further out — from the clothes! There are really people who almost identify with their clothes. They give such importance to outward appearance that they almost change personality depending on how they are dressed. This was pointed out with witty exaggeration by M. Bontempelli[4] in one of his recent plays, and this had already been discussed from a higher and more symbolic point of view by T. Carlyle in his Sartor Resartus.

But returning to the body, we can say that almost everyone feels at one with their body; they own its conditions and sensations, saying, I am hungry, I am thirsty, I am tired. They struggle or even fail to conceive of their own separate existence, independent of their body. It is a lived materialism. We need to get rid of it. It is the first door to break through or open to get out of prison.

Let’s see what tools we have to do this — what facts and reasons can help us in this:

. . . We […] do not know the external world, matter in its reality, but only our own image, our representation of it, which we project to the outside world.

The second way, the philosophical way, is in a sense even more radical. It undermines the very foundations of matter in whose substantial objective reality ordinary man naively believes. Idealistic philosophies, such as Indian Vedanta, Buddhism, and in Europe the conceptions of Berkeley and later idealists, and the various “critiques of knowledge”[5] make it evident, in more or less different ways, that it is a gross illusion to believe that things per se are as we perceive them. They appear to us as such or through a double deformation, and indeed are subjective construction.

Of the mysterious universe around us have only limited glimpses, allowed by our five senses which pick up only a small fraction of the vibrations that exist: there large discrepancies between auditory, thermal and visual vibrations and what we can sense.[6] We have no direct organs to perceive the faster ones (corresponding to x-rays, etc.). With other senses the invisible would be visible — sounds would be seen and colors heard. etc. etc.  (radio waves. . . ) With different perceptions opaque solids would be transparent and vice versa . . .

Recent advances in physics have finally dealt the final blow to the classical conception of matter as an extended substance endowed with mass. [The concept of ] matter believed to be solid was dissolved by physicists, first into a dance of infinitesimal particles as distant from each other as the sun and the planets, then even into charges of electric energy in gyrations of ions and electrons, in vibratory quivers of the ether of a speed inconceivable to us.

The laws of matter and energy, [once] believed to be so firm, prove to be not not valid at the level of the infinitely small: the very last scaffolding of space and time on which [the materialist conception of] the external universe swings was based . . . [?] and according to some has already collapsed under the blows of the new conceptions of relativity . . .

To what does all this lead if not to the final demise of all materialism and positivism with their unworthy subjugation of spirit to matter; to the confirmation of healthy critiques of knowledge of an idealistic character, and finally to the triumph of the spiritualist conceptions that have affirmed the supreme reality of Spirit in all ages?

Here, however, we must understand ourselves: we must not go to the point of absurdity and caricature. No sane spiritual conception denies the empirical and apparent existence of the external world, just as no spectator denies the apparent and momentary existence of the scenery, the actors and the unfolding of the drama represented in the theater.

But precisely as the scenes unfolding in the theater have no permanent and autonomous reality — they are an arbitrary fiction created by the author and are voluntarily presented by the actors — so it is concerning the phantasmagoria of the external world. The spirit is the free author of the cosmic fiction; it has imagined it, it has voluntarily restricted itself in it, and has instructed the actors — our souls, which, however are oblivious and have forgotten their true spiritual identity, and have identified themselves with the parts they represent.

But . . .  I realize that I am going into and raising difficult complicated issues!

Back to the essential point: the convergent results of the most modern science and spiritual philosophy of all times lead to the conclusion that matter has an empirical semblance but no substantial and permanent reality. That it is an aspect, a product, a mode of manifestation of spirit, which is the only substantial and efficient reality.

From this there derives a practical consequence of enormous value: that the Spirit can do everything over matter — there are no limits to its transformative and redemptive action. This is the luminous and arousing truth that shows the possibility of spiritual cures and of all our highest, boldest and most joyful achievements.

[1] In Italian, non io.

[2] In the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, māyā, “appearance,” is “the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real.” —Tr.

[3] Avidyā is a Sanskrit word whose literal meaning is ignorance, misconceptions, misunderstandings, incorrect knowledge, and it is the opposite of Vidya. —Tr.

[4] Italian playright, poet, novelist and composer Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960). —Tr.

[5] probably a reference to Kant. —Tr.

[6] Humans can hear only between 20hz and 20khz, but there are “sound” vibrations both below and above that range; the human ability for tactile and thermal sensing is likewise very limited, and the range of human vision (380-700 nm) takes in only maybe one-trillionth of the actual electro-magnetic spectrum. This note is an attempt to collate the rough notes Assagioli assembled in the original manuscript. —Tr.