Identity, Identify (with)

Although out of the safe harbor of his own identity anchored in this time and this place,
the traveler may still be clearly aware of this time and place as well.

An individual who has experienced transcendental states has a strong feeling of cosmic
identity.

As for identity, it is not really lost. On the contrary, it is found; it is expanded to include
all that is seen and all that is not seen.

At the extreme, the individual consciousness seems to encompass the totality of existence
and identify with the Universal Mind.

Enlightenment comes when the individual self realizes it has no separate identity beyond
this Absolute.

Experiential identification with inorganic matter is often accompanied by fascinating
insights of a philosophical, mythological, religious and mystical nature.

Experiential identification with the inorganic world is not limited to the secular aspects,
but often has distinct numinous or spiritual qualities.

I’m more closely identified with what no longer exists than what actually is. (The ego
identity is based on selected memories of the past.)

Identification with the creative energy of the cosmos often inspires a new attitude toward
life and becomes the foundation for a new understanding of existence.

If Jesus could realize his identity with God, you can also, but this God does not have to
be idolized as an imperious monarch.

If purified, the individual mind can identify itself with the Universal Mind, the inner
consciousness.

It provides new levels of understanding of one’s own identity, the dimensions of being,
human life and existence in general.

Learning, memory, mood, judgment, identity, consciousness can be transformed by
electrical and chemical stimuli.

LSD subjects report experiences in which they identify with various animal ancestors in
the evolutionary pedigree.

Man as ego does not see nature at all. For man as ego is man identifying himself or his
mind, his total awareness, with the narrowed and exclusive style of attention.

Many examples of the identification of a consciousness-changing drug with God and
associated with religious ritual could be cited.

One’s true identity is felt as something extremely ancient, familiarly distant, with
overtones of the magical, mythological and archaic.

Our Hebrew-Christian spiritual tradition identifies the absolute—God—with the moral
and logical order of convention. (God is not a narrow, little meaningless convention.)

Our precious “self” is just an idea, useful and legitimate enough if seen for what it is, but
disastrous if identified with our real nature.

People are already familiar with suffering. What they need is a reminder of their true
identity which is bliss.

So long as man identifies himself with the ego, he is trying to be God. It is only when he
knows that his center of being is the infinite that he is really free to be man.

The Church has always been highly suspicious of mystics because they seem to be
insubordinate and to claim equality or worse, identity with God.

The ego is the social image or role with which the mind is shamed into identifying itself,
since we are taught to act the part which society wants us to play.

The essential effect of the psychedelic experience is the death of the time-bound ego and
the consequent realization of the Supreme Identity.

The individual consciousness seems to encompass the totality of existence and identify
with the Universal Mind.

The kingly concept of God makes identity of self and God or self and universe,
inconceivable in Western religious terms.

The realization of the Supreme Identity, of the truth that the Self is the infinite and not the
ego, does not involve the obliteration of the ego or of finite experience.

The sensation of one’s identity is a result of social conditioning and is itself a social
institution.

The subject can witness or identify with the birth and development of the cosmos
involving dimensions and energies of unimaginable scope.

This Other World could be experienced as the moment when one emerges from the
prison of “limited mind” and becomes identified with the “limitless mind.”

To identify with the ego is to confuse the organism with its history, to make its guiding
principle a narrowly selected and incomplete record of what it has been and done.

We are ignor-ant of our real identity as members, functions, expressions and
manifestations of everything that is to be seen in the sky and much more.

When the mind is completely purified, knowledge of the true identity of one’s own Self
arises.

Whether one is enlightened or ignorant, there is in reality no escape from the Supreme
Identity.

A superior religion goes beyond theology. It turns toward the center; it investigates and
feels out the inmost depths of man himself, since it is here that we are in most intimate
contact, or rather, in identity with existence itself.

As soon as the ego’s act of identifying itself with the future can be seen as something
present, one is seeing it from a standpoint superior to the ego, from the standpoint of the
Self.

Before the invention of Christianity, sex was more often identified with religion than sin.
(It is questionable whether sex was ever identified with sin before the coming of
Christianity, but there is no question that sex was identified with religion.)

cosmological mysticism—It’s an ecstatic experience of Nature and Process which leaves
the subject with a sense of having acquired important insight into, as well as identity
with, the fundamental nature and structure of the universe.

Every initiation into what lies behind the passing show involves an unmasking which is
the same thing as the death of the role or identity that one has assumed in the socio-
political game.

Human beings have a profound need for transpersonal experiences and for states in which
they transcend their individual identities to feel their place in a larger whole that is
timeless.

In experiences that have transpersonal dimensions, the individual has the sense of having
transcended his or her own identity and ego boundaries as they are defined in the
ordinary state of consciousness.

In many cases the subject discards the spectator role which he had assumed for the
historical tour and finds himself taken up into a seeming identification with the stages of
evolutionary process. (eyes closed)

In the paradisal vision, the individual has a different sense of identity. It is not merely
itself, bounded rigidly by its own skin. Its identity is also its whole field, which, in
mystical terms, is to say that it is one with the universe.

In this type of experience, the subject has the feeling of encountering the Creator of the
universe or even the full identification with him. This can be accompanied by
extraordinary insights into the process of creation.

It is an illuminating insight into the very essence of existence. The experient does not
gain rational understanding of the cosmic process, but reaches instant comprehension by
losing his or her separate identity and literally becoming the process.

Most people, it seems, who relax and “let go” have the universal experience of
discovering a single Reality, a oneness with all things, an identity with God, with the
Supreme Being, with the Higher Self, or whatever you wish to call it.

Profound transpersonal experiences move the individual out of the narrow framework of
identification with the body-ego and lend to feelings and thinking in terms of a cosmic
identity and unity with all creation.

Realization of the fundamental identity of the individual consciousness with the creative
principle of the universe is one of the most profound experiences a human being can
have.

Social conditioning fosters the identification of the mind with a fixed idea of itself as the
means of self-control and as a result man thinks of himself as “I,” the ego. Thereupon the
mental center of gravity shifts from the spontaneous or original mind to the ego image.

The “death” which must be undergone to behold the vision of God is the death of a false
identity and the withdrawal from the world which is required for liberation is withdrawal
from the game that this particular person, so-and-so, is my one and only Self.

The habitual egocentric mode in which man identifies himself with a subject facing a
world of alien objects does not fit the physical situation. So long as it remains, an inward
feeling is at variance with reality.

The mystic’s subjective experience of his identity with “the All” is the scientist’s
objective description of ecological relationship, of the organism/environment as a unified
field.

The mystical experience is essentially the being aware of and being identified with a from
of pure consciousness, of unstructured transpersonal consciousness which lies, so to
speak, upstream from the ordinary discursive consciousness of everyday.

The sensation of relationship is the impulse underlying the great religious traditions of
the world—the sensation of basic inseparability from the total universe, of the identity of
one’s own self with the Great Self beneath all that exists.

This whole image of the universe as an imperial and monarchial state is a joke. The
ultimate identity of man with God is not identity with this Commander-in-Chief of the
universe.

We can perhaps see the whole course of a psychedelic experience as an effort of
consciousness to rid itself of false identifications and experience its own everchanging
identity.

What happens outside the body is one process with what happens inside it. This is that
“original identity” which ordinary language and our conventional definitions of man so
completely conceal.

When the Self is no longer identified with the ego, when in certain spiritual practices, it
penetrates and realizes its own depths, it simply KNOWS that it is eternal and all-
inclusive.

An individual who has a transpersonal experience develops an entirely new image of his
or her identity and cosmic status. The materialistic image of the universe in which the
individual is a meaningless speck of dust in the vastness of the cosmos is instantly
replaced by the mystical alternative.

Experiences of plant identification often mediate deep understanding as to why certain
plants have been considered sacred by some cultures. (Plant identification doesn’t mean
what the name of the plant is, but experiencing plant consciousness or what it is to be a
plant. Psychedelic plants are the most sacred.)

Here, the individual feels that he is experiencing the innermost divine core of his being.
His individual self is losing its seemingly separate identity and is reuniting with what is
perceived as its divine source, the Universal Self. This results in feelings of immediate
contact or identity with the Beyond Within, with God.

Identification of consciousness with ego consciousness leads to confusion of mind and
intellect, to acceptance of appearance as reality, to materialistic formulations of the
interaction of mind and matter, to isolation and fear, to increasingly negative conceptions
of reality and ultimately and very logically, to disaster.

Identifying with the consciousness of the Universal Mind, the individual senses that he
has experientially encompassed the totality of existence. He feels that he has reached the
reality underlying all realities and is confronted with the supreme and ultimate principle
that represents all Being.

It is not uncommon for subjects reporting evolutionary experiences to manifest a detailed
knowledge of the animals with whom they have identified—of their physical
characteristics, habits and behavior patterns—that far exceeds their education in the
natural sciences.

It may happen that the subject becomes intensely involved with a thing, then the thing
becomes a symbol and may be identified with some key person in the subject’s life.
Then, the intense involvement with the thing becomes an intense involvement with the
person.

Nature seems to the subject a whole of which he is an integral part and from this
characteristic feeling of being a part of the organic “body of nature” the subject readily
goes on to identify with nature in its physical particulars and processes. No drug subject
similarly identifies with a room or other artificial environment.

One can transcend the limits of the specifically human experience and identify with the
consciousness of animals, plants or even inanimate objects and processes. In the
extremes, it is possible to experience the consciousness of the entire biosphere, of our
planet, or of the entire material universe.

Our capacity to identify with the consciousness of plants contributed to the fact that many
cultures hold certain plants to be sacred. Plants with psychedelic properties have been
incorporated into the religions of many cultures and are considered deities or the “flesh of
the gods”.

The individual identifies with only one aspect of his or her being, the physical body and
the ego. This false identification leads to an inauthentic, unhealthy, and unfulfilling way
of life, and contributes to the development of emotional and psychosomatic disorders of
psychological origin.

Transpersonal experiences which involve transcendence of spacial barriers suggest that
the boundaries between the individual and the rest of the universe are not fixed and
absolute. Under special circumstances, it is possible to identify experientially with
anything in the universe, including the entire cosmos itself.

Among Jung’s best known contributions is the concept of the collective unconscious, an
immense pool of information about human history and culture that is available to all of us
in the depth of our psyches. Jung also identified the basic dynamic patterns or primordial
organizing principles operating in the collective unconscious, as well as in the universe at
large. He called them “archetypes.”

Individuals in nonordinary states of consciousness who tune into these experiential
realms participate in dramatic, usually brief, but occasionally complex and elaborate,
sequences that take place in more or less remote historical periods and in various
countries and cultures. These scenes can be experienced from the position of an observer
but more frequently from experiential identification with the protagonists. (eyes closed)

One can experience himself in a specific situation in his childhood, in the birth canal
and/or in ancient Egypt. While aware of his everyday identity, he can identify
experientially with another person, another life form or a mythological being. He can also
experience himself in a different location in the world or in a mythical reality. (eyes
closed)

One may enter one’s visions and seem to be walking through gardens, art museums,
medieval castles, futuristic cities, etc. Archetypal imagery may appear, and one thus finds
oneself encountering mythological characters such as angels, demons, dragons, and
Grecian gods. On the boundary of mystical consciousness, it is not uncommon for
Christians to encounter an image intuitively identified as the Christ.

Our personal boundaries may appear to melt and we can become identified with other
people, groups of people, or all of humanity. We can actually feel that we have become
things that we ordinarily perceive as objects outside of ourselves, such as other people,
animals, or trees. Very accurate and realistic experiences of identification with various
forms of life and even inorganic processes can occur in transpersonal states.

Our problem is that the power of thought enables us to construct symbols of things apart
from the things themselves. This includes the ability to make a symbol, an idea of
ourselves apart from ourselves. Because the idea is so much more comprehensible than
the reality, the symbol so much more stable than the fact, we learn to identify ourselves
with our idea of ourselves. Hence, the subjective feeling of a “self” which has a “mind”.

The world of myths, legends, and fairy tales literally comes to life. The subject can
witness numerous scenes from the mythology and folklore of any culture in the world and
visit any mythical landscapes. He or she can also experientially identify with legendary
and mythical heroes and heroines or fantastic mythological creatures. Such sequences can
emerge in meaningful connection with personal problems of the subject. (eyes closed)

There is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words. That awareness
can expand beyond the range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond
everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the
differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around
them.

We’re not just our bodies. That’s an illusion. Our physical forms are just a temporary
condensation of consciousness in material form. This one consciousness is our true
identity, and we all know this deep within us. I know that you know that we all know that
we are one. We’re all just playing this game. In ordinary reality, we’ve deliberately gone
to sleep on this knowledge.

When we experience identification with the cosmic consciousness, we have the feeling of
enfolding the totality of existence within us, and of comprehending the Reality that
underlies all realities. We have a profound sense that we are in connection with the
supreme and ultimate principle of all Being. In this state, it is absolutely clear that this
principle is the ultimate and the only mystery.

The thing that most aroused my interest was the tone and contents of what my classmates
who had taken the drug were saying. They talked to each other in stunned, excited voices
about love, sharing, identity, unity, death, ecstasy—topics not generally discussed by
psychology students except with cynical flippancy or heavy academic seriousness—but
certainly never from experienced confrontation, as was happening now. (That was Ralph
Metzner.)

Fully expanded consciousness feels an identity with the whole world.
It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the ego.
Life is altered because the very root of human identity has been deepened.
Our true identity is the total process of the world.
Psychedelics can “trigger” a new sense of identity.
The LSD ecstasy is the joyful discovery that ego is only a fraction of my identity.
The very root of human identity has been deepened.
True identity is indivisible oneness, beyond negativity and dualities of any kind.
We can leave our present identity and move throughout our nervous system.
We have lost touch with our original identity.
We learn to identify ourselves with a conventional view of “myself”.
When the game has run its course, the Self awakens to its original identity.

He has ceased to identify himself with his ego, with the image of himself which society
has forced upon him.

He sees that his ego is his persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of
experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself.

All day, in wave after wave and from all directions of the mind’s compass, there has
repeatedly come upon me the sense of my original identity as one with the very fountain
of the universe. I have seen, too, that the fountain is its own source and motive that that
it’s spirit is an unbounded playfulness which is the many-dimensioned dance of life.

He finds himself entering into an identification with the evolutionary process.

A person describing it can talk about a complete loss of the ego and simultaneously claim
that his or her sense of identity expanded so that it encompassed the entire universe.

I felt as though I was remembering something I had known before I was born, but had
forgotten by identifying with the physical and mental world as total reality.

I knew myself to be this single, encompassing Consciousness. I knew that its identity was
my true identity.

I sensed that my identity was shifting from being the manifestation of this Energy to
being the Energy itself.

All identity with self dissolved. There was no sense of time-space, only an awareness of
Being. At no time was there a sense of the individualized self. I never knew when “I”
entered the stream, only the emergence out of it.

As my body was rocked with wave after wave, I lost contact with my feet and my legs. I
began to experience a total identification with nature, as though my body were merging
with the earth, like a tree with roots in the ground.

My identity and awareness seemed to spread throughout the room and even beyond into
the forest outside. This meant when somebody came into the room, as they did, it was as
if they were walking into “me.”

Psychedelic subjects reported experiential identification with other people, animals and
various aspects of nature during which they gained access to new information about areas
which they previously had no intellectual knowledge.

There were brilliantly colored geometric patterns flashing across. I could not identify any
one of the patterns. They were varied in shape and size and color and they flashed all
around, everywhere. (eyes closed)

I learned that I am more—so much more than this body that walks the earth. I learned
that I’m still me, even without a name, a family, an identity, or a body. I almost think that
the body is a prison that holds my consciousness inside narrow limits, to make it possible
to function on earth. Once I was out of it, the limitless was my home.

I was experiencing how consciousness manifests itself in separate forms while remaining
unified. I knew that fundamentally there was only One Consciousness in the universe.
From this perspective my individual identity and everybody else’s appeared temporary
and almost trivial. To experience my true identity filled me with a profound sense of
numinous encounter.

She lay down on the grass in a field beneath a bright sun and soon was living out an epic
of creation in which she identified with “the Great Goddess—Mother Earth.” Her
experience of this identification began when she first became aware that “for some time”
her body had “no longer existed in its usual limited form” and that now she was “one
with the earth.”

Subjects repeatedly reported that they experienced consciousness of the ocean. On other
occasions, they have identified with what they felt to be the consciousness of fire. Many
LSD subjects also stated that they experienced consciousness of a particular material or
even the microworld of the atoms. (You can experience and/or identify with the
consciousness of anything.)

The perennial philosophy and the esoteric teachings of all time suddenly made sense. I
understood why spiritual seekers were instructed to look within, and the unconscious was
revealed to be not just a useful concept, but an infinite reservoir of creative potential. I
felt I had been afforded a glimpse into the nature of reality and the human potential
within that reality, together with a direct experience of being myself, free of illusory
identifications and constrictions of consciousness.

a cosmic adventure in consciousness aimed at solving the riddles of personal identity,
human existence and the universal scheme

a vision of God as a radiant source of light of supernatural beauty or a sense of personal
fusion and identity with God perceived in this way

alterations of sense perception, of emotional level and tone, of identity feeling, of the
interpretation of sense data and of the sensations of time and space

“cosmic consciousness” the shift from egocentric awareness to the feeling that one’s
identity is the whole field of the organism in its environment

discovery of one’s true identity and of the dimensions of one’s being that connect the
individual with the entire cosmos and are commensurate with all of existence

experiential identification with the primordial Emptiness, Nothingness, and Silence,
which seem to be the ultimate cradle of all existence

my central sense of identity, which springs directly from the heart of reality and is not
subject to birth or death

seeing through the social institution of the separate ego, no longer confusing his identity
with his social role or taking his role seriously

self-knowledge or self-awakening—the discovery of who or what I am when I’m no
longer identified with any role or conventional definition of the person

the dramatically intense perception of objects and the concomitant sensation of
identification with them

the realization of essential Being, of consciousness and identification with the Universal
Life

the realization that what he thought was his identity was in fact only a tiny fragment of
the Real Self—and this is liberation

the transcendence of verbal word-concept games, perceived space-time dimensions, ego,
and personal identity

the very highest form of Bliss, wherein he achieved the state of total identification with
all of reality

what all of us has always been, a part of the divine substance, a manifestation of love, joy
and peace, a being identified with the One Reality

the leap across entangling thickets of the verbal, to identify with the totality of the
experienced

a sense of merging with another person into a state of unity and oneness, retaining awareness of his or her own identity (One can also experience being another person, even someone from ancient history.)
a deep appreciation and personal identity with the total grandeur and beauty of nature
a disentanglement of one’s Self from every identification
a new sensation of identity
a realization of identity with the infinite
a realization of one’s original identity with God
a shift in the sense of identity—from the ego to the universe
a vast journey of growing self-awareness and a return to our true identity
discovered a new unexpected source of strength and their true identity
experience the “inner identity” between ourselves and the world
experiential identification with the Universal Mind
found one’s true identity in the inmost Self
have entirely transcended the ego and reidentified with the divine
identification with undifferentiated vibratory energy
identification with the Universal Mind, with cosmic consciousness, or with the Absolute
letting go of limited self-identifications
liberates the human mind from its constricting identification with the abstract ego
man’s search to identify himself with something more meaningful than his mortal life
my basic identity, the eternal Self of all selves
my identity with the infinite
our eternal identity
our original and eternal identity
realizing one’s identity
realms where all hitherto accepted belief systems and identity structures were suspended
remember your original identity as the source and ground of the universe
reveals the ego to be a fiction and leads to a new sense of identity
supreme identity, inmost light, ultimate center, self more me than myself
that strange intuition of an eternal identity
the animal otherness underlying personal and social identity
the apprehension of an Ultimate Unity with which the seeker unites or identifies
the birth of a new kind of consciousness and a new apprehension of man’s identity
the destruction of the old sense of identity
the eternal identity beneath the temporal
the identity of the human spirit in its pure and real essence with the Supreme Spirit
the internal mystery of man’s own identity
the realization of man’s inner identity
the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions and of the ego or identity
the ultimate identity of oneself and the Godhead
to awaken our true identity
to return again into one’s true identity, that is, to fusion with the absolute
to transcend the identification with the ego