Many sayings of the fathers start out from the assumption that we must first die to the world in order to be up to the tasks that the world sets us: “A brother asked Father Moses, ‘I see a task before me and I cannot fulfill it.’ The old man said to him: ‘If you do not become like a dead body, like those who are buried, you cannot master it.'”
If I completely identify with a job, if I make my sense of self-worth dependent on whether I can do it, then I will ultimately be unable to master it. The fixation on my task blocks me. 1 am not free to tackle it, because I absolutely have to get it right. Fear of failure prevents me from doing a good job. Dying means giving up identification with the task. Then I am free to do it well, because everything doesn’t depend upon how I get it done. Dying to the world, or imagining that 1 am lying in my grave, expresses what transpersonal psychology nowadays calls dis-identification: I look at my thoughts and feelings, but I don’t identify with them. I see the tasks that I have to carry out, but 1 don’t identify with them. I have a job, but 1 am not this job. I feel anger, but I am not my anger.
Psychosynthesis, developed by Roberto Assagioli, has worked out the method of dis-identification. I look at my thoughts and feelings, for example, my fear. I sense this fear, but then I go back behind the fear to the unmoved witness, the untouched self. This inner core, the spiritual self, as Assagioli calls it, is untouched by fear and by the feelings that mark me in my emotional domain. Dis-identification liberates me from the compulsion to have to carry out the task perfectly. For transpersonal psychology dis-identification is true therapy. So long as we identify with a problem, it becomes permanent. We won’t get really free from the problem until we stop identifying with it. “Dis-identification from the ego, by which we recognize our true essence, is in transpersonal psychotherapy the most important prerequisite for our liberation”.
The method of dis-identification is evident in yet another saying of the fathers: “A brother came to Father Makarios, the Egyptian, and said to him: ‘Father, tell me something. How can 1 obtain salvation?’ The old man taught him: ‘Take a look at the tombstones and pour scorn on the dead.’ So the brother went, jeered and threw stones at the graves. Then he came back and reported to the elder, who asked him: ‘Didn’t they say anything to you?’ He answered: ‘No.’ Then the old man told him: ‘Go there again tomorrow and praise them.’ And he came to the old man and reported: ‘I praised them.’ And he asked: ‘Didn’t they answer?’ The brother replied: ‘No!’ Then the elder taught him: ‘You know how badly you abused them, and they didn’t answer – and how much you praised them, and they said nothing to you. That is how you must be if you wish to find salvation. Be a corpse, heed neither the injustice of men nor their praise -like the dead, and you will be redeemed.”
At first glance this method seems to be somewhat macabre, as if we were supposed to be as insensitive as the dead. But in truth the point is to transcend the level of identifying with praise and blame, to practice dis-identification. According to this saying, our life succeeds only when we stop making ourselves totally dependent on praise and blame. For then we are never on our own. Another interesting point here is that the feelings of praise and blame are first acted out excessively before transcending the level of the feelings, before the young brother realizes that on that level he’ll never find the way to success in life.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
