Name: Steve Mensing
Topic: Personality Clusters vs Identities
Sent: 16.49 - 5/19 2001
Hi Napsters!

Liz asked: What are identities? Can they be cleared?
Can whole identities be cleared?

First I'm not real hot about going after a whole identity and trying to clear it with one gulp techniques. I experience a lot beliefs and aspects make up an identity. From what I've seen of "identity clearing one gulp style" is that plenty of aspects and beliefs may get submerged. With one gulp methods we may be left with the illusion of a fully cleared identity, yet many aspects and beliefs are alive and running their magic in the unconscious. I prefer to tackle Personality Clusters and their webs of thoughtforms and emotions. Over the last two months I've shared a number typical Personality Clusters and some of their more frequent beliefs. You might find them in the NAP archives or up on Sergey's English Emoclear website. Clear these and you really pull the stuffings out of a cluster and find far less resistance than going after a trance identity. Personality Clusters is the way I do it.

Let me talk about some of the typical notions of identities. Indentities are frequently talked about in alternative healing circles. Identities appear to be the repository of unconscious beliefs. A common way of discovering an identity is ask questions like:

What sort of person or identity might believe that?

What sort of person or identity might feel that?

What sort of person or identity might act that way?

These questions are supposed to elicit the identity. The "unconscious" begins a search for the identity and the answer automatically surfaces. The answered identity may not make sense at first for the questioner--it comes like a spontaneous intuition. Frequently folks new to intuitive responses may resist this answer. Identities are frequently hidden out of our awareness and sometimes highly resisted. Doing them whole can often engender much resistance. These unconscious views of self may have a strong value to the person who holds them. They may serve useful functions and we better recognize this. Going after the whole "chunk" at once can be unconsciously blocked and thwarted. Remember these identities are the ways folks hypnotically view themselves. That's why some therapists refer to them as trance identities. Giving them up also may mean, at the unconscious level, that we are giving up our real self. Often people who have not experienced their core self or essential nature will feel terrified at some level giving up these trance identities. It helps when someone is trading in an hypnotic part of themselves that they they "know" their dealer will provide them with a better model. Hopefully an essence based experience of the essential self. A person better know at some level their trade-in will be a good one or they will resist this transformation strongly. It can feel like ego death.

Our identities exert powerful influences upon us. They create definitions, no matter how illusory, of what we supposedly are. Giving up an identity can create uncertainty and anxiety in people. Identities of course have their downside. They tend to hypnotically keep themselves alive and flavor our perceptual experience. Identities create a momentum of feeling and thought that influnces our unconscious choices in behavior. This momentum makes for an automatic and narrowed response to life. Spontanaety and creativity in response are blocked by identities. We hit the same nail with the same hammer and this creates a loss of freedom. Trance identities stand in the way of full living and living from our essential nature.

My preference is go after personality clusters, belief by belief through their attendent feelings, and to clear into essence so the trance identity is replaced by an experience of our core self. In doing this work it seems prudent to accept this trance self and to note what important duties it performed in our lives. Then belief by belief, feeling by feeling return the trance self to formlessness and in doing so, experience our essential nature. This is the transformation of an identity into our core nature.

Take care, Steve

Name: Steve Mensing
Homepage: http://Nap.Fanspace.com
Topic: "I"dentities
Sent: 06.33 - 5/20 2001
Hi Folks:

I see there was a lot of activity about clearing identities during the evening. Yogi and Lyle had much to add. Yogi notes that clearing from essence is a very powerful way to clear.

For me essence is the great universal solvent. It takes back its disocciated "I"dentities and their attendenet beliefs. When we clear in essence, our beliefs, emotions, and sensations are rapidly dissolved back into the essential self or core self. That's what transformational clearing tech is all about.

A little more about "I"dentities. Identities are based on the notion of "I" am. Anytime we make the self statement "I am this" or "I am that" and believe it, we are both making an overgeneralation about our self and are being disasocciated from our essential self. When we make this statement: "I am" (fill in the blank)" we are choosing to see our self as having only this one particular quality and are forgetting our many, many other qualities.
"I"dentities can create powerful illusions about ourself if we believe them at the gut level. We can have overly positive and negative stuck identities. Further a highly believed identity will remove us from our essential beingness. "I" dentities are often the way we navigate in this world. Our language structures invite "I"dentities. Most folks believe they are these separate "I"dentities even when some of these "I"dentities conflict with other "I"dentities at the edge of awareness or attract beliefs and feelings creating challenges in healthy and balanced living.

The "I am" self can begin to be created the instant we ignore the open awareness between our thoughts and begin to label and to react to this new perception. This mental creation draws our attention away from our essential self and dissociates us from it. We now have a conception of self. We have a "map" and not the "territory" as Korbzybski would say. And if we believe this "I am": (fill in the blank), we will have a one-dimensional view of our self that a concept will provide. This one-dimensional view of self can be very delimiting in some instances because it leaves out our other qualities. It can also inflate our self view.

Our mind often misses that these "I"dentities are concepts and insubstancial. Out of these "I"dentities, our minds builds a matrix creation called the sense of self. In building this conceptual sense of self, we become highly selective. We sometimes miss important information, pass over weaknesses and strengths, and unconsciously choose what memories we will call upon to verify both our world view and our sense of self.

We often forget that this conceptual sense of self is mostly a collection of habitual beliefs. We take it for real and in doing so we lose touch with our essential nature. Positive elements exist in this webwork of "I"dentities called self. The ego helps us survive among other positive duties. Knowing our sense of self serves useful functions, we better be aware of its powers to be an overgeneralizing force and to disconnect us from our deeper self.

In growing and returning to our essential nature, it is important to notice the "I"dentity's illusion and it's habitual self-creation. Sometimes it's easy to fall under the "I"dentity's entrancing spell. Hopefully, if we're paying attention, our feelings and emotions will call us back to our essential nature.

Take care, Steve

Name: Yogi
Topic: More on identities
Sent: 23.02 - 5/19 2001

Steve and Lyle's way of going after identities as a cluster of beliefs is very thorough. Being able to do this from the reference point of a formless(identitiless) self is even more powerful. Often, a person stuck in an identity complex will not be able to easily access an essence state (or what I might call a source being awareness, basically a formless self occupying no fixed viewpoints).
In this situation, starting with the beliefs that they can accessed and picking them apart one at a time is a highly effective approach.

Also using one of my perrennial favorites, the transparent belief exercise from the ReSurfaciing Book, is a handy technique for getting to the beliefs which are more deeply buried, and tend to be the beliefs that are close to the root of an identity.

When a belief is very close to your felt sense of who you are, a strong shift will happen if you clear it.
Steve is right is saying that it is a kind of death.
If your unconscious is not convinced that you can still be you without that beliefs/identity, then there will be strong resistance to letting it go. You must know at an intuitive level that you will be stronger without the identity, then you will more easily let go of it.

For example, if you have been using identities or personality clusters to get love, attention, or other forms of support from others, there will be payoffs from the identity and costs to letting it go. Until you intuitively feel that you will have more positive attention and higher quality love and support from NOT having the identity, you will unconsciously cling to it.

This is one benefit of writing down the beliefs of a personality cluster, or running the transparent belefs exercise and writing down the transparent beliefs you uncover. Then you can clearly see how the beliefs limit you, and what you will stand to gain by clearing them.

Meditative practice is helpful here because it can assist you in realizing from an intuitive level that beliefs and identities are things that you have, not who you are. Its much easier if you realize that what you are doing is dropping ballast you've picked up along the way, and not discreating your real self.

Here again the dissassociation thing is real important. The more thoroughly you can see all the aspects of the identity (or if you are using a feelings-based approach, the more aspects of the identity that you can experience without resistance), then the more complete your clear will be. So you want to separate from the identity naturally, after you have satisfactorily experienced it without resistance.
Rushing to clear may result in a lot of fallout which will come back to haunt you later. You want to do it cleanly and just handle one thing at a time in the beginning. The identity will clear more easily if you can hold it without resistance or desire.

Working your way through each belief in a personality cluster will therefore result in a very thorough clearing. You will get to a kind of rock-bottom viewpoint, feeling, or belief that on which the whole cluster is sitting. Clearing this will result in quite a drop, and open you to essence. From the essence states, you can clear stuff fast and efficiently.

Successful identity clearing should result in an essence experience. If you cannot easily access and occupy a more expanded, formless sense of self, it is because some identity/beliefs are still blocking.

As this relates to the Avatar course, this is why the idntity rundowns come in the last section of the Avatar course, and after the inititation. You would be hitting pretty deep essence states, or source states as they are called, by that point in the course. Properly done, the Avatar identity rundowns are meant to be done from being grounded in a more ormless sense of self.

Everybody uses identities in day to day life, and we have our favorites that we are most comfortable occupying. Identities are thus not good or bad or right or wrong in themselves, they are simply filters we view our experience through.

The flipside of being able to clear identities is being able to occupy identities consciously, and without resistance. You can have fun deliberately occupying a viewpoint and ejoy the interactions with others that it creates. You can be a fierce warrior and stand up to all those bad guys, then turn right around and be a big teddybear for your special girl. Just remeber to drop the teddybear stuff around the baddies and not fiercely attck your girlfriend. It's when you go unconscious and the identities come out at inappropriate times that trouble starts. The Tyson knockoput blow is great in the training ring, but not at the dinner table.

Ideally, identities are things that you have and can use, not things you are that use you. Right now I am occupying the identity of a tired person who needs a good night's rest. Being a lump on a log is actually a pretty good thing right now. ZZZZZZZZ....

Sleeping peacefully,
Yogi