The Road to Disidentification: From UFO to UFS - 07.15.10

“Each of us must be responsible for our own liberation. It’s not something that an other can do for you,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. But, paradoxically, “Liberation is not an attainment. . . . The reason that it’s not an attainment, is that Liberation actually requires losing something. The problem is we’ve already attained something too much; we’ve attained a false identity. That’s what gets in the way of our bliss. . . . So it’s not that we have to get something, but we have to let go of something. And yet it’s the thing that we’re most proud of, this ego that we’ve constructed. It’s our doll. It’s our great idol that we worship. And who can let go of that, ‘What will I be if I let go of that?’”

“And it’s this anxiety of being nothing if I let go of the mask. And being vulnerable—because you could also use the metaphor of saying the ego’s like a tank, like one of these war machines: it’s full of armor to protect itself against attacks; it’s got a cannon mouth right in the middle; it’s got all kinds of little holes for machine guns; it can run on these tracks in any terrain; it’s really tough—it can put up with all kinds of nastiness and give back all that it gets. The problem is that it can’t fly. It can’t accomplish joy; you don’t go out for a joy ride in a tank. It’s only geared for war, and it forces you to see life as a war.”

“So if we want to get out of the tank and start to fly, then we have to become like a UFO. Except in this case it’s a UFS: we have to become an Unidentified Flying Subject, not an object. And we become unidentified when we stop identifying with the ego. And then we’re free and we can fly, and we don’t have any more need for defense mechanisms cause there’s nothing to defend, nothing to protect, once we are unidentified.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 15, 2010.