To increase your chance of feeling either disidentification or compassion with a thought more challenging than “I am a giraffe,” we will redo the Experiencing Disidentification Investigation with a self-judgment that you have already thoroughly investigated with the Investigating Self-Judgment questions as part of the Mindfulness Mission 3.03.

So, what does compassion feel like? One way that the love of compassion arises is as a combination of both unpleasant and pleasant feelings. It’s as if the pleasant feelings hold the unpleasantness mindfully in wisdom, peace, and kindness. Overall, the experience of compassion is pleasant, and often profound and moving.

As part of your mindfulness missions, you will be using this form repeatedly to test how effective your investigations have been at helping you deactivate false thoughts. On subsequent usages, feel free to only read the italicized text, and reference other sections as needed.

Investigating and Experiencing Disidentification

Take a 10-breath-cycle mindful pause to boost your mindfulness. As you answer the questions, we encourage you to mindfully remember why this false thought is not true, helpful, useful, personal, and safe to allow.

Then, use your nonconceptual awareness to observe and directly experience the answers. Use that nonconceptual information to then put the answers into words. For questions 1-5 answer “yes” or “no.” For questions 6-8, follow the instructions. 

Answer honestly and genuinely. Whatever your answers are, honest and genuine answers are the “correct” answers when doing investigations.

1. Think a falsehood that you have thoroughly investigated. When you think this thought, does it generate any mental or emotional disturbance in you?

2. Think the falsehood again. Do you take this thought personally? Do you see the thought as “your” thought, or invest it with a sense of self?

3. Think the falsehood again. Do you consider this thought to be important?

4. Think the falsehood again. Do you fear, hate, or dislike this thought?

5. Think the falsehood again. Does this thought generate any behavior impulses in you? (Such as a desire to run away, fight, collapse, or turn towards worldly sense-pleasures?)

6. Think the falsehood again, and mindfully notice how you head, heart, and body feel as you relate to this thought. Gently notice this. What feelings or sensations do you feel?

7. What are the feeling tones of those sensations (are they pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral)?

8. Are those feeling tones worldly (sense-based) or relational (not sense-based)? (You may have a hard time distinguishing between worldly and relational feeling tones at first. That’s OK. Just do your best. This will become easier with practice and the insights that these investigations generate.)

Understanding the Results

Here are some guidelines to help you understand your results.

1. Complete non-identification: If you answered, “no,” to questions 1-5, and felt only pleasant feelings when relating to the thought, you experienced complete non-identification with that falsehood. Wonderful.

2. Compassionate non-identification: You answered “no” to questions 1-5, yet you felt a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant feelings with the pleasant feelings predominating. This is the experience of compassionate non-identification. Your mindful wisdom, and kindness turned towards the thought and saw how it was unkind, untrue, unhelpful, impersonal, and safe to allow.

   Why do you still feel unpleasantness? Either some parts of the mind still identify with the thought, or, in the past, this falsehood had a lot of power over you, so the echo of that power still remains in the unpleasant feelings it generates. Keep relating to it with nonidentification to compassionately starve and weaken its power. 

3. Compassionate partial-identification: If you answered “yes” to one or more of questions 1-5, and felt a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant feelings, but the pleasant feelings predominated, you experienced compassionate partial-identification.

   Parts of you still identify with the thought, but your mindfulness, wisdom, and kindness turned towards the thought and deactivated a lot of the identification. The behavior impulses may have been there, but they felt more like an echo of their normal strength, so you could ignore them and remain behaving skillfully while the thoughts were present.

4. Identification: If you answered “yes” to one or more questions and felt mostly unpleasant feelings, parts of you were still mostly identified with the thought. You may need more mindfulness, or you might need to investigate the thought again to see more clearly all of the ways it is unkind, untrue, unhelpful, impersonal, and safe to allow.

Journal Activity

Once you complete the investigation, answer these questions in your journal:

1. Of the four options listed above, how did you relate to the falsehood?

2. What insights did you learned from this investigation?

The Wiliness of Falsehoods

It is helpful to think of false thoughts as having a life of their own. They seek to gain advantage and control you, and they can be very cunning in their mission. When you are mindful, peaceful, happy, alert, and well-rested, they know you can easily deactivate them by disidentifying with them, so they rarely arise in those moments.

Instead, they wait until you are in physical pain, tired, unhappy, and/or -- most importantly -- relating to your senses from normal, conceptual consciousness before they enter your mind. They know that you will be more likely to identify with them in these instances. And identifying with them is the food that nourishes and strengthens them so they have more power and more control over you.

That is why we encourage you to immediately take a mindful pause whenever you notice any of the falsehood alarms ring. This helps you starve the falsehoods, and weaken their power, while taking back your own. The rest of the BATLADI practice that you will learn in the Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course will further help you disidentify from them.

This is also why we encourage you to remain mindful at all times by having a daily meditation practice, resting your attention on your breath throughout the day, and taking several mindful pauses a day, whenever you remember to.

This is also why we encourage you to love and care for your body and mind by giving them good sleep, supportive relationships, restful meditation, healthy food, clean water, and exercise and so you can be healthy and alert during your waking hours.

They’ll Be Back

Realistically, the false thoughts you investigate will keep arising to test if you have really learned the lessons they are here to teach you. Expect false thoughts to team up on you especially when you are unmindful, and suffering mentally, emotionally, or physically.

We meditate and practice these practices, so that we can do them when things are tough. When things are tough, the aversion inside us will say, “I don’t want to do the practice” and encourage us to give up, but we must be strong. With routine practice, we can overcome these obstacles and do these practices even when difficult.

Why Do False Thoughts Exist?

Falsehoods exist for two main reasons. First, they exist to help guide us home to love, truth, and joyful service. They fulfill that purpose when we starve them of identification to such a degree that we never identify with them again. But until that moment, they will do their best to grow strong, control, and manipulate you.

Secondly, falsehoods exist so that the eternal, ever-present, all-knowing, boundlessly loving Higher Power of our understanding, can experience life fully, in all of its diversity, beauty, tragedy, success, and loss. We will deepen our understanding of this idea in future classes, as well as in the Disidentifying from Form article LINK that is part of the Mindfulness Mission 3.03.

Additional Resources

• If you are not already, consider taking our Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course which helps you develop a daily meditation and mindfulness practice.

• Read Investigating Self-Judgment to learn how to see how self-judgments are untrue, unkind, unhelpful, impersonal, impermanent, and safe to allow.

• Read Experiencing Disidentification with False Thoughts to learn what it feels like to disidentify from false thoughts.

• Read Investigate Thoughts to be see clearly what a thought is, and learn how to relate to them more skillfully.

• Read Disidentifying from Form for additional helpful information on how and why mindfulness helps us disidentify from our thoughts, and eventually, all forms.

Banner photo credit: Jason D @jasondeblooisphotography