CONTINUUM 003

IDENTIFICATION WITH SEPARATION OR ONENESS

Gary
While reviewing our conversation, VOFLAG came across this:

Flaviu
"If you speak as the flow of life YOU identify with the flow of life and become separated of "everything which is not flow of life". This is the ego-identification.

"When identified with something, with Anything, you become that and express something from that perspective."

Later,

​Gary wrote:
​Identifying with the Void/Flow of Life rather than with self, frees Gary from the grip of the world and its suffering. Resistance towards the world (human society, mass consciousness, and individual pain) holds Gary in its grip.

'The Void/Flow of Life as Gary' experiences oneness with life, and freedom from the pain of the world, when resistance is relaxed into acceptance, and self is unified with non-self.

Q: When identified with VOFLAG, is this ego identification? Or, since there is nothing that is NOT the Void/Flow of Life, does this bypass separation?

The Void/Flow of Life is the non-self/self?

Flaviu
Yes you observed correctly.... ANY identification with Anything (if doesn't include as well the opposite) is ego identification.

VOFLAG, your term, contains simultaneously and instantly, as you say, both opposite poles of the apparent polarities (both dualities of the separation) and thus uniting the two separations in and as Oneness and considering thus the Oneness as real and the separations as illusory.

However if one identifies with VOFLAG but does not identify with something which is not VOFLAG, separation is maintained (for example, considering that VOFLAG is real AND something else which is not VOFLAG is not real but is an illusion). Then identification with one pole is still present, and identification with the other pole is not present, separation exists and ego-identification still occurs separating the two polarities.

If "the void" is one with "the self" meaning a separated self is non-existent, there is no ego identification or separation. But if the self is separated of the no-self and one thinks/feels about him"self" as a self rather than a NO-SELF (United as One with the no-self) then obviously separation is still there, and the self is considered real instead of illusory.

Yes, when "the Void" is realized as no-self AND the flow of Life is AllThatItIs, they are one without separation, Oneness is realized.

Therefore when one is expressing within duality and not in oneness there are always two polarities and even Oneness is expressed as the opposite of "the absence of Oneness".

Oneness is rather integrating both opposite polarities (all polarities as one) than identifying only with one of them. This can happen even when one expresses only one polarity if the awareness of no-separation is present.

It's a subtle distinction between speaking as Separation or as Oneness.

Oneness is always there even if separation thinks/feels about itself as being separated. Only the awareness of the self-identification process makes the difference.

Gary
​You wrote, "However if one identifies with VOFLAG but does not identify with something which is not VOFLAG, separation is maintained (for example, considering that VOFLAG is real AND something else which is not VOFLAG is not real but is an illusion). "

VOFLAG is "As Gary", so there is a distinction between VOFLAK "As Kati"
or VOFLAF "As Flavius".

But these are distinctions, not separations. Or, they are APPARENT illusions of separation.

The Void/Flow of Life is One. Nothing can be outside The Continuum (the unity of the Void and the Flow of Life) -- nothing, not even nothing, can be separated from it.