Another topic I keep coming back to….
The whole process of Ground awakening to itself is very much a differentiation of 1st person experience and 3rd person identity.
In our first person experience, what is alive in immediate awareness, we are awareness and the content of awareness is awareness itself. It is beyond and includes all polarities, free from any center, absent of an I with an Other.
And in our third person identity, as a he/she/it, an object in the world, as others see us, we are a human self in the world with a particular age, gender, nationality, preferences, set of likes and dislikes and so on. This third person identity is crucial for the functioning of this human self in the world, and it arises in immediate awareness as anything else. When awareness awakens to itself, there is no more or less identification with this human self and its identity than anything else arising.
When these two are confused, there is an identification with our third person identity. This he/she/it in the world becomes an “I” and appears as a subject, and with this identification comes a life and death drama with all its many flavors. What is already alive in immediate awareness becomes filtered through this temporary identification, making this field of awareness and form, inherently absent of an I with an Other, appear as I and Other. Identifying as content of awareness, an object within form, tends to put awareness itself on the other side of the I-Other split, and this is one way this dynamic perpetuates itself.
Differentiating the two allows for a disidentification with our third person identity, which in turn allows awareness to notice itself as the field of awareness and form, already and always absent of I and Other.
Put another way, there is a differentiation of the absolute (awake void and form) and the relative (third person identity), allowing awareness to be awake to itself while this human self still functions with its usual identity in the world.