I have thought I was 184 cm since my teens, and that’s what my passport and all official documents say. A friend suggested I must be taller so I checked, and I seem to actually be 186 cm!
I don’t remember where 184 comes from. Maybe it’s from my teens before my body was fully grown in height?
I am now putting 186 into my brain, and use 2 cm more than I previously thought as a way to remember.
WHEN IDENTITIES CHANGE, THE ECOSYSTEM OF IDENTITIES CHANGE
I notice that it does something to my human identity. I am someone 186 tall, not 184. I belong to a different category now. I can feel a visceral shift and difference in how I see myself.
Of course, it’s a silly example and it’s not exactly a core part of anyone’s identity unless, perhaps, you are very short or very tall.
That’s why it’s interesting to notice that my image of this human self is changing a bit with this new and updated information. Even something as peripheral as height is part of the total picture. It’s part of the network of identities making up the identity of this human self. They all make up an ecosystem.
OTHER SHIFTS
I am familiar with these kinds of shifts in overall identity and in the network of identities.
When I do The Work of Byron Katie, there is sometimes a visceral change in how I see the world and myself. It’s all different. What I saw in others or the world is also here, and always was. What I took to be what I was – at a human or more fundamental level – is not what I am.
The biggest shift happened when the consciousness I am recognized itself when this human self was sixteen.
The consciousness I am woke up from the visceral sense of of fundamentally being this human self, and instead found itself as awake space, as consciousness, and forming itself into any and all content of experience. What I am forms itself into the experience of this human self, any sense of a doer or observer, any identity, others, the wider world, states, and so on, and it’s always new, fresh, and changing.
This is a shift out of identities more than a shift in identities, although the shift is reflected in mental representations and identities too. It’s a shift that turns everything and the world upside-down and inside-out.
I thought I was in the world, and, in reality, I am what the world – as it appears to me – is within. It always was that way, I just didn’t notice.
It’s very likely that way for all consciousnesses, for all beings that “have” consciousness as we in our culture like to say it. We are all, most fundamentally, consciousness, and the world as it appears to us happens within and as the consciousness we are.