1st Fetter
The Identifying Curriculum

Identifying vs. Non-Self

The First Fetter is the delusion which makes us see ourselves as a separate self. A consistent, knowable being that extends across time, possibly even transcending the death of the body.

Seeing through the First Fetter identification involves discovering that everything you tell yourself about yourself, about the world, about everything you identify with, about everything you like and don’t like, are just stories.

They are not real.

If you look more deeply into these stories, (past the content of them) you will quickly discover that they are only thoughts. (Can anything you think not be a thought?)

On top of that, the idea of the individual "me" who has created these stories, and who feels that they are talking about a discernible "me", is itself just another collection of thought.

We quickly discover these infinite loops of thoughts “about me” reinforcing other thoughts “about me”. And yet, when we pause and investigate where exactly these thoughts are pointing, just what this "me" actually is, we discover that the more we look, the less "me" we are able to find.

That's all well and good. Thoughts are obviously thoughts, which can be a more impactful realization than it might seem on the surface, but what we often overlook is that the thinker who is supposedly thinking the thoughts, is also nothing more than another thought!

(It's thought all the way down, so to speak.)

This particular thought (worrying about an upcoming job review, for instance) is just a thought referring to other thoughts (perhaps something to do with an insecurity about your performance at the job, thoughts about how your boss has always had it out for you, or what future impact a bad job review might have for you and your family). It can also be something more subtle, like having a thought about wanting a snack which is then immediately followed by thoughts about your weight, or health, or grocery bills.

There is always a "you" at the center of those thoughts that they all seem to refer to, but that "you" is never explicitly shown. These thoughts refer to each other in a way that gives one the illusion of veracity because it's reinforced by others. And the one that is present now usually has the feeling of being the true "me" thought, like it's standing one step above the other thoughts. But none of this is true.

A thought is a thought is a thought. And no matter how much they refer back to this elusive "I", it never seems to appear.

We can read a novel about a fictional character, Sherlock Holmes for example, and no matter how much we know about his life history and inner mental world, we can never find him because he's not real. He's a figment of our imagination. Just like the self.

We create a sense of "I" within each of those stories that we believe about "me, myself, and mine".

This sense of “I” defines itself by comparison. It needs to decide what part of this experience is "me and mine" and what parts are "other". This has some practical implications, but largely it's an arbitrary distinction that gets created.

This artificial distinction of "me" vs "others" creates a self that is in constant competition with its environment. It is constantly comparing itself to everyone and everything that it comes in contact with, real or imaginary, in order to know how to define itself, what it's like, where it stands in its own imaginary hierarchy.

"Am I a novice piano player, intermediate, or a professional?" We can only know when we take note of our abilities and try to compare them to what we see and hear from others. Then we set up a scale based on those criteria, and randomly place ourselves at some point along it. We then likely judge ourselves for only being at this place on the scale (that we just made up), and maybe feel that we need to improve quickly in order to improve our self-view, because surely I will think better of myself if I can just become a better pianist.

We do this sort of calibration all the time in different ways. "Am I a good person or a bad one?" It depends on who you compare yourself to. Which traits are you using to make the distinction? Do you actually know what the other person is like, or are you using your own projections of how you view them in order to make a false comparison to your cherry-picked traits that you have decided are relevant for this particular metric?

It's all mind-created nonsense. You can never find "good," "bad," or any other distinctions outside of the mind.

The differentiation between “me” and “you,” and “us” and “them,” "better" and "worse", are all just fabrications of the mind that we can become aware of, and then let go of.

This is how we create, and then maintain, a view of ourselves as being separate and unique (and generally not good enough).

Which is also the reason we can then justify treating other living beings disrespectfully and cruelly. We couldn't do this without a sense of distance and separation.

We create bubbles of reality with our idea of “me” always fixed in the center. We then create a concept of connectedness with other beings and objects that varies, based on arbitrary ideas of physical and emotional distance.

We tend to feel the most love, compassion, and care for people who we are related to, or who are deeply nestled in our in-group. We gradually lessen that feeling of connection to friends, acquaintances, strangers, and then to people in foreign lands who are just concepts and not felt as real tangible beings.

The same goes for the animals in our lives.

We care deeply for our pets, but may gladly spend our weekends in hunting cabins, shooting at other animals, and dragging fish out of the water by piercing hooks. We even use our beloved dogs to go retrieve the carcasses of the similar animals who we’ve just shot.

These distinctions are baseless fabrications of the mind which are always oriented firmly from the "me" located in the direct center of concern.

If we discover a mouse or colony of ants living in our homes, we either kill them, or hire someone else to kill them, with no deeper reflection upon it. "My wellbeing, and my home" are more valuable than "their wellbeing, and their home."

These false divisions between pet and prey, us and them, only exist in the mind. They do not exist in the reality of the ecosystem, or within the interactions of us living beings ourselves.

Our sense of morality is conditioned, and mind-made. So the limitations of our morality are also conditioned and mind-made.

Please note that we are not saying that one thing is objectively right, and another thing is objectively wrong. Again, morality is mind-made. Like everything, it is empty of an inherent existence.

But we all have cognitive dissonances and distinct blind spots of awareness in our behavior which can be very telling.

If you now have a sensation in the body that seems to be referring to someone who has done, or could do anything right or wrong, (perhaps something related to guilt or shame) then become aware of the belief connected with that sensation. Is it trying to redirect future behaviors? Is there fear for the ramifications of this guilty little being who may suffer the future consequences of their lack of moral upstanding?

That sense of being uncomfortable with reading this is a great example of identification. However it shows up will be a unique experience for the biological bundle of ever-changing causes and conditions that we call "you". So don't make it personal, but do take note of how it feels, and which actions, if any, it seems to be instigating.

The First Fetter inquiries work to see through the delusion of that identification.

What Am I?

Let’s start at the beginning.

Feel into reality. Again, by “reality” we mean whatever is appearing in your sense fields without any labels attached to it. There can be seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting, but can there be the simple action of awareness without there being a thought about what it is that is being seen, heard, felt, smelled, or tasted? Can we even be aware of it without feeling like the one who is assumed to be aware of it?

Ordinarily we experience the raw input of a scene for only milliseconds before the objects are classified, labelled, and reduced from vibrantly raw sensory information, to an easily recognizable name and concept. This name and accompanying concept are virtually interchangeable with every other similar thing that bears the same label.

For instance, you have likely seen many trees in your lifetime. Probably thousands. But no matter whether it is a birch, elm, oak, beech, cypress, or any other, you immediately classify it as a "tree". Done. Easy.

This keeps you from ever seeing the actual colors, textures, and shapes that are unique to this one particular living being which is, for the sake of convenience and conserving brain energy, reduced to an oversimplification of "Willow Tree".

Really? Truly look at all of its movements, the instantly labeled parts like "roots", "trunk", "branches", "needles", "leaves", and see it for a unique flowing being who is a holistic experience, not a sum of its parts. Who is also not separable from the dirt in the ground, or the air and sunlight that surrounds it.

This "who" is also not separable from the "you" who is watching (or in this case imagining) it. This "tree" cannot exist in this way without you, and you cannot exist in the same way without it. You and the tree create and complete each other in this moment.

So why create the arbitrary label of "tree" "dirt" "air" and "you"? None can exist without all of them spontaneously arising. It is a system which is creating all of these sense impressions. And the system is what we call Life itself. This is the inseparability we spoke of earlier.

Breathe deeply.

The strange thing is that we don't just conveniently label things "outside" of us, we also do it with our internal experiences.

Thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, all of them are instantly categorized into easy-to-recognize boxes like "pain", "sadness", "fear", "happiness", "guilt", "love", "anxiety", etc. None of these have any inherent existence. And none of these show up in one distinct, and only one distinct way.

"Anxiety" for instance, is a collection of sensations felt in the body, and thoughts experienced in the mind. These sensations might be mild or intense. The thoughts quiet or intrusive. Anxiety can range from a vague feeling of unease about an upcoming deadline to a full blown panic attack. And yet we label all of it with the name "anxiety".

In doing this work, we want to be much more specific in our discernment of what is being thought and felt. So we discard the labels as much as possible, and rather come into the raw experience of every emotion, thought, sight, sound, taste, smell, and feeling.

We go directly to the most "real" aspect of all of it so that we can find out how much the experience is actually a certain way, and how much the mind is adding to it, coloring it, painting it with a brush that does a disservice both to the experiencer, and to that which is being experienced.

Am I My Body?

If you reflect a bit, you will notice that there is likely a distance between the feeling of being the experiencer, and that which is being experienced. In short, this is the "me" vs "them" phenomenon.

There is almost an invisible divider creating a sense of distance, and an invisible barrier between the two.

The Separate Self is the personal “I” that we identify as. And yet (spoiler alert) no matter how intently you look, you won't find that “I” anywhere. (That said, it is still of the utmost importance to do the looking! Conceptual understanding is great, but it is unlikely to lead to the reduction of suffering and the vast paradigm shifts we are talking about here. That comes from direct inquiry and meditation.)

Generally the separate sense of self precludes, for no immediately discernible reason, everything that lies outside of the visual physical body. So without any reflection you might say that the personal “I” is the body.

But is it?

If we zoom in on your body, we will stop seeing the skin, the boundary that we normally hold as the threshold between "me" and the rest of the world, and find instead bones, organs, liquids, etc.

Zooming closer yet, there are microscopic organisms that keep the entire body functioning as a system. And there are actually more of “them” than there are the human cells that you take to be “you”.

Zooming in further, we find chemical molecules made of atoms which are made of subatomic particles which are made of... mostly space.

99.9% of the content of an atom is space.

Empty space.

Are you still so sure that the body is “you”? Are you the cells? The DNA? The bacteria making up the microbiome? The subatomic particles which are absolutely indistinguishable from any other subatomic particles throughout the whole of the universe?

Am I My Thoughts?

Maybe you think that the personal “I” is in the mind. That seems reasonable. We often take our thoughts to be "my thoughts" and to be a direct reflection of "who I am" and "what I know and believe".

This assumption, however, is calling out for deeper investigation.

If I am synonymous with something, I should be able to control it, right? Part of what gives us the illusion of being the body is because it feels like we have control over it. It seems like I can stand up and walk across the room and get a drink of water, come back, sit down and continue typing at will. We've already played a little with dismantling this certainty that I really am the one in control who chooses to navigate the room and when, and we will investigate it more the further into the course we go.

But the body often seems slightly more removed from "me" than the thoughts. The thoughts are as intimate as we can get. There are few things that seem scarier for a lot of people than the idea that someone might be able to read our thoughts... all of them! That is considered to be even more revealing than seeing the body naked.

Why is that? It's because we are even more identified with the content of thought than we are with the physical form. And not only are we identified with the thoughts, we also feel guilt and shame about harboring some of them. That itself should be the gateway to a huge insight! If you were truly in control of your thoughts, wouldn't you just get rid of any pesky, ruminating, embarrassing, or uncomfortable thoughts? Just resolve right now that you will never have them, and then... poof. You're free.

Of course it doesn't work that way because you are not your thoughts!

The next question is, are you even in control of your them?

The truth is that “you” are not there to control them. At all! You cannot be found anywhere because you are just a belief.

The "you" who is identified with the mind can be simplified to a process where one thought comments on another thought. One comments on another in a nearly infinite regression of self-referential conceptualizations that harbor no self anywhere at all. But some of those thoughts are beliefs about being a self. And they themselves are only thoughts too.

What we take to be the “me” in the mind is just a concept created to make sense of sensations that appear around and within us, and help us to navigate and survive in an unpredictable world.

This attempt of the mind to make sense of sensations, and to create meaning out of disconnected thoughts, and to draw connections where there often aren't any to be found, is how we end up with ideas like materialism's “the hard problem of consciousness”.

It's a mind-made conundrum where because we feel something to be true, like: “I can’t find an 'I' anywhere, but it feels like it's still there, so it must be! I just can’t find it because I haven't looked in the right place yet.” And because it feels in some way to be true, we believe that it must be.

That is not a conundrum, but illogical nonsense. The fact that a moment of conscious awareness appears does not mean that there is something independently existing called "Consciousness"... but that's a discussion for another time.

The point here is to note that we are often duped by our own beliefs, even when presented with absolutely no proof that the belief is correct. And yet we still refuse to let it go.

That exact notion was why a new religion “The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” was founded in 2006.

We can’t see a flying spaghetti monster. We can’t prove that there is a flying spaghetti monster. But since we can’t prove that there isn’t a flying spaghetti monster, it must be real.

We might as well call that the “hard problem” of the flying spaghetti monster!

Instead of convincing ourselves that something is true just because it makes us feel more comfortable than if it wasn’t, why don’t we just look, really look, to find out for ourselves whether this is true or not?

Is This Real?

For now, we are going to draw a line between "reality" and "fantasy".

It might be obvious, but it's worth stating that we experience the world through our senses.

The ears are hearing, the nose is smelling, the eyes are seeing, the mouth is tasting, the body is feeling, and the mind is doing all five of these things on a slightly more subtle, but still discernible level.

That is what, for now, we will call reality.

(This is of course not quite accurate as those sense organs simply detect and transfer chemical and vibratory information, while the brain is the only organ which more properly can be said to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel... But we'll get deeper into that in the Sixth Fetter.)

However, while the sense organs are taking in vast collections of information, and the brain is toiling to make sense of it all, the brain is also thinking about what is being processed. It is creating maps and associations, and complex webs of conclusions and predictions based off of its own processing. And when the mind is thinking in this way, selfing is likely happening.

For now, we will say that all pure sensory experiences are reality (or at least as close to them as we can come, given the limitations of our biological sense organs, and the brain that is interpreting the electrical signals).

And we will say that all thinking and selfing will be considered fantasy.

The process of doing FetterWork is learning how to see the difference between what is "real" and what is "fantasy" in all areas of your life.

If you look into it, you will quickly discover that all thoughts are always “about” something.

That is the mind selfing.

When you are selfing, you are placing the “I” in the center of attention, and then you are twisting and turning expectations, assumptions, judgments, beliefs, conclusions, reckoning, guessing, hunches and speculations around, so that your selfing becomes the only correct perception, making everyone else’s view wrong.

But remember: none of that is reality! It is just a belief, or a collection of beliefs, happening in the isolated bubble of the human mind. Selfing sees "me" as separate from everything.

Many of us drag through our lives with a feeling that we are not enough. This leads us to living a life where we are constantly jumping from one path of self-improvement to another. Searching desperately for that one insight or revelation which will fix the defective "me". We are seeking for that one thing which can make the “I am not, I should be” mentality evaporate.

But seeking will never result in finding. That is not the nature of seeking.

The nature of the “I am not, I should be” mentality is to always believe that something else is better than what is.

In its essence the “I am not, I should be” mentality will never be content. It can't. It is based in something much deeper and more fundamental that is actually creating the self along with its supposedly deficient definition.

In other words, the very thought that defines "me" as being deficient or wrong, is what is fabricating the "me"!

Simply having a new thought about how great I am is simply creating a new false me, based off of the same fundamentally delusional starting point: that there is an independently existing "me" who can be objectively judged as being good, bad, or neutral.

This me is a thought, constantly being fabricated by the mind, moment to moment. Whether it is deemed worthy, unworthy, good, or bad, is just an imaginary attribute of this fictional character.

We can't define a superhero without defining their inherent personality traits. If I think of Superman, certain attributes like strength, speed, and valor all show up because Superman would not be Superman without those traits. The fictional being called Superman is defined by them.

In this same way, the fictional being that answers to your name comes online with its own learned ideas of its traits. (Artistic, loyal, funny, hotheaded, a passive aggressive bully, a leader, kind, etc.) But those traits describe very general patterns of behavior which might be only occasionally evident. No matter how kind you are, you are not kind 24 hours a day. There will be moments when you are not kind to yourself, or to an ant you unwittingly drove over. Even if you are creative, there are many moments of the day when you are not actively creating.

These descriptions are generalizations that fabricate the idea of the one who must exist to fit those traits! If the self doesn't exist, then who am I talking about?

In theory, the First Fetter releases all of the hooks of identification, so it releases the hooks of "you" being defined in any particular way. If there is no consistent "you", then it's not possible for it to always present in the same way.

That said, please do not fall into the trap of spiritually bypassing all of the shadow work and trauma release that needs to be done by simply convincing yourself that there is no self, so everything is hunky dory. For that, we suggest turning to the Second Fetter, and working with the body to release those layers of identification which can be bound to emotion and developmental trauma.

This cannot be emphasized enough: FetterWork is still conceptual! It is only a framework pointing in a direction. It does not mean that it is real either.

If the sense of an “I” is a delusion, then working with dissolving that delusion is delusional in itself... it is a complete paradox!

And the danger is that you will just exchange the concept of an “I” with a new concept of “No-I”.

In other words, you will now identify with not identifying!This is why a guide and a group is so important. If you are strolling along on a delusional path, it will not lead you anywhere productive. You need to become aware of the direction you are heading.

Selfing, however, will not let you see that, but it will keep you in a delusional state for as long as possible, simply to maintain its power.

So how do you see through the delusions of selfing?

You stop identifying! Bit by bit. Delusion by delusion.

You become aware of the ways that identification is happening.

You viscerally feel and witness the ways that the identification takes shape and gets believed in.

And then over time, those patterns begin to change.

That’s it. It's a simple formula, but it does take diligence, and a willingness to fully experience absolutely everything with honesty, humility, and a courage that you will be okay if the floor suddenly drops out from under you.

If that sounds intriguing to you, let's move on.

If you feel some trepidation around this, you can rest reasonably assured that nothing “real” is going to change. When you let go of all the assumptions you hold about "you", about your opinions, your reality - of course everything will be viewed differently, even though fundamentally, nothing has changed.

The people in your life still exist. You will likely still hold the same job, or enjoy your retirement. You will likely still eat and prefer the same foods.

Though fear sometimes paints it this way, it is not a literal death, but rather a fundamental paradigm shift in which it is seen clearly that something that never existed simply never existed. Nothing scary about that!

The only thing that has changed is that you no longer assume or identify.

Before we move on, let’s recap what reality and fantasy actually are because this is a very important distinction that we are going to be returning to frequently to see through the first five fetters.

Everything you know by Direct Experience to be true, ie. your sensory experiences, (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching) we will now call reality. If it can be directly perceived in the space around you, we will call that "real".

Everything which you think you know through borrowed knowledge, and everything that you believe, is all thinking. It is not something tangible in the room with you.

If it is a concept or something which can only be invoked by memory or imagination, it is being created by the mind, in the mind, and is ultimately only about the mind.

So all of this we will now call fantasy.

Feel Into Reality. What Is Actually Here?

First Fetter Exercise

Sit with your eyes closed, and bring awareness to what you sense. Not what you feel emotionally, but what shows up in the raw sensory fields.


Bring awareness to your foot.
Can you feel where the sock ends and your foot begins?
Can you find the barrier between the two?
Do you experience a “dissolving” of the foot, so it feels like the foot and sock are one in the same?
Do you notice that it is now only a thought that is telling you that “my foot has a sock on it”, because in reality you can’t feel that it is so?

How much of what you experience is reality and how much is fantasy?

How do you know the difference?

Full playlist for the Identification Curriculum

“Wow. Where did they come from?
I was amazed to discover the incredible body of work offered by Pernille and Todd. All of it feels like a missing link which has been a game changer in my experience. Their Mind-Body Integration workshop was especially astonishing and mind blowing. My gratitude overflows.”

- Gabriela W.

Explore the 2nd Fetter.

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