Identification and Considering

The margin under the last diagram carried a question the lesson itself never quite spoke aloud: three horses, no driver. Three centers, running at three different speeds, and nothing shown holding the reins — unsettling enough to sit with on its own. Today’s news is worse. It is not that the seat is simply empty, waiting for someone competent to finally climb up. The seat keeps being taken.

Here is what takes it. Attention — the same attention self-observation has spent three lessons training — can do something stranger than watch: it can flow into a thing until no distance is left between the two of you. Not attention resting near a mood, checking in on it now and then, but attention pouring wholly in, until the mood is the only thing occupying the space where a watcher used to stand. This has a name: identification. You do not have the mood at that point. You are it, in the plain, literal sense that nothing remains outside it to notice the having. First Steps called this being swallowed, before this journey had a name for the mechanism doing the swallowing. Now it does.

Identification is not particular to moods. It happens with a task half-finished, a possession, an opinion you argued for once and can no longer abandon without it feeling like losing a limb. One variety deserves its own name, though, because it eats more hours than all the others combined: identification with people — or more precisely, with what you imagine they think of you. The old teachers called this considering, and its inner form is where the seat gets taken most often of all.

You know the shape of it before this sentence finishes. A conversation from Tuesday reruns at eleven on Friday night, and this time your reply lands sharper, exactly as it should have the first time. An offhand remark from a colleague gets replayed until it grows a tone it never actually had, and a full defense gets built against an accusation nobody made. None of it is chosen the way a meal is chosen — it starts on its own, the way the film in an earlier lesson started on its own, and it runs on borrowed attention that has nowhere else to be for as long as it runs. Inner considering is identification with an opinion that may not even exist, and it is tireless. Its opposite is worth naming too, so the word is not left meaning only suspicion: outer considering is real regard for what another person is actually carrying — the same attention, spent outward instead of in.

Nothing here asks you to stop considering today, any more than earlier lessons asked you to stop the machine or silence the mouth. Only catch it, once, the way you have caught everything else this act: mid-identification, mid-rehearsal, close enough to see the seat being taken while it happens.