The Tower of Identification

September 8, 2025

Inspired by Douglas Harding & Richard Lang

We can identify with many different things, moving up and down the scale of distance.

Consider the following reflections:

• I can identify as my pain in my leg, focusing entirely on just the exact pinpoint of sensation in such a precise spot on my leg.
  • From here I obsess over securing the abatement of this particular pain.
  • I'm primarily concerned with the pain and my leg.
• I can identify as my feet walking on a path.
  • From here I obsess over securing the perfect placement of each step, optimized for both the balance of my footing and the physical sensation of putting my full body weight on the foot and on the surface.
  • I'm primarily concerned with my feet and my body.
• I can identify as more senses all together, as I eat something and experience the primary senses.
  • From here I obsess over securing the perfect bites of my meal, optimizing for the sight, sound, smell, texture, taste, and temperature of my next bite.
  • I'm primarily concerned with my experience of the food.
• I can identify as a body.
  • From here I obsess over securing the functioning of my organ systems.
  • I'm primarily concerned with health.
• I can identify as a swarm of feelings, reeling in desire, craving, and aversion.
  • From here I obsess over securing happy, hedonic, pleasureful mental feelings.
  • I'm primarily concerned with my own feelings.
• I can identify as an employee in a business.
  • From here I obsess over securing revenue for the company, optimizing for both my social reputation within the company and for the return on investments and profits being made.
  • I'm primarily concerned with the company's success.
• I can identify as a member of a large organized community.
  • From here I obsess over securing the welfare of the community, optimizing for the group's goals, success, values, and priorities.
  • I'm primarily concerned with the community's success.
• I can identify as a citizen of a nation.
  • From here I obsess over securing the independent sovereignty of my country, optimizing for its political, economic, social, and cultural advancement.
  • I'm primarily concerned with the country's success.
• I can identify as a human.
  • From here I obsess over securing the survival of the human species, optimizing for the long-term flourishing of humanity, the progress of civilization, and the well-being of all conscious beings and all life on the planet.
  • I'm primarily concerned with humanity's welfare.
• I can identify as an occupant of Earth.
  • From here I obsess over securing the flourishing of the planet, optimizing for all life inhabiting Earth and the environment itself.
  • I'm primarily concerned with the ecosystem.
• I can identify as a conscious being.
  • From here I obsess over securing the well-being of all consciousness.
  • And that is my primary concern.
• I can identify as a part of the universe.
  • From here I obsess over securing the continuation of the cosmos.
  • I'm primarily concerned with everything — all things.

Realistically, the concept of "securing" everything and being "primarily" concerned with everything breaks down once you realize that everything encompasses all that I can be concerned about and thus makes any other thing impossible to be "secondary" to what is "primary", and furthermore "everything" can neither be secured nor be in some state or risk of insecurity.
(At the cosmic level, "everything" contains both what we might protect and what we might protect it from, making the very idea of "security" meaningless.)

But I can also go the other direction on this scale, and I can shrink the distance.

• I can identify as neurons.
  • From here I obsess over securing my neural networks.
  • I'm primarily concerned with synaptic connections.
• I can identify as cells.
  • From here I obsess over securing my organelles, DNA, and energy.
  • I'm primarily concerned with replication, protein synthesis, motility, growth, and other cellular processes.
• I can identify as molecules and atoms.
  • But from here, as from the cosmos, the concept of "securing" atoms or even of differentiating "concern" among/between atoms breaks down.

At the biggest and smallest scales our typical value judgments no longer make sense. "Everything" is neither good nor bad, just as "atoms" are neither good nor bad.

There are no concerns (or obsessions), and there is neither security nor insecurity. There is no partiality, no preference, no wanting, no desire. And that is because there is no differentiation, distinguishing, or separation.

But we often move to "the middle" — to some "central" point of identification between the far ends of this spectrum and scale. We're usually caught up in the identification of some point that does differentiate, that does have partial preferences, that does judge things as good and bad for the given primary concern, and that does have an obsession with securing something.

Ironically, this preferential partiality, judgment, concern, and obsession with security causes us to prioritize and value one point of identification over the others.

For example, when I am solely identified with being a citizen of a nation, I prioritize my country over the pain in my leg, my whole body, my company, my community, and even over other humans who aren't citizens of my nation, the environment/ecosystem outside my country, and more broadly, other conscious beings who aren't a part of my country.
Or, when I am solely identified with being a swarm of feelings, I prioritize my own pursuit of happiness above my leg, my body, my neurons and cells that aren't involved in my happiness, my company, my community, my country, humanity, all of life, the planet, and all other conscious beings.

And so it goes.
If I die for my country, I sacrifice my person, my body, my leg, my feelings, my neurons, my cells, my employment, my community membership, and my further capacity to contribute to the well-being of humanity, life on Earth, and consciousness altogether.
And the same can be said if I serve my personal feelings above all else. I do so at the expense of my cells, my body, my company, my community, my country, humanity, life, and consciousness broadly.

This scale can be described like a tower of identification and "distance", with atoms (or even subatomic particles if you want to get really specific) at the very bottom and the universe / the entirety of the cosmos at the top.

Again, we spend the vast majority of our lives in the points of identification towards the middle that are egocentric, ethnocentric, sociocentric, and anthropocentric. But we bounce between these, sometimes even multiple times in a day.

Tim Urban wrote something similar:

Billions of years ago, some single-celled creatures realized that being just one cell left your options pretty limited.

So they figured out a cool trick. By joining together with other single cells, they could form a giant creature that had all kinds of new advantages.

This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can [think of it as] an Emergence Tower.

Not long after cells started joining together to form animals, some of the animals discovered that they could go up another level of emergence and form even bigger giants made up of multiple animals.

[...]

Take ants and spiders. Ants are furiously loyal. They always put the team first. The ants I've gotten to know in my life have a long list of bad personal qualities, but “individual selfishness” isn't one of them.

Meanwhile, two rival spiders will compete with each other ruthlessly, both entirely self-interested.

So what's the deal? Are ants nicer than spiders?

No. It's just that spiders stop doing the emergence thing at the individual organism level, while ants go up a level higher—to the ant colony.

The ant colony is really the “independent life form” of the ant world. If we look at how ant colonies treat other ant colonies, it's a lot like the way one spider treats another.

Individual ants in a colony are kind of like the cells that make up your body, which cooperate with each other not because they're nice, but because they're part of a bigger life form.

Humans do emergence too—and like all things human, it's complicated.

[We] bounce up and down [...] all over the place on the Emergence Tower.

You might wake up in the morning with your psyche firmly on the bottom of the tower, feeling like a lone individual. You head to work, where you brainstorm a project with five other people, becoming part of a six-person thinking machine. After work you join a political protest outside, losing your sense of self in the exhilaration of being a tiny piece of a thousand-person megaphone. Depending on the situation, we can act like spiders or ants, and everything in between. It's as if there's an elevator in the Emergence Tower, and our minds take regular trips up and down.

Along The Tower

At each level of the "tower" (from leg pain to the cosmos), you identify with objects that appear in your awareness. Whether it's "I am this body", "I am this citizen", or "I am this universe", you're still placing yourself at a particular distance from other objects and taking on their concerns, limitations, and boundaries.

Harding's Question

Harding & Lang invite us to ask the question: What do you find when you look for yourself / for "what you really are"?

From the lens of physics

Let's start by looking at ourselves scientifically and see what physics has to show us.

From the bottom of the tower, if you travel the distance to the very "closest" you can get to "here" — what Harding calls "zero distance" — you find that between, among, and within the subatomic particles is simply a "space" that is not solid.
From here, we realize that:

On the complete other end, if you travel the distance to the very "farthest" you can get from "here", out into the infinite universe, you also find a similar vast, ever-expanding space.

Harding says, "Closer than close, there is nothing." And we might add: Farther than far, there is also just space.

From the first-person experience

When you investigate what you actually are from your own first-person perspective (via direct looking), you find that there's no object there at all.

You don't find a face, a head, or a boundary.

The integration of perspectives

Just as matter dissolves into mostly "empty" space when examined closely enough, the solid sense of being a separate "thing" dissolves when you look for what you actually are.

You find exactly what physics finds downwards or upwards at the extreme ends of distance: open space.

What you discover is that you are the very awareness or "space" in which the entire tower of identification appears. You're not located at any particular level - not the atoms, not the body, not the nation, not the cosmos. You are what Harding called the "capacity" for all of these levels to appear and be known.

A Concluding Contemplation

So who/what are you, really?

You are the open space for all things.

You can still function at any level of the tower when practically appropriate (caring for your health, your community, your planet, etc.) but without the compulsive identification that creates suffering.
You recognize these as temporary, functional roles rather than your essential nature.

You don't have boundaries. There was never any separation.
Everything is altogether interconnected.

Questions for Reflections

What might our days be like if they were punctuated with experiences of identification with points on the far ends of the scale/tower?
What if we rode our little identification elevators right up to the roof or down to the ground level throughout the day?
How do we more easily take these trips out of our normal ranges — beyond the average low point of egocentrism and the usual high point of anthropocentrism? Can you easily traverse outside that range?
What do you do to practice this? Do you use some methods of reflection, contemplation, or meditation? Maybe something else?
And how long can you stay in that state?
What's it like to identify as just atoms? What's it like to identify as the entire interconnected web of all things?
And perhaps most importantly, what's it like to let go of differentiation, separation, partiality, security/insecurity, judgment, and obsessive preferential concern? In a sense, what's it like to lose notions of identity itself on these far ends?

How do we maintain access to the far ends (of the subatomic and the cosmic), so the middle-level identifications become less compulsive?

If the tower were laid out like a landscape, could we learn to skate along its surface?