Dissociation is a concept from psychology. We often associate it with mental illness, personality disorders, deviant understanding of reality, and bizarre behaviour.
That is only a part of the story.
Dissociation is involved in everything human, just as emergence is involved in everything human.
Dissociation is an extreme variant of psychological emergence.
The «normal» variant of dissociation is what we call roles.
Dissociation occurs along a spectrum from stray thoughts and light daydreaming to DID,
Dissociative Identity Disorder, where the person rather helplessly alternates between different personalities who take control, one after the other. They each have their own life story that the other personalities do not necessarily know anything about.
The patient thus constantly experiences holes in the memory, which may be precisely the primary purpose of dissociating, namely, to be freed from another personality's unbearable trauma.
We will not dig deeper into the morbid, but my point is that dissociation is both a natural, healthy, inevitable thing – and a morbid one. But it is not the dissociation itself that is morbid. Dissociation is an attempt to deal with all types of stress, in fact, also what we would call regular, non-stressful events.
Dissociation is normal!
So normal is it that yourself, your experience of being just you – is a dissociation.
You are a mental separation, a dissociation, from the universal consciousness.
That's it.
The universal, collective, one Experiencer – and you – are the same and work the same. It must therefore be so if our axiom holds.
But from your perspective, you are only experiencing «you» because you are a dissociated experience.
How did that happen?
Birth is a very traumatic experience.
Everything is suddenly wholly new and different when you come out of your mother's womb. Your only opportunity to deal with the violent, new impressions is to dissociate and create a new, integrated understanding of what is going on.
You have nothing relevant to compare with, so you have no choice. You must dissociate.
This «understanding» is you , but it takes two to three years before you discover «yourself». We'll be back to just that in a moment.
Dissociation is, for most of us, something strange and unknown.
Dissociation means that we think we are something. That is not how we experience ourselves daily. Just ask us – and we will answer that, of course, we know who and what and where we are!
That we experience something does not mean that what we experience is correct or complete. We all know this, but we forget it in our daily lives.
Let me try another example and see if we can expand our understanding from there.
