[quote=JustASimpleGuy]You can "touch" the empty formlessness. I suggest that's your true identity as it is mine. It's the Divine. Nothing is closer yet nothing farther away as conditioning and mind form quite a formidable barrier, however it can be penetrated.

One way to touch it is deep meditation and not just any meditation. It has to be open meditation where there is no focus, no object of attending. That being said one must first focus and concentrate mind through focused meditation practices, but when mind is sufficiently concentrated the attending has to be let go and open meditation techniques practiced. Resting in awareness, choiceless awareness, do nothing meditation.

Just like focused techniques (breathe, sound, bodily sensations, mantra, etc...) the fruits of open techniques begin to manifest outside of formal practice, eventually and with enough practice.

Yes, while I do not disagree with anything you say, I do bristle a bit, as I often seem to these days, as such words as “your ‘true’ identity”. Not so much because it is wrong, but perhaps that it seems to imply a completeness or absoluteness that is not really there. While it is true that nothingness is a fundamental aspect of my nature, creation is a fundamental aspect as well. I am that emptiness in the vessel, but if I fill the vessel with my creation, then I am that which fills it as well. When there is nothing, then there are no things to undergo change, when there are no things undergoing change, there is no experience of time. When there is no time, things, or action, then there is no persistence of “I”, yet I want to say “I” have touched this state of nothingness. With no things or action to be aware of, then what can awareness be aware of other than nothing. So nothing becomes the something one is aware of, and the absence of change becomes the time against which the nothing persists and makes it feel real. A contrast with an expectation of change to no change becomes what I am aware of. Nothing and something merge back into unity as one thing, time persists, and the rate of change in this state of nothing goes to zero. So perhaps now I can say with just as much confidence, that my “true” identity is everything, and it is equally true as saying I am nothing, which when held still in awareness becomes a something persisting eternally through time. My exploration of spacetime and form, as it undergoes change, is really just an exploration of me, as represented by an ever changing series of “I”s through time.

It's interesting to experience body, mind, thoughts, emotions, memories just like external stimuli. That is as not Me (well not "Me" but "me", not Self but self) but just events in the field of awareness and no different than anything else we perceive via sense organ perceptions.

What's even more interesting is this "new" way of experiencing isn't "new" at all. It's always been there, just never realized. It's more of an exercise in deconstructing a false identity vs. constructing a new identity.

And again, I am with you but I am not comfortable with the term “false identity”, not because it is not a false identity, but because it implies a “true identity” against which such an assessment can be made. Any identity I have tried to permanently rest my hat upon, has eventually been seen to fade away when viewed from another perspective. Nothing, being just one more of those supposedly ‘solid?’ identities that given time and change in perspective, I come to see as no more or less true as any other identity. If there is one model of “true identity” that I can use to judge the others as false, I have not found it, and my interest in doing so seems to be fading as of late. Although I do see how questions can have true or false answers within a given paradigm, perspective or context, these days I find myself more and more satisfied with “yes” as a more fundamentally wider perspective acceptable answer to “true” or “false” questions.