Is the complete disidentification with thought and identification with being the “observing presence” a critical step towards enlightenment?

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Sure, but it’s not so much the “complete disidentification” part that’s important. You can’t completely disidentify with your thoughts. If you spend a little time thinking about thought and how it works and how your brain works, you’ll realize that you’re a physical being and your thoughts are physical, operating according to the rules of physics.

Complete disidentification with thoughts is basically a really deep acid trip. You can’t piece together coherent anything, much less something like a thought.

Identification with the “observing presence” is still identification with thought. It’s just a different kind of thought than before. Thought is brain activity and it’s how you make sense of things.

What you need to do instead is to get a “fingertip feel” for just how much identification is going on at any point in time and what that identification is with. Rather than tirelessly trying to eliminate identification, reduce it by getting closer to the whole concept.

Enlightenment is the lack of difference between self and not-self. Most people look at this and conclude that the only way to do this is to eliminate self. But the other way to do it is to get really really close to something such that you lose yourself in it.

This ties into the two-frame model of spiritual evolution that I have. Level of surrender and level of perceptive responsiveness. You increase surrender through spiritual techniques like meditation / prayer. This reduces self.

You increase perceptive responsiveness by losing yourself in something you love. This seems to increase self, because you cannot simultaneously reduce self and try really really hard to do stuff. So self-identification increases, but is also subsumed into this other thing.

Having a constant feel in your brain for whether you’re in a high level of surrender state or a high level of ‘other-identification’ state or neither is very useful. You can assess your mood to determine whether you want to do more meditation at a given moment or to lose yourself in something bigger.

Slowly, your ‘general’ level of identification will dislodge from body-mind identification and you’ll naturally find yourself in a more observing frame for greater periods of time before you ‘forget’.

The forgetting process is important to recognize. I learned this from George Gurdjieff. He said if we could only stop forgetting ourselves, we could be enlightened. I read Gurdjieff for months before I could distill what he meant. You are an amazing person with spiritual gifts that you can apply.

But your mind is ephemeral, weak, prone to forgetting. You’ll be on a spiritual roll, then without even seeing yourself doing it, you’ll jump onto a mundane task or whatever, then get caught up somewhere else, and you’ll forget about all this spiritual greatness until you suddenly remember it hours to days to weeks later.

The goal here is to never forget. To always have your big-S Self in the back of your mind, so you can always remember that it’s there so you can apply your spiritual gifts in any situation.

This stuff is real, you can harness it, you can build belief like a muscle, but it’s important to not get too dogmatic about anything, particularly in dangerous stuff like, “the self doesn’t exist.” That’s a high level insight that doesn’t mean what first comes to mind.