Healing Inner Division

Through various teachings and personal insight gained through inquiry and meditation, I’ve come to see with increasing clarity the source and nature of my own suffering. I see how negative experiences from the past survive in my mind, governing certain thinking patterns and the way I relate to others and myself. I’ve also come to see how I am so divided inside, and I see what might be considered the root cause, or the basic nature of this division. The past lives in our minds, for better or worse, on both conscious and subconscious levels. Inquiry, mindfulness and meditation allow us to see this and the resulting personal patterns as they are playing out both internally in us and externally in the world. States of sustained mindfulness (such as can be achieved in meditation) can bring us to a place where we have let go of personal identification to a point where our awareness shifts from being concentrated in any one place, to becoming more of an all-encompassing emanation that is not concentrated anywhere in particular. With this shift comes an experience of wholeness that is truly healing. The more we experience this, the more we see that this is an expression of our true nature and it becomes something that carries over into our daily lives. Most of us are divided inside. Identification with thought divides us internally, creating a division between thought, awareness, and the body. It also divides our perception and experience of the world in various ways, springing from a deep-rooted sense and belief in separation, of self and other. This division is experienced strongly as feelings like anxiety and depression, or more subtly as a general sense of being incomplete and the belief that happiness is something (or someone) that is found outside of ourselves. Through identification with thought we have come to locate ourselves primarily in our own minds, experiencing the world as this little thinker that lives somewhere behind our eyes. The strongest expression of this identification, and the one that anchors all other identification, is the thought “I”. But the “I” thought actually comes and goes along with the various beliefs, judgments and stories that arise and pass. All of these things come and go, while your actual being—who and what you truly are—remains always right here, in the present, without being disrupted or altered in any way. You can experiment with this right now, or in meditation. Take a moment to notice that thoughts simply come and go on their own, while silent awareness, your true being, remains always just as it is. Notice the contrast between thoughts blipping in and out and the greater stability of the rest of your being. What is your deeper experience of yourself? Are you coming and going like thoughts, or are you really always here, now. The truth is, who we are as beings is not confined to this space in our heads. The center of who and what we are is not located behind our eyes and, in fact, our beingness has no perceivable centre other than the illusory ones our minds create through identification, through attention and mental fabrication. Seeing the momentariness of thought in contrast with the stability of our true being, we can begin to loosen our identification with thought. The looser it becomes, the more we experience our very being as something that is not limited to or divided between any objects in our awareness, but as something that is inherently whole and all-encompassing. This inherent wholeness is our true self, and seeing this—being this—we see that we can be the source of our own healing and happiness. Silence and stillness are among our greatest allies in life and on the spiritual path; finding them inside and befriending them is an act of self-love. Be patient and kind with yourself. Look inward with an open mind and a compassionate heart, and eventually you will see the truth, that you are the peace you’ve always been seeking.    “In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man, and it is all the becoming, the battle of life, the agony and fear. Meditation is the ending of this space, the ending of the me.” ~J. Krishnamurti