Healing the Divided Self

Excerpted from
Barefoot on Holy Ground: Twelve Lessons in Spiritual Craftsmanship
By Gloria Karpinski

Soon after we discover the Light, we learn that not all parts of self are standing in it. Out of fear and denial we have relegated many aspects to the shadow lands of unconsciousness. The task of a disciple is to identify, embrace, and eventually integrate all parts of the divided self.

Our shadows are filled with anything we have rejected, denied, dismissed, or disowned about ourselves. They are locked in the subconscious by guilt and shame, self-judgment, and lack of self-love. They are actually phantoms because they are untruths about who we are. Yet they are alive, and therefore active dynamics, as long as we don't recognize them.

Wherever we fail to recognize the omnipresence of the sacred throughout all life in the unbroken continuum from Spirit into the physical, there denial, dismissal, and dishonoring dwell.

We all live in varying degrees of maturity, understanding, and cooperation between parts of self. Some aspects of self may be very developed, responsible, and ready for full service, while others are still rebelling like adolescents, hiding in shame, raging in anger, or whimpering in fear.

If we don't honor the aspects of ourselves that are less skilled, cooperative, ready, or attractive, we spend a vast amount of energy trying to hide them. And, of course, they are always there, nipping at our heels, creating chaos with other people, compromising our joy with shame, and asserting themselves at all the worst possible moments. Our shadows are only one manifestation of the divided self.

One of the most dangerous divisions we make is between the ego and the Divine. Spiritual literature can even be confusing on the subject, leading one to believe the ego is the one thing that stands between us and enlightenment. Perhaps "personality self' is a better phrase, because the ego is so often understood merely as vanity. The ego is our unique incarnating unit for human life. Spiritual practices are meant to fuse the ego, or personality self, with the eternal Self, not deny it. If we haven't developed a healthy personality self, we have no effective vehicle for functioning on this plane. "Thy Will and mine be one" is the goal and the resolution for the split. "Thy Will" is the Will of the essential Self, which never experienced a split in the first place. The ego has to be trained to remember that truth.

All traditions recognize that any life is a chiaroscuro of shifting lights and shadows. Light and dark sisters, Cains and Abels, Jekylls and Hydes appear in stories around the world. In Hinduism and Buddhism as well as the great sagas and myths from Greece, Iceland, and many other cultures, we find personifications of the various hues of light and dark. Some of the characters in these dramas are so powerful, we perceive them as acting upon human affairs rather than being psychospiritual symbols of our inner personal worlds.

Mastership requires that we understand human duality and eventually integrate all our feared parts into Self. Otherwise we blame all that we deny or hate in ourselves on someone or something outside of self, often a devil or demon. This demon has been called by a multitude of names, among them Lucifer, a fallen angel; Satan, who was Jesus' persecutor; the dark Ahriman, opposing the Persian Light-bearer Ahura-Mazda; Mara, Buddhas tempter; Iblis, who tormented Mohammed; and Osiris, who experienced death and dismemberment at the hands of his dark brother Seth.

Tales of the struggles of duality exist in all mythologies. Methods of mastering the darker parts of self vary. Images of slaying the dragon evoke a different inner response than taming the dragon. Slaying wants to destroy that part of self that we perceive as evil, bad, unattractive, or less than, images of ourselves that perpetuate dualistic self-concepts.

But to tame the dragon is to transform it by first embracing it.

The duality trap decrees certain qualities bad, while proclaiming others saintly. It's symptomatic of the crippling disease of either/or. As we explore qualities of discipleship, we soon realize that any one quality can become the subject of obsession. For example, the ability to create orderly systems on the material plane helps us organize and teach all that we've learned. Yet if that same ability is not integrated and balanced with other qualities, it can be used to concretize rigid rules and dogmas that disallow the ongoing revelation of the Divine. Most of us are not 100 percent orderly or 100 percent rigid. We are always in process, with degrees of clarity.

The objective is to pay attention, looking for checks and balances in our clarity on any subject, gradually owning all of the content in our psyches, seeing both light and shadow, and learning to accept all of it. The degree to which I can see-and accept-all of who you are depends to a large degree on my willingness to see-and accept-all of me.

We must be very gentle with ourselves and others as we recover lost parts of ourselves. We have all suffered from the "should syndromes" imposed on us by family, religion, education, peers, the media. Rights and wrongs reverberate in our minds, reminding us of where we have failed to meet others' criteria.