the human condition

The human condition for most people

Is one of being whole

And yet not feeling whole

Deep down, most of us do not feel whole. We do not feel complete and integrated. We may not have much conscious awareness of it, but deep down each of us usually has a feeling that there's something wrong, or something missing in oneself. The great paradox is that there is nothing missing, really we are whole. We just don't feel it. Instead, somewhere deep inside us, there's a great doubt, a great question mark. And that drives us to try and fix things. We try to compensate for this lack. And that's really the driving force behind all our anguish, all our neurotic behaviours, and all our longings, yearnings.

And really the spiritual longing is to come back to a way of being in the world where we are no longer feeling incomplete, when we are no longer feeling that there is something wrong or lacking, either inside ourself or in the world around us. These two are not separate. The way we see the world is a reflection of our inner world. Often the unconscious parts of our psychology, our deepest beliefs, we project all this onto the outside world, onto other people, onto our life circumstances. So the great spiritual longing is really to return, we could say to a state of wholeness. That wholeness is already here. We've just lost touch with it. We don't feel it.

And so the rather arduous work on our spiritual journey is to look inside ourself and find all the obstacles, all the strange beliefs, that are disrupting the feeling of wholeness. We have to bring many unconscious beliefs into the light of awareness. And sitting with a lot of awareness on these inner machinations, we can release them. It is possible. It is possible to return to the state where we are aware of our wholeness. And another paradox is: we don't really need to feel that. It's our natural state. and when we are residing in that state, this sense of a separate self disappears.

That belief, that we are separate from the rest of existence, is really the root cause of the feeling of incompleteness. Simply through our beliefs, our deepest, most unconscious beliefs, we have psychologically cut ourself off from existence. So it is no wonder in a way that that feeling of not being whole is deep within us. That's an uncomfortable feeling. It's an unpleasant feeling. And that's really why we're driven to seek ,to find peace, and return to a state of being where we are residing in wholeness.