Healing the split mind

When your mind is whole, you are in your right mind, and not in two minds. Being in two minds is what happens when your mind is split in half. What happens in the state of split mindedness is quite interesting.

It's not merely that you split off a part of your mind. As you introduce a split, ie a belief in separation, you lose sight of wholeness completely. What then happens is you actually form TWO artificial identities, and neither one of them is the whole of you. It's almost like having two egos or personalities, and both are fake.

One of these identities, let's call it the persona, is retained in awareness as more of a conscious self. This self is the part of your mind that is steering away from darkness and sin and tries to be "good". It uses denial of "the rest of you" in order to hide its sense of sin and guilt in the darkness. It blocks it out of awareness through this denial, which is attack, which buries it and projects it.

The part of your mind which has also split - the other 50% of you - becomes a dumping ground for sin and guilt, hidden behind denial and repressed. You project this dark shit outward through disassociation, to try to disown it. It's part of further trying to disown part of your mind that your persona-self thinks is evil. Recognize the persona appears good but ultimately is judgmental and wants to destroy the sinful self.

So the "goody two shoes" part of your mind which is always trying to focus on a fake sense of idealism, positivity, looking good, saving face, being popular, seeming to be perfect etc, actually has a murderous attitude towards the other part of your mind. It basically sections off this other part of your mind, hates it, judges it, and shoves everything it does not "approve of" onto it. That includes sin and guilt, so now this "shadow self" is formed and relegated to death.

So in your mind, if your mind is split, you have this conscious persona self and this much less conscious shadow self. The shadow self is kept in the dark because, as Jesus says in the course, if you were to bring these two selves in close contact with each other they could not long remain separate.

The persona self fears the shadow self and tries to constantly judge and attack in on order to keep its distance, to maintain its own sense of autonomy. The persona sees itself as what the course calls "the face of innocence", aka the victim. And it views ithe shadow portion as a victimizer, or an enemy, which it wants nothing to do with and pushes away. This pushing away produces separation, disowning and projection onto others and the world, to try to "attach" the sin to something other than your own mind or sense of self. As the course says, separation means disassociation, or coming "between".

But we have to realize here that being split minded does not mean you are being the whole of your real self while you're in your persona self, or that your real self is under attack by the shadow self or its projections. Instead, recognize that the persona self is only a partial ego self, and it not whole, and it is not real, and it is not you. It's an artificial sense of identity formed from illusions of preference and avoidance, illusions of innocence and pretending to be perfect.

So as you consider how to forgive and take back projections and so on, you have to also realize that the "you" that is trying not to judge or project, is actually part of the judgement. It's part of the split mindedness. That persona self, wants as best it can to be completely free from the repressed shadow crap. So beware that as IT tries to take back projections, it is really not that interested in UNDOING the sense of sin, to begin with, because it needs it in order to maintain the split. And note that this persona self is "trying to wake up and be more spiritual" - the spiritual ego, and it can't - you have to wake up FROM it.

Without the split in the mind, without maintaining a sense of separation, both the shadow self and the persona self cannot exist. They rely on keeping the war going. The inner conflict has to be perpetuated, denial and blocks to awareness have to be maintained, otherwise it blows up the whole dynamic of you having a split minded relationship with another part of yourself.

For example in terms of victims and victimizers, usually the shadow crap is projected and seen as an external victimizer, while the innocent victim role is assigned to your persona self ie conscious self. But in order to "heal" this situation, it's not enough to just "take back the victimizing". It's not enough to simply own that you are the one attacking yourself from the outside in, or that you are vicariously using others to do this. The victimizer is only one HALF of the problem.

The victim role is also part of the split, and being a victim has to go as well. You can't maintain this ideal of "getting rid of attackers" while keeping the "innocent victim" intact. So what that's going to have to mean is, if you want to wake up, is that you're going to have to not only dis-identify from the victimizer, but also from being a victim. You have to recognize that your mind - the larger container of this drama - is actually playing both sides. Your mind is being both a victim and a victimizer of itself. And NEITHER of those roles is your real identity.

When you can bring both of these parts of your mind into awareness and see them together, AND then recognize that you are the ONE MIND who is pulling all the strings and making the victimizer victimize "you", plus making the victim "be a victim", you can no longer maintain the ILUSION that they are separate identities. When you own that you are both of them, you will own that you cannot be EITHER of them. It's been a lie, all along, that either of these two identities were you.

You were pretending they were DIFFERENT to each other, by means of splitting off some attributes to assign to one and some to another, to maek them seem to be opposites. But the opposition is entirely a deception and in truth, the two identities are not really opposite at all. They are both being run by one "larger" mind - your real self - who temporarily is the actor behind the scenes who has lost sight of itself while pretending to be having a multiple-personality disorder.

Because we so heavily identify with the conscious persona and not with unconscious hidden projected stuff, largely because we are not aware of it, you "as the conscious self" might think that you merely need to deal with the harmful attackers outside of you who are making your life miserable. But it's not just them. It's also you, in denial, with rose-tinted glasses, pretending to be special and perfect, who are also part of the murderous dynamic of sectioning off parts of yourself and relegating them to hell. So that sense of identity also has to be brought into question.

You are not a victim, or a victimizer. You are not the persona or the shadow. You being the persona is not you being the whole of yourself, even though this split off part of a sunbeam thinks it's the whole sun. You are bigger than both. Which means your sense of identity has to let go of these illusory selves and expand to a larger reality. As Jesus says in the course, as you awaken your sense of self expands. Because what you are really waking up from is being stuck inside little boxes and compartments, walled off from each other as if you have multiple selves that live in isolation.

Your enemy is yourself. The perpetrator is you. The victim is you. The fake innocence is just a "face" you put on to hide the pain and maintain the shadows. To take back your projection means only to reel in the projection of the shadow content, the sin and guilt, to try to bring it closer to its source. But it must also meet with your persona and cause the two of them to cancel each other out. You are larger than both aspects of the split mind, because you are the whole of mind. And only whole-mindedness, without the split condition, is a state of sanity.

The ego is always about taking sides, emphasizing differences, being special, having enemies, being offended, being at war with something. But what is this "opponent", except MORE EGO? It takes both sides of every conflict, it does not care who wins or loses. It does not care who is the victim and who is the victimizer. It is both, in a state of self attack. It doesn't even care if you live or die because it knows that someone will die, when you play its games.

So you have to realize that your "conscious ego self" is really only PART OF the problem and your sense of having a spiritualized ego is just as much part of the problem as the projected sin. Being holier than thou goes hand in hand with becoming highly judgmental and condemning other parts of yourself as unworthy and defective. If you feel unworthy it's because your conscious self believes it is superior. Inferiority and superiority go hand in hand.

The conscious ego self cannot wake up. Much of its efforts are to make its life better by continuing to repressed, reject, accuse, condemn, project, disown and kill off anything resembling "unacceptable and unlovable". And yet all the while, judging you are unlovable from the outside so that it is never satisfied with trying to make you more perfect through self mutilation. The ego is in two minds. It is not in its right mind. And it is not your mind. There is more to you than any of these roles or fantasies or illusions of being one thing and not another. You are everything.