How Do We Break Apart?

Is there anything more frightening than having the unity of our personality as a human being broken and shattered to such an extent that we become a being with multiple personalities? Becoming so lost among these personalities that neither we nor others can recognise our true self among these fragments?

The truth is that none of us is entirely free of multiplicity. In fact, the whole journey of becoming “one person” is the recovery of our true self from among these fragments of personality.

But what causes us to lose our individual wholeness? What transforms the house of our being into a dark crypt inhabited by monsters that sometimes crawl outward from our inner darkness, leaving even us filled with shame and fear, while at the same time we find no way other than to continue living with these dark monsters within?

Have you ever seen the radiance of a person whose inner and outer house are one? A person before whom you know you are speaking with the sole inhabitant of that house? After years of struggling with monsters that are nothing other than my own broken pieces, I know with all my heart that the process of developing my individuation is nothing other than liberation from these fragmented personalities. I know that inner peace and tranquillity can never be recovered unless there is only one person within. Human beings whose inner house contains several contradictory personalities are unhappy human beings.

How can we experience love in its wholeness without revealing ourselves? If love is presence and the giving of the Self in its wholeness, how can one love when no coherent self exists? How can we claim to give something that slips through our own hands?

Have you ever seen someone become so lost in the tangled skein of their different personalities that they can no longer even find a true self to reveal—that they forget themselves and no longer know who they are? After years of observing human beings, I have come to the personal insight that the most beautiful and admirable human spirits are the most coherent ones.

In Jungian psychology, the mandala is both a symbol of the Self and an embodiment of the process of individuation. Concentric circles eventually converge upon a centre, sometimes represented by light, sometimes by the sun, and sometimes by the Buddha seated at the centre of these circles. Fragmentation and multiplicity decrease as one moves from the circumference toward the centre, until stillness, peace, and unity are finally attained there. The aim is to reach that light, that sun, that Buddha at the centre.

Falsehood is the greatest demon in the world. Every time we lie, every time we put on a mask different from who we truly are, we give birth to a new personality that acquires an independent existence within us. It crawls into our inner darkness and remains there until the time comes for it to emerge again. Every time we do anything other than the most honest thing we know and recognise, a part of our wholeness breaks. After years of lying to ourselves and others, nothing remains of us but a frightening collection of personalities we have become, none of which is our true self. Have you ever felt the peace of standing before someone who is honest with themselves and with others? Have you ever felt the fragmentation and anxiety before a person whose true self has been lost among the false personalities they have chosen and lived?

Truthfulness contains a meaning wider than simply not lying. To live in truthfulness is to guard the wholeness of the Self, and it is the only way to love and to reach the light within. Living in falsehood breaks us; in this multiplicity we are shattered and lost. We can neither truly love nor find joy.

A captain who is coherent in heart and mind always knows that at every moment it is they who decide among their choices. They know not only why they make those choices but also accept full responsibility for them. A captain who is not one within the heart will doubt their own captaincy. Although they may pretend that at every moment it is they who decide, in their heart they know that the ship itself is travelling along the path of fate; and when disaster comes, they will curse the sea and the rocks. Our lives are no different at any moment. There are no small and large decisions. There are only paths that we either choose with the wholeness of our hearts or that the demon of falsehood chooses for us—paths in which our Self is present, or in which everyone and everything except us is present: others, society, the circumstances of life... It does not matter what name we give to those others.

There is only one way to struggle against this demon, drag each of the monsters within us out of its dark corner, and recover the Self: to be one person and to live in truth.

Aydin Areta