I’ve been doing shadow work on an almost daily basis for the past few years now. I keep discovering new parts of myself, new insights and awareness, as well as understandings of the collective world through exploration and journeys through my unconscious and through relationships with the world, kind of like a spiritual-scientist and explorer.
Thanks to a client of mine with multiple personality disorder, I have been learning a lot lately on how different parts can be unaware of themselves until they interact with each other, and the different degrees in which they can be separate amongst each other. I find it really interesting that this is called a “disorder” by psychologists, because to me people with multiple personality disorder are some of the most self aware people I’ve ever met. They have different parts, just like other people, but they are acutely aware of them. Most people are unaware of their internal and unconscious splits.
Because of that, lately I’ve been asking myself the question “what are the parts of me that I am the most unaware of?”. I also became aware of a split in a person that I interact with often, and of how completely unaware they are of this split. It made me realise that until that moment I thought I was dealing with one person, but I wasn’t.
During my shadow work today I wondered what this mirrors in me, as I use the law of mirroring to find the parts in me that are reflected by people and things in my reality. As I observed the mirror - my friend - and saw how he believes he is fighting “outer enemies”, while he is simply fighting himself, I wondered if I have also been “fighting with” different people and things that I thought were outside of me, but are actually me.
Suddenly, my awareness shifted, and I saw how indeed the people and things that had stressed me in the past, are actually me, just like one of my arms is me. Just as I can feel separate from my arm if I take an aesthetic that numbs my nerves, and just like my arm is in some way separate from me because it is a separate set of cells and tissues than the rest of my body, but my arm is also me, in the same way these people are me but separate physically and by a temporary illusion that makes me forget I am them. Just like my nerves are the connection I have to physically feel my arm, my empathy is the connection that I have to feel those people.
Therefore the people who had threatened me last year were actually still me, just temporarily and illusorily separated from me. So this whole time I had not been playing with something “other”, but in fact with myself: I have been creating all these conditions and circumstances just like a game designer creates the different pieces of a game, and then plays them against each other.
I wondered, why do I do this? My consciousness shifted again, and I went back to remembering when I had started creating the first splits, the first pieces, frequencies, atoms, not out of some calculated design, but merely as a reaction, because when I had my first thought, and discovered I was something, I also saw there was nothing “other” than me. I could not tolerate that thought, and had to find out what I was, and so I started dividing myself obsessively, to find out how to be in relation to nothing. At the time when I did that, I did not even know free will existed, I had not thought that concept yet.
But there came a catch: the more I divided myself, and the more I interacted with myself through these different pieces, the more lonely I felt, the more separated I felt, the more I suffered. Instead of “curing” the problem, I was creating it and making it worse. Ans so I realised that I was tired of playing this game, and I wanted to “come back” to myself. But how could I do that? By finding out how to integrate each piece.
So I created a separate ego for this particular piece, that goes by the name “Valentina”, with the curiosity and will to be an explorer and a problem solver, so that she could figure the puzzle of putting back myself together - piece by piece.
It all made sense, with my life. I saw that indeed time and space are an illusion but they are also real and necessary to create this. I finally understood why my dream space is so different from my physical reality: they are two different lenses through which I look at the same world.
Just like a breath first expands to the full capacity of its lungs, then exhales contracting, so this shadow journey felt like a large expansion of my consciousness, that enlarged to breath in, all the way to the realms of the universe, and then exhaled contracting back to my single, unique ego.
And it all made sense: why I am here, my crazy life, and what I’m doing.