The Split
On the making of demons, and why healing can never be a solo project
In Kabbalah, there is a creation myth called Shevirat HaKelim. The creation of the universe began with a pouring of divine light into spiritual vessels. Some of these vessels weren’t strong enough to contain this light, and so they shattered under the pressure into many fragments of divine light, which became trapped inside hard, brittle husks called kelipot. Humanity’s purpose, according to this tradition, is to gather these shards of light to repair the split.
I keep noticing how this same shattering happens inside the mind. When I am split off from my experience, I suffer. By this I mean I suffer whenever there is me, and then there is a part of me watching me, judging me, saying 'Oi! That should not be there.'
One of my oldest and most battle-hardened fears is about sleep. I know people who say that no matter what is going on in their life, they can always sleep like a baby. Not me. I developed a whole beautiful, neurotic complex around getting 40 winks that has made it hard sometimes to simply get 40 winks. I have tried everything to beat insomnia, including hypnotherapy, CBT, IFS, pills, melatonin, CBD oils. Some of it worked for a little while, but none of it lasted. And I think none of them lasted because they were all based on a split. Whatever I tried was essentially an attempt from one split off part of me to get rid of another part of me. And therein lies the problem.
Freud saw all this coming, of course. In Civilization and Its Discontents he argued that every society runs on a deal: we hand over a portion of our wildness in exchange for not being eaten, and the superego is the police officer we install in our own heads to enforce the terms. A person with no inner “oi” at all is a potential menace to society and so some split is the price of admission to living among other humans.
But Freud’s patients had one primary judge - father, a priest, a schoolmaster - internalised and grumbling away in Viennese. We carry thousands of judges. The judge now lives in our pockets and it’s a product that never sleeps. You can now pay a monthly fee for a device that watches you sleep and tells you whether you did it correctly. People wake up feeling fine, check their score, and revise that feeling. This is the split, industrialised, miniaturised, and billed annually. Never before in human history have so many voices, so constantly and insistently, told us that some part of our being is not ok.
That’s the water we’re all swimming in. Anyway. Back to my bed.
What finally started to change things is a commitment to a practice I’d been circling for twenty years. I call the practice 'turning towards.' It’s very simple: whatever I've spent a lifetime avoiding, I choose to turn towards instead. So if I get into bed and the old fear rears its head, instead of fighting the fear or fleeing it I go looking for it. I find it in my belly and I settle in next to it, the way you might sit down next to a scared, abandoned child at a bus stop. And then whenever I turn towards the fear in my body it almost always shifts into something else and all I do is keep following, following, following, like following a thread through a dark house. That's the practice.
This practice has now become so consistent and ingrained that I am even seeing changes in my dreams. Not so long ago in a dream I find myself driving deep into the North (whatever that means) to go and find this demonic Voldemort-like figure who has haunted my dreams on and off for 40 years. And, when I eventually get to the place where he is hiding (the fact he is hiding, as opposed to me hiding from him was already quite remarkable), there is no sign of him but the scene becomes some kind of a conference for shamans. And as I walk into this gathering, I see a glimpse of some miraculous things happening, and I really want to find out more, but there are so many people there it is hard to find a way into the middle of it all. I’m feeling excluded from the possibility of miracles, and in this feeling of being excluded there is a familiar pang of loneliness. And then I wake up.
What I am learning is that when we turn towards our demons they often become something else, guardians of some precious and vulnerable part of us that once had to be hidden. In the dream, the demon had been guarding the place where miracles were happening. And perhaps that is exactly what our demons do. They guard the parts of us that still believe there is something magical and precious about this life. Or, to put it in the language of the broken vessels: what I call a demon may in fact be a shard of light trapped inside a hard shell, something split off from the source when the original vessel couldn’t hold what was pouring through it.
And a single vessel has limits; no one is strong enough to hold light-shattering experiences alone. What makes a vessel strong is the presence of other vessels beside it, people helping us bear the unbearable. When we don't have these support vessels around us, the split goes deeper. The husk thickens. And we forget the demon was originally a guardian protecting a miracle inside of us. I needed a therapist, a coach, and eventually a group before my own practice could hold. A vessel that can hold the light turns out to need more than one pair of hands.
We are living in a time of fragmentation. Our light is being shattered into a million little pieces, and then we are told to carry our own little spark in our own solitary vessel. “Stay in your lane!” they say.
But the split inside us and the split between us were always the same split. We do not heal by becoming perfect little self-contained units of trapped light. We heal by helping each other turn towards what we have exiled, by seeing through each other’s eyes what our demons have been guarding all along. This is how we begin to heal the split we were never meant to heal alone.
This is a lot of what we do in the Heart of Being Human community: turning towards, together. If you're tired of carrying your spark alone, you'd be welcome.