11 Our habit of transferring our split onto everyone

We may have managed to mislead ourselves about how we ended up here, living in this difficult dualistic sphere. It wasn’t by luck or chance. No, we’re here because this planet is a perfect match for the negativity remaining in us. It offers conditions compatible with our inner landscape. Once we get past our negative involvements, we’ll get to move on to another sphere that doesn’t feature duality.

Whenever we are negatively involved with someone, we can be sure our split is a factor in the fireworks.

Inner splits lead to outer conflicts

What does that mean, “negative involvement?” This basically refers to our confused ideas about what’s going on in this world. We’re confused about reality, and our mind is full of incorrect concepts. Confusion is the result of being lost in this illusion. And wherever confusion prevails, there’s always conflict.

Conflicts are split concepts that divide the psyche. They arise when some aspect, inside us, is not in truth. Said another way, conflicts are always the fallout of inner misunderstandings. As we get a better grip on reality by realizing the truth, our splits mend. This is the way to gain inner unity and end our negative involvements.

If we genuinely understand what was just said, reincarnation will no longer be a vague theory for us. We’ll have no doubt that it cannot be any other way than this. For as long as our flaws are still separating us from the truth, and therefore from reality, we’ll have to return to these conditions. For here in duality, our state of illusion is the norm.

This state, in turn, creates the right environment for us to learn and grow and overcome our illusions. So Earth is nothing more, and nothing less, than a classroom for people with inner splits.

Do it now or do it later

If we take a look around, we can see the opposites of duality everywhere: man and woman, day and night, life and death. This is one way Earth pairs up the halves of two-way splits. We don’t see this two-way split applying to animals and plants and mineral. Because they are still in a lower state of development. As a result, they find themselves with more than just these two-way splits.

We could sit and meditate on abstract concepts about splits all day long. But unfortunately, we wouldn’t come an iota closer to understanding them. Alternatively, we can do the work on this path the way the Pathwork Guide shows us. Then we can discover our personal unconscious wrong thinking.

This will make it abundantly clear to us how we create the conflicts that then force us to choose between two alternatives. Of course, in a conflict, both options stem from a basic illusion. So then both alternatives are going to lead to an unsatisfactory conclusion. And this will make us feel hopeless.

When we find ourselves ensnarled in a dualistic confusion, we are negatively involved with people and with life. But the worst negative involvement that happens is inside us. We’re locked on a wrong concept which is giving us a tilted view of reality. And these wrong ideas don’t clear up just because we die.

No, if we don’t work them out in this lifetime, we’ll come back with the same unresolved confusions in our psyche next time. Our life conditions will once again be constructed to bring it to the forefront. This will go on until we stop evading the issue and become ready to do the work of self-healing.

Find both halves

Our relationships with our parents and children are, karmically speaking, our most intense and dramatic. These are the relationships that will most strongly challenge our unresolved confusions and conflicts. In doing so, they will illuminate our underlying basic split.

We can see evidence of our split right there in the symbolism of having two parents. If we have a psyche that is largely free and healthy, we will be blessed with a set of parents we think of as an asset. But when our negative involvement is still peaking, our parents will each bring out one side of our split.

If we look at everything we’ve managed to surface so far—including our main image and defenses, our conflicts and faults—they will reveal the basic inner attitude that is governing our life. And this attitude is always split down the middle. Meaning, we fluctuate back and forth between two essentially opposite ways of reacting.

We won’t figure this out when we’re still early on the path. It will take some seriously intense work to raise our split from our inner depths. This requires more than making a few recognitions, seeing an image or unearthing a fault. But all these things, at this deep level, come together and form a single nucleus. And this is what manifests our split out into the world.

If we can fully recognize our split, we can feel confident that we are making considerable progress in gaining self-awareness. When this realization starts to take shape, we’ll see that our two fundamental attitudes are represented by our parents. Our distorted attitudes come from the influence of one parent and the way we responded to them. At the same time, the other parent produced an entirely different influence and therefore emotional response. In this way, both halves of our conflict got activated.

There was no way for us to work this out before we got here. So our parents, who bring our unresolved split out into the open, couldn’t possibly be responsible for our problems. That said, we need to come to terms with their faulty behavior toward us. And it may take us a while to see things in this new light.

Uncover the basic conflict

We must come to see how our split is reflected back to us by our parents. Then we will be able to see how we rebelled against them. Finally, we will be able to discover how our twofold split is still dominating our life. And it will continue to do so until we mend it, which will require both insight and understanding.

Then theories won’t matter, including whether or not we believe in reincarnation. It’s irrelevant, what we believe. What’s important is that we see our split clearly. We must come to realize how its illusory nature colors our view of life.

Our “illusory way of life” is a fairly accurate description of how we go through life like a robot. We automatically respond the way we did to our parents, without being aware that we are just repeating our same reactions. It’s like a blind compulsion to keep reliving the past, over and over and over. We don’t see that we are doing this, or that what’s driving us is our own hidden split.

Babies, then, don’t really start with a clean slate. Actually, we sort of do, but we sort of don’t. For we arrive here with our own unresolved conflicts based on our illusions and misconceptions. At the same time, we have a very impressionable psyche.

So we experience everything with a very intense impact. Whatever happens makes a fresh impression that goes deep and becomes firmly rooted. These impressions are always absorbed in direct proportion to how inherently healthy our soul is to begin with. If the same thing happened to us as an adult, it wouldn’t make such an impression.

We know that positive experiences make a greater impression on children than on adults. For they have a keener sense of taste and smell. And they’re more curious about even the simplest things. Negative experiences then make an even stronger impression on the soul. But such impressions can only land where the psyche is already ensnarled in a duality.

This goes deeper than an image. It also goes beyond garden-variety duality. This basic conflict is so deep, its existence is the reason we have the human experience. But it’s not inaccessible. We can see it clearly in our reaction to our two parents, which we keep reliving every single day.

This is the reason one person’s duality is not identical to another’s. It’s why our split is likely not the same as our brother’s or our sister’s. And also, because of this, our limitations aren’t exactly the same as someone else’s. But once we see our limitations, they instantly weaken. And this leads to more security within ourselves.

Piercing the veil

Let’s take a look at this repetitive thing we do regarding our split. For it is hugely underrated, vastly overlooked, and horribly misunderstood. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as transference. But it happens everywhere in our life, not with just our therapist. It shows up in all our intense relationships. In short, we repeat the original traumatic relationship with our parents to the same intensity as what we experienced as children.

Whenever we are negatively involved with someone, we can be sure our split is a factor in the fireworks. Both sides of our split will always manifest, transferring our two-sided reaction to our two parents onto unsuspecting people and situations. Typically we do this blindly, applying what often has no application at all.

Since we’re completely lost in our illusion, we react the same we did way back then. But this is not a match for the reality of the current situation. The trouble is, our reaction forces the other person to have the very reaction we expected. But they wouldn’t have had this reaction if we hadn’t set them up to deliver it.

For example, if we’re convinced that we are going to be rejected, it will happen. Because our own behavior will be rejecting. For we firmly believe in something that isn’t true. But then our belief gets reinforced, so our split cracks open even wider. We can keep doing this for a long time, until we start to see what we are doing. We have to pierce the veil of our unreality if we want to start living in true reality.

Breaking the cycle

We go through life, then, reacting to the person in front of us, not as them but as if they were our parents. We send our responses out, directed at what we think exists but not at what really exists. So we’re not reaching the real other person.

Most of the time, we’re doing this with someone who is doing that same thing right back. As a result, we’re constantly bypassing each other. Our currents crisscross but never land. This contributes heavily to so many people feeling so incredibly lonely. And it’s why we have such difficulty communicating.

One thing that can help is if one of the people involved wakes up. We must have enough perspective to realize that the other’s responses are not about them. If we’re that person—if we are a little less caught in a prison of blindness—we may be able to avoid making a bad situation worse.

We will need to have recognized our own dualistic split and stopped doing our own dance of transference. That’s the only way to stop the onslaught of misdirected arrows from landing on us as their target. Then the negative involvement won’t get a rise out of us. That will signal to the sender of the transference that maybe these two situations aren’t identical after all.

We need to be the ones to break the cycle. Otherwise, we’ll be dependent on others being healthy and free of duality so that our own transference doesn’t land on us. We need to be the ones who step into reality. This is how we end the cycles of suffering that result from our confusion and the resulting chaos.

Stepping out of illusion

We have the power in our hands to avoid a lot of pain. Remember, pain comes from illusion. And illusion is what results from our split that was first lived out in our relationship with our parents.

The way out is through awareness that we are living in a trance. Our blind automatism and our stereotypical responses will slow down as soon as we see how we are doing this. We need to realize that we have never fully reacted to our husband or wife, our child or our friend, as them. Rather, we see them as standing in for someone else.

Yes, we do this with our own children as well. For if we don’t give up this flawed way of going about living, every important relationship we have will be influenced by it. It’s a trap we have to break free from. And it’s the liberation we are seeking and can find on this spiritual path of self-awareness.

Lack of awareness is truly a prison that makes life not worth living. Because we feel caught between two equally unappealing alternatives. We adopted a certain way of reacting to our parents, and now we keep responding that way. And so we keep getting the same poor results.

Sometimes our reaction to one parent may be an attempt to correct or compensate for an unwanted situation with the other. It gets complicated. However it goes for us, our two attitudes will come together to form our basic split. And our way of living will be a result of this.

Once we break this mold, though, new experiences can materialize. Then life can become meaningful and joyful, peaceful and rich. For splits are not compatible with harmony. Which means, by surfacing our split and mending it, through our comprehension, we will come to living in more harmony.