***Integrating the Fragmented Self

The contemporary world presents us with an oceanic array of choices, stimuli, responsibilities, and distractions that often keep us from achieving personal harmony. Many people either fail to realize or are indifferent to the fact that their lives are really a form of controlled chaos. Others are all too aware of this situation and find themselves overwhelmed by the excess, burdened by their inability to incorporate and/or filter out unnecessary or harmful mental input.

Some people, though, have taken on the modern world in all its excess and have found a way to thrive, enjoying a life that is happy, healthy, prosperous, and dynamic. Chances are such people are continuously striving for wholeness and have learned the fine art of personal integration.

One key to becoming integrated is to incorporate the opposite qualities of those aspects of life we generally think of as positive. For example, cheeriness, charm, and good-humor can only be authentic if one has also experienced some pain and suffering. Good humor is not about denying or repressing the grim things in life, it’s about coming to terms with them and making them a part of us--contained, understood, and even nurtured. Through our struggle to achieve personal integration, we gain insight into living well.

Avoiding the painful and the unpleasant often makes a situation worse. Embracing pain--using it, transcending it--is the way to achieve a higher pleasure. Striving for wholeness and achieving it will enhance and elevate the full range of our desires and aspirations.

Wholeness means uniting all the aspects of one’s self, integrating all innate capacities, however disparate they may be. Achieving wholeness or integration is a daunting task. One of the many obstacles to wholeness is that people, in a cosmic sense, are small, limited, and inadequate; tiny pieces of a vast, imperceptible whole. This realization can become a source of defeatism, leading one to believe that achieving wholeness is impossible in such a fragmented world.

As individuals, we experience the various effects of dualism--that separation between essential aspects of ourselves, like mind and body--on a daily basis. Duality is based on the law of attraction and repulsion, and, therefore, creation itself is founded on the principle of duality. It would seem, then, that we are meant to exist in a state of fragmentation, and the noise of media and technology does not add to this situation so much as mirror it. This makes the task of wholeness that much harder.

It is difficult to talk about a theme like wholeness without lapsing into the abstract and metaphysical. It’s a chimerical topic, but the consequences are very real. The person looking to succeed must have his own house in order and maintain some peace of mind simply to make it to work in the morning. But to thrive and reach the zenith of success, a person needs to do more. It’s a matter of reaching self-knowledge, and taking the next step after that: applying that knowledge in your professional as well as your personal life.