The Way of Wholeness, Part 1: Fragmentation

Inner Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

Inner Work

For the week of December 8, 2014

The Way of Wholeness

Part 1: Fragmentation

The spiritual path is a journey from fragmentation to wholeness, from time to the timeless. Beginning where we are, we look and likely find ourselves in a fragmented moment, in a multitude of processes, loosely connected at best. Here we have the major set of processes we call our thoughts, our emotions, and all that goes on in our body. Then there all the external processes. Our family, where each person has their own ongoing stories, of which we are a part. And each has their hidden depths. There is our job with all its intricacies, requirements, protocols, and people. There is our leisure, our friends, entertainment media, hobbies, and habits. There is our race, ethnicity, religion, and prejudice. There is our politics, our nation, our opinions, our passions, our indifference. There are the endless ongoing tasks of life, personal grooming, caring for our family, cooking, cleaning, and shopping. There is our home and all our possessions with their required care and maintenance, as well the utility and sometimes the joy they bring. There is the past, the present, and the future. All these and more are the fragments of our life.

But fragments, even a multitude of them, do not make a whole. We tend to feel disjointed, careening from one role to another, one task to another, one piece of our life to another. It goes from complex and bewildering to banal and boring, and every emotion in between. Can there be something that ties it all together, something that makes our life a whole rather than this endless series of fragments?

This is not just a psychological issue. Fragmentation is built into the very nature of our world, into time and space. Everything is separate in space: one thing here and another over there. Things do not occupy the same space. Events are separate in time. The gate of time severely limits us. We cannot be in two places at once. We cannot do two things at once, except for the experience-impoverishing effort of multitasking. We are separate from each other and separate from our destiny.

Not only is our life fragmented, both inwardly and outwardly, but we ourselves are not whole. We are missing something, some fundamental connection, some piece of our soul. That lack drives us. We tend to look to externals to fill it: to experiences, to jobs or money, to relationships and family. Such externals matter deeply: to be productive, to feel secure, to have the warmth of love and friendship. But even with all that, something more fundamental remains unsatisfied, unfinished. We yearn for more, for completion, for wholeness in our own being.

We cannot think or plan our way out of this. No mind-trick and no amount of fame or success will resolve our fragmentation, our separation, our lack of wholeness. Because it arises from our own nature and from the nature of our world, the only way toward completeness is to change our nature, to become a different kind of being with a different set of perceptions.

For that we pursue the spiritual path, which we can call the Way of Wholeness. In the coming weeks we will explore further aspects of that Way. For this week, look at the fragmentation of your life. See where you are amidst all that. To see how things are with us, to see what is missing is a major motivation toward the work of self-transformation, self-completion.

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