We all have a double personality, also called a split personality. When you are meditating, all the thoughts that enter your mind without conscious permission are thoughts of our other half who is born, living, and determined to die with us, unless we can either amalgamate the second ‘me’ into a unified ‘us’ or mute the stranger who always try to push the me out of me. ‘Why didn’t I do that? Something stopped me’. ‘I had a bad feeling about it but something seems to make me do it still!’ ‘Why did I not just shut up instead of blabbering on? I incriminated myself with my talkativeness.’ ‘I want to lose weight but just can’t say no to food despite my resistance’, etc., etc. I am sure many of you share this experience of regret or confusion and even shock at your own decisions, actions, and words. We give our behavior various excuses like lack of willpower, lack of confidence, lack of motivation, and lack of willingness, and so on. In fact, all these phrases fit. We all have this ingrown opposition which we mistake to be stronger than us because we give it too much time without much analysis or challenge. This is a silent voice in the head, yet a deafening influence on our mindset. This voice echoes at all 3 levels of our abstract existence- the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious mind. The reason that the intruder has comfortably scouted inside the sanctity of mind’s most intimate apartment is: We willingly appoint this stranger as our closest confidante and remain totally unaware of its overpowering expanse.
There is a flip side to this as well. ‘I was all set to travel, but something inside me said ‘don’t’. When I heard of the crash, I thanked my hunch’. We call such near-miss experiences, ‘gut feeling’ or ‘sixth sense’ or ‘intuition’. I call this voice my split personality. Meditation could help one to understand that this mysterious voice inside our mind is nothing but the echo of our own fears, doubts, and equally, our faith and our own convictions. This voice resides deep in the subconscious and seeps through into the unconscious; this is the reason we hear it as a remote echo from within.
The amygdala in the brain processes emotions in its right and left hemispheres. The right side is associated with negative emotions and the left side with positive emotions. Depending upon our genes, the environment in which we are born and brought up, as well as our natural preferences as we grow up decide which emotion is overpowering in our character. Emotion survives through expression, like positive emotions would express themselves as love, charity, and empathy. Same way, the expression of negative emotions is hatred, callousness, greed, and so on. We create, nurture and develop a voice inside our mind, which we might hesitate to say aloud, and over a period of time, it grows into a palpitating entity hidden within us. We give it all the names, but it is part of our own identity. Because the split-self does not work from the conscious platform we start giving it all the fancy mystical interpretations.
To consolidate this split- part of our own self, we need to connect with ourselves through meditation, reflect on actions as ‘our’ karmas and not give ourselves the excuse for bad karmas. Analyse whether your mind is more inclined towards negative thoughts or positive emotions. Adjust a healthy balance through conscious choices. Eventually, tilt the balance towards positive. We can do it if we persevere. When I refer to meditation, I don’t connotate religion or even yoga. It simply means introspection of self, unbiased and impartially. The other half of ourselves within ourselves is meant by nature to be a permanent feature of ‘ME’. Rear it proper and use it to your advantage.