Gathering the Fragmented Self 3

Gathering the Fragmented Self 3

Gathering

The experience of being gathered and coherent seems to come from outside the parade of temporal events. It penetrates our conditioned world as the momentary experiences of wholeness. It shows itself to be composed of our mental, emotional, and physical energies operating in a unified way in the present moment. When we are gathered there is a congruence in our behaviour – in our body language, our speech, and our emotional tone. We are not projecting incongruity or sending multiple messages. The will is not fragmented.

We learn that awareness of our breath and physical presence can greatly assist this gathering. And we learn that to be identified with any single function, such as thinking or feeling is to lose that comprehensive self-awareness we call “presence.” It is to be without that “I am” or I-ness that stems from our deeper being, from beyond the superficial mind. 

The essential matter here is that the human being is made up of many functions: sensory, behavioural, emotional, intellectual, psychic, and intuitive. When we live at the energy level of functioning automations, which our highly technologized societies seem to encourage, we function in mechanical and habitual ways. When we function at the higher level of sensitive energy, which means that our attention is drawn strongly to noticing something, then most of our attention is absorbed in just one of our many functions. We may be aware of thinking, or feeling, or sensing, but there is no overall awareness.

The secret to developing an integrated self is to intentionally extend awareness to more than one function at a time…If, for instance, we are fully occupied with an emotion and become aware of our breathing or our physical sensations, we have gathered more presence. If those of us who live mostly in our heads, in repetitive and limited thinking, both add an awareness of something physical such as our breathing and come into touch with our feelings, we have extended our presence greatly. 

Living presence
Kabir Helminski