A root cause of unhappiness comes from the separation anxiety. Birth leaves the newborn with a feeling of heartbreak following separation from the mother. This injury can lead to wanting to compensate for this lack throughout one’s life. Incarnation in matter plunges us into the relative, duality: it is even the fundamental basis of terrestrial existence. Without darkness, there is no light. The same goes for masculine and feminine, hot and cold…
Duality means separation, therefore the psychological phenomenon of anxiety and the need to find unity. The world needs polarities to exist, with duality being the basis of our experience. It is a fundamental truth that we must meditate on and perceive deployed in our lives. Unity in matter can only be punctual or artificial.
Erich FROMM in his work The Art of Love specifies: “the experience of separation arouses anxiety, the source of all anxieties. To be separated means to be cut off. Man’s greatest need is the need to overcome this separation, to leave the prison of one’s solitude”. Human beings have unconsciously developed artificial solutions in order to heal their inner wound due to separation and their quest for unity:
– States of pleasure: Relieving separation anxiety for a time, these practices call for further repetitions, often with an increase in frequency and intensity.
– Membership in a group: The individual conforms to the group with which he identifies. He may lose his individuality, but gains a feeling of unity.
– Creativity: which unites the creator with his creation, representing the world outside of him. Being unites with the world through its creation, during the time of creation.
All these attempts at union and overcoming separation are partial, subject to external and temporary conditions. The only true union can only be accomplished through a spiritual process leading to a deep and lasting feeling of unity. Beyond personal will, personality and passions, beyond the fusion where distinctions disappear. Any form of separation then disappears, because each part contains within itself the whole.
Unhappiness only exacerbates the needs for healing, reconciliation and unity. We must therefore exercise discernment to recognize and accept our states of separation. We must first seek this feeling of unity within ourselves, and in our connection with nature and the cosmos. And not by material and temporal means.