the divided mind is really whole, part 1
Vic Shayne
author
The Self is a Belief: the idea that causes suffering
A number of years ago I read a book written by a prominent physician who, unlike most of his peers, was able to think outside of the box of modern medicine. His name was John Sarno, MD, and his book is entitled The Divided Mind. Sarno is credited with restoring the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who had been suffering with physical ailments that medical intervention was unable to cure. His new theory was based on a very ancient idea that suppressed emotions can cause physical symptoms. This finding that emerged from his caseload of patients over 50 years led Sarno to explore the facets of the mind that harbor feelings strong enough to create physical pain.
emotions that cause physical symptoms
John Sarno discovered that deep-seated emotions quite often cause physical health issues such as headaches, backaches, neck pain, rashes, shortness of breath, foot pain, and much more. He called such health issues TMS (tension myositis syndrome, or as I like to say, Too Much Stress). His cure was simple yet defied the unyielding and dogmatic medical paradigm, making him an outlier among his fellow physicians everywhere. His message was to recognize that your emotions are causing your physical symptoms, and your pain, discomfort, and immobility will disappear.
Detractors argued that Sarno’s approach to healing bordered on quackery. Nevertheless, it’s hard to argue with hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who read his book and found a permanent cure for ailments that were ruining their quality of life and for which modern medicine offered absolutely no cure. And it’s even more difficult to deride a man with more seniority than anyone, and especially because he was a board certified medical doctor at the prestigious NYU medical center.
what does a divided mind imply?
After reading John Sarno’s book, The Divided Mind. I meditated on his title and his concept for a very long time — years, in act — encouraged by my own success with the Sarno method in curing a chronic backache I had for nearly 20 years and then, years later, an itchy rash that doctors could not cure. I became living proof that Sarno offered a secret to healing that his peers refused to see because their egos stood in the way.
I wondered what the term “divided mind” really meant and whether it was a real phenomenon. When it comes to psychosomatically caused pain and discomfort, I discovered that, superficially, the mind seems to be doing at least two things at once: It is noticing the effects of stress, trauma, and emotional problems while perpetuating these problems. And at the same time the mind— the subconscious mind — is holding onto problematic thoughts that it will not allow to rise into the conscious mind. Similar to Freud’s teaching, Sarno’s work focused on a conflict between the conscious and subconscious minds.
are there really two minds?
Although we can appraise emotional problems in terms of two minds working in conflict, the fact is that there are not really two minds at all. There is only one mind. The real problem is that the egoic self, which is the sense of a “me,” fragments reality into pieces so it can see nuances and differentiations. This is a natural function of the mind and brain and has very practical real-world applications. BUT, while this is most helpful for solving problems, making decisions, and recognizing the difference between a rope in the grass and a dangerous snake, when it comes to knowing what we really are, this same act of fragmentation is an obstacle to our mental, emotional, and physical health. And, I would go so far to say that this apparent divided mind is the root of nearly all suffering in this world.
We are not at all fragmented; we just believe that we are because we have been psychologically conditioned to navigate our world of shapes, forms, and phenomena. But by fragmenting our own minds via our beliefs we create conflict and suffering for ourselves and everyone else. And everyone else is doing the same thing, making our world full of suffering and craziness. Often, as Sarno showed, this suffering extends to our own physical pains, aches, and irritations in the form of TMS.
the ego is divisive
It is the egoic self — the entity we call “me” — that has theoretically divided the mind. And it is the egoic self that has invented ideas such as higher and lower consciousness, a higher self, enlightenment, a soul, etc. — all of which are buzz words in the sphere of today’s spirtuality-speak. In actuality, however, such divisions are no more than beliefs resulting from a lack of realization of what we truly are. If one were to enquire deeply into the self then this fact of life would become apparent, but since hardly anyone does this we have millions of people running around repeating ideas that are erroneous and divisive. And we continue trying and pretending to be happy despite our broken, fragmented minds. Tony Robbins and Marianne Williams have made handsome careers for this very reason. But, alas, positive thinking and prayers do little, if anything, to mend the division of the mind.
freud’s fantastic framework
Sigmund Freud came up with the idea that there is a super ego, an ego, and an Id — all parts of the mind. As John Sarno taught, Freud’s concepts were important in allowing us to understand how we tend to compartmentalize our thoughts, experiences, trauma, and emotional wounds. The super ego is the part of us that holds fast to moral principles, and the Id is like the unbridled, ferrel child within us that believes it should have whatever it wants and whenever it wants it. Sandwiched in the middle is the ego, which is our face to the world. If we do not balance these three aspects of the mind we experience mental and emotional problems. In other words, we remain in conflict, seemingly with a divided mind.
Recognizing that our minds appear to be divided may be the first step in exploring what we really are, because we can see that we are conflicted as a result of dividing the totality of existence into bite-sized portions. The next question is how we got this way. From here we can ask ourselves a lot of questions and then just observe until it becomes obvious how we tend to think, what we think about, where thought comes from, what our relationship is to thought, whether there is a “me” that is not affected by thought that comes and goes, and so on. Through this self-enquiry a picture begins to develop — one that shows us how thoughts create so many problems for us and that our presumed associations and identities are the result of errant thinking.
from healing to enlightenment
John Sarno’s life work was about healing physical symptoms through the mind. But if we go much, much deeper we can discover that the egoic mind, which is the sense of a “me” who we believe we are, doesn’t actually exist. It is an illusion created when the mind is psychologically conditioned to believe it is the center of its world and separate from everyone, and everything, else. It is this false sense of separation (the division within our minds and thinking processes) that causes our emotional problems, because separation causes internal and external conflict. This fragmentation of the mind causes physical symptoms, but this is just the tip of the iceberg; it also causes our suffering, conflicts, narrow-mindedness, limitations, pettiness, violence, angst, depression, anxiety, and failure to grasp the big picture.
freedom from the conditioned mind
Freedom is that which exists without restriction, without limitations, and it is freedom that is our natural state of existence, which becomes evident once the self is discovered for what it is.
Read Part 2 of this two-part discussion on the divided mind…
