In his book, I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter proposes that the essence or soul of a person can be instantiated in the mind or brain of others, particularly someone who loves them. For those I have been close to, I definitely get this sense that a part of their essence resides with me, a part of who they are continues to loop through my mind, as if a part of my brain is now devoted to supporting their existence. As though I literally donated a portion of my hardware to running their program. I gave them a piece of my mind.
Then there comes a time when an attachment must be dissolved. The process of withdrawal can be excruciating. But the most painful thing of all, I think, is when you get confused into believing that separation means killing off the piece of them that lives in you, which is still connected to them.
I’ve been doing this all my life, and I’m only just beginning to realize it. After separating, if my longing for someone is too overwhelming to handle, the only apparent solution is to put them out of my mind for good. Renunciation. Quit cold turkey. I seem to believe that the tendrils of their soul that have been woven into my being must be extricated or made to wither away, or I’ll be trapped in painful longing forever.
No wonder the process evokes so much suffering and trauma. In my mind, they are dying. They are disappearing forever, and I am murdering a segment of my own mind and heart… the segment that is them.
But imagine separating without separating. You proceed along a new life path that entails no further physical interactions, and you may even shift your focus entirely away from thoughts of them, but the one you love continues to be in you, and you in them. Even as you walk in different directions, you walk interdimensionally hand in hand. It’s inescapable.
The people I think I’ve lost, I can feel them sharing my awareness right now. I can feel their beingness living and breathing within me, as me. Normally, that only increases my craving for contact, but when I open up to letting them live in me, to giving their soul a permanent home, something shifts profoundly. More than the mere allaying of grief, the whole problem of reaching across the gap between our two selves ceases to make sense.
It’s a lot like desert solitude… involving a sense that everything you know of your own awareness is all that exists for the moment. The only difference is that you realize there are other souls here… maybe all of them.
