The Wall: Unconscious Symbology

I was having a conversation with one of my spiritual teachers about the parts of myself I am trying to understand and change when an image suddenly appeared in my mind.

It wasn't something I was consciously trying to visualize. It came as a symbolic message from my unconscious to my conscious mind, and even as our conversation continued, I could see it. The closest way I can describe the experience is that I was in two places at once. One was the physical place where the conversation was happening. The other was this landscape. My eyes were open, I was listening and responding, but at the same time I was somewhere else, looking at this wall in the desert. I could move my attention through the landscape, change my vantage point, examine what was there, and feel what its different elements meant.

I saw an ancient wall standing alone in the middle of an empty desert.

The conversation had been about a part of me that is still operating within a program shaped by a variety of neuroses that developed from performing perfectly as a child, adolescent, and even young adult in an effort to be safe and protect myself from the reactivity and expectations of my parents. These neuroses served an important purpose but are no longer needed. Yet, they've become part of the program. I have been striving to create new neural pathways and overcome this.

At first, I was close to the wall. On the side where I stood was the part of me still operating within these patterns. Somewhere beyond the wall, I imagined the part of me who had overcome them and lived from a place of self-acceptance.

I imagined that other side as an oasis.

It was where I would finally arrive once I had worked through all of this. The place where I would be self-accepting, healed, and free of the patterns that had followed me for so long.

But then my perspective changed. I was no longer standing close to the wall, merely staring at rock. I was looking down at it from high above. From there I could see the wall in its entirety. It was ancient, tall, and stoic, built from enormous stones and standing by itself in the desert.

From above, I could finally see both sides.

They were exactly the same.

There was no oasis waiting for me beyond the wall.

There was desert on both sides.

What I had imagined on the other side wasn't actually self-acceptance. It was a projection of it. From where I had been standing, so close to the wall that I couldn't see beyond it, I had created an image of what I wanted to be there. I had taken self-acceptance and turned it into another destination. Another thing to accomplish. Another future version of myself to place on a pedestal and reach toward.

But the wider view showed me what was actually there.

The desert is empty because of how deeply I had to abandon myself simply to survive. That meaning was present from the moment the image appeared. The desert doesn't feel like loneliness to me, nor does its emptiness feel neutral. When I enter the image, I feel self-abandonment in the landscape itself. The barrenness of it is the internal experience of having left so much of myself behind.

Now, as an adult, I'm seeking myself. I'm trying to heal and shed these layers, but the wall is still there.

The wall, though, is not a villain.

I created it as a shield. It served an important purpose. I can feel that the wall itself wants to exist because it believes it is helping me. It is peaceful and stoic. It is alive and it "feels" that it is of service, and so it will not dismantle of its own volition. It isn't trying to imprison me. It is faithfully continuing the job I created it to do. Understanding the wall this way changes my relationship to the things it represents. Anxiety, perfectionism, vigilance, and the other patterns I developed do not have to be treated as defects that need to be ripped out of me. They were protective. They learned their jobs at a time when those jobs mattered, and they continue to perform them even though the circumstances that created them have changed.

The wall is not something I need to conquer. It is something I need to understand.

This is why I don't imagine myself destroying it. I don't want to demolish it, bulldoze it, or blow a hole through it to reach the other side. More importantly, I know that even if I tried, the wall wouldn't budge. Those methods would never work. I cannot use force against a structure that was created by force and expect it to somehow produce self-acceptance.

Fighting the wall would only give it another reason to remain.

I imagine the wall simply fading. Its work comes to an end.

The perspective from above became increasingly important as I continued exploring the image because, before this, all I saw was wall. I was so close to it that I didn't even know how narrow it was.

From up close, it seemed infinite. From above, I could finally see its dimensions. I could see its height and thickness, but I could also see its edges and all the empty desert surrounding it.

The wall hadn't become smaller. My perspective had expanded.

From this vantage point, the wall is almost strange in its proportions. It is incredibly tall but only about as wide as my arm span, standing alone in an enormous open desert. Someone looking at it from the outside could reasonably ask, Why don't you just walk around it?!

And yet I can't.

Within the image, that is simply not an option. That feels very much like the nature of some of the defenses I've built in my own life. From the outside, someone may be able to see their boundaries immediately. From where I have stood, they can appear to occupy the entire horizon.

But seeing the "oasis" side of the wall for what it was may have been just as important as finally seeing the edges of the wall.

I recognize that pattern of imagining fulfillment somewhere beyond my present circumstances because it has appeared in other forms throughout my life. If I can just get the new job. If I can just get the new apartment. If I can finally accomplish this one thing, then I'll be happy.

The object changes, but the structure remains the same.

Something in the future becomes invested with the promise of changing how I will feel inside. I don't see the thing entirely as it is anymore because I have also made it carry everything I hope it will give me. The job is no longer just a job. The apartment is no longer just an apartment. An accomplishment becomes proof that I have finally arrived somewhere. Self-acceptance can become another version of the same projection.

If I can just heal enough, then I'll finally become the person on the other side of the wall.

The danger is that we can spend our lives moving from one projected oasis to another. We reach something we were certain would change us, experience the satisfaction of having reached it, and eventually discover the dissatisfaction returns, and another oasis appears somewhere farther away.

Also, the projection itself prevents us from seeing clearly. We aren't relating to what is actually in front of us anymore. We are relating to what we need it to represent. The more of our inner longing we place onto people, places, accomplishments, identities, or even our own imagined future selves, the easier it becomes to live among illusions without even realizing we created them.

From close to the wall, I couldn't see that.

From above, the "oasis" disappeared.

I don't experience that as a loss.

The other side of the wall is still a projection because I am imagining self-acceptance from the perspective of someone who doesn't yet know what it feels like to fully inhabit it. I am trying to picture an internal reality I haven't experienced yet using the internal reality I already know.

That means the wall may not actually divide the neurosis side from the self-acceptance side at all.

It may divide two perceptions of the same landscape.

If that is true, integration isn't about getting to the other side. There isn't a different or better version of me waiting somewhere across the desert. What I want is to integrate the neurosis side with the self-acceptance side. If that happens, I believe the wall will gently fade before my eyes. When the wall fades, the mirage of the self-acceptance side fades with it.

There are no longer two sides.

There is one landscape.

And only then does the true oasis appear.

This true oasis wouldn't appear as the imagined reward waiting for me beyond the wall, but as something that begins to reveal itself throughout the landscape once the division is gone. The desert is self-abandonment, so perhaps its transformation begins with returning to myself. The landscape changes not because I finally escape one side and reach another, but because I am no longer abandoning one part of myself in pursuit of another.

Landscapes have made sense to me my whole life as a way of experiencing things internally. I don't always experience an emotion or psychological state as a word or an abstract idea. Sometimes it becomes spatial. A feeling can have an atmosphere. An internal state can have terrain, weather, light, distance, boundaries, or a sense of movement. I can sometimes see these places internally while simultaneously feeling what they mean, and exploring the landscape allows me to understand something that I couldn't have reached through language alone.

That is what happened with the wall. The desert, the wall, and the oasis aren't decorative symbols I chose afterward to explain an idea. The landscape came first. Understanding it came afterward.

I also don't believe awareness means arriving at some final state where all of this is finished. We are all in different places in our healing and awareness, and those places continue to change. I don't think being able to support another person requires having reached a projected destination. If anything, this vision has made me more suspicious of the idea that such a destination even exists.

For me, the work is becoming conscious of what is happening within me while it is happening. It is recognizing the walls I once couldn't see, understanding why I built them, noticing what I project beyond them, and becoming willing to see the landscape as it actually is. I began this vision believing self-acceptance was waiting for me somewhere I hadn't reached yet. Now I wonder whether the very idea of an "other side" is part of what has kept the wall standing.

Maybe the work is not to become the person I imagined beyond it.

Maybe the work is to return to the landscape I am already standing in, to the parts of myself I abandoned there, make peace with the wall, thank it for its long standing service, and allow it to finally fade.