The ancient Hebrew prophet Isaiah wrote that a great wall had been created out of humanity's "sin" in the spiritual world (Isaiah 30 : 9-14). And Freud, of course, is on record as saying that the only thing separating the conscious from the unconscious is "resistence itself". And while I think that these explanations of the wall are correct, as far as they go, they still leave us with a lot of questions about just what this wall is and what can be done about it.

But there is a another way to define and explain this inner wall, a modern approach that helps to expose its hidden presence within each of us. The modern psychologist Stephen Levine speaks of this wall in far different than Freud or Isaiah, terms far easier for the modern mind to identify with and accept. Instead of describing the wall as being made of "resistance" or even "sin", Levine uses the word "grief", and his approach helps us to see that both Isaiah and Freud were referring to the same thing, the same dynamic. Levine wrote:

Over time, all this holding and clinging, condemning and judging, hardens around our grief like barnacles on a ship. When we hold on to our grief, anger, and guilt, they don't simply go away on their own, although they do seem to. When we don't express them, when we don't allow ourselves to fully experience our own grief, sadness, and disappointments in life, they are prevented from falling away naturally, and are instead preserved intact, "going into cold storage" inside our own minds where they can exert an invisible but potent effect on our lives, behaviors, and attitudes. When we avoid confronting and addressing these feelings directly, we prevent their emotional energy from being "discharged"; to deny their existence is merely to hold them back, preventing ourselves from releasing them and letting them go. Like cars in gridlock, these emotions won't just dissipate on their own; they don't have anywhere else they can go. They have a single destination - our consciousness, and will not turn off that road until they arrive, no matter how long it takes. So like cars in a traffic jam, they just wait, piling up, building an obstruction. And their emotional energy piles up too. Prevented from dissipating naturally, these unacknowledged feelings are forced to accumulate silently and invisibly within us, becoming ever more solid and formidable, growing dense roots deep into our psyches, burrowing their toxic tentacles into our attitudes and behaviors.

When we finally grasp that this is really the message being delivered, we begin to understand that our grief and suffering is really just another of the many threads woven through the human experience - not punishment for some unpardonable sin. And with this, we realize that the Buddha was not entirely correct - that although life does include suffering as one of its most noticeable components, life is far more than just suffering itself. And with this recognition, we can finally begin the process of letting go of all the judgment that has hardened over the years around our grief.

And the first step in letting go of all this pain, grief, and judgment is to acknowledge its existence and try to see it for what it is. When we finally summon the courage to approach our grief, we discover it has accumulated into a firm, dense wall, an unanticipated and unexplored barrier between the heart and the mind. We start to comprehend that this wall never really completely prevented communication between the conscious and unconscious, it was just that, like a guard to a castle, this wall insisted that IT be dealt with first. Like Glenn Close's character in "Fatal Attraction", the wall, built out of the unexperienced moments of our own past lives, was there with its hands on its hips, saying "I won't be IGNORED".

When we finally give up trying to do the impossible, when we finally stop vainly trying to ignore this wall, when we gird ourselves with faith and courage, and bravely resolve to walk up close and look directly into the blackness of our grief and see it for what it is, we begin to realize for the first time how very often we have distrusted what we feel in life, discovering all the convoluted patterns of our grief and unfinished business. All the loss, all the injuries, all the disappointments of a lifetime (of many lifetimes?) lay there, encrusted in that wall of barnacled grief, holding us back from our own lives, locking us out of our own hearts.

Standing finally right at the base of the wall, we look up at its imposing heights, and begin to understand that our unspoken, unacknowledged, unreleased grief is immense. We start to grasp that we've been spending most of our waking lives desperately trying to elude the pain of our daily grief, our daily fears, our daily anger, our daily sense of isolation, all the grief of a lifetime. Peering deeply into this wall, we see that every iota of our disowned grief is still there, piled up, each little bit still waiting in its original condition to be released, each bitter morsel of sorrow and grief still unchanged from the moment of its origination.

Remarkably, this painful exploration of our grief opens the path to heavenly joy. By illuminating the darkness of these innumerable moments of helplessness and hopelessness, fully immersing ourselves in them so that they can finally be completely experienced, released and discarded, the armor around our hearts begins to melt and the barnacles begin to drop off, and we become healed.

He implores us to let this stored-up pain release itself into our awareness. Nothing could be easier; all we have to do is stop holding it back. If it breaks our hearts, he advises, so be it. Let them break. As difficult as it may seem, we must let go, we must stop all our holding on, all the holding back we've been constantly engaged in. The true agony, we thus discover, was simply in being separated from our own pain. Paradoxically, we find that being reunited with that pain is the one path that will allow us to finally travel beyond it. Acknowledging and experiencing the "truth" of the presence of that pain is the only thing that will "set us free" from it.

What we never let ourselves feel, will never heal. That is why the wall is sure to fall in each of us sooner or later:

This question answers itself. We must regularly perform inner "housekeeping" chores, spiritual maintenance, regularly examining our own hearts, to see if we have allowed any new experiences or feelings to be disowned, unacknowledged, or repressed. But this is an easy task, and not nearly as difficult or challenging as confronting the whole wall. Once the sediment of the great wall has been washed away, we merely need to perform brief and relatively effortless soul-cleansings after that:

This is DivisionTheory. DT simply asks how this would manifest in the afterlife, and concludes that "as a man thinketh, so he is".

If this wall is not "knocked down" inside us while we are alive, if we die while still in a state of self-alienation from our own authentic feelings, this inner division will not instantly and miraculously be healed just because we exit the body. This state of inner division will remain our own condition.