Sad wanderers with destroyed personalities

It doesn't amaze me the amount of friends that tell me about that profound —even intolerable— sadness they experienced (or that they are still suffering), when they arrive to make a living in other countries. It's perfectly understandable that every person who goes away from everything familiar will face feelings of sadness and nostalgia, trying to rebuild his thoughts about his place in this world; and far more deep feelings if the reason for that distance is but the urgency of survival itself.

Indeed it is natural but, from a deeper perspective, the unbearableness of the thing comes from the fact that human beings tend to define themselves way too much by the environment where they develop their lives —G.I. Gurdjieff called that the identification process—. That's the main “glue” of all political and religious ideologies that gather masses around ideals using the power of identitarian beliefs. And, as Mckenna taught very well, that's a very dangerous thing:

But I believe that the identification is not only a dangerous practice that can lead us to a sectarian victimhood (or an aggressiveness) but, as I've expressed before, for the values of inner life, it is a deplorable waste of our limited energy on Earth, invested on goals and priorities that do not represent the real constitution of our psyches.

Given the custom management of our subjectivities in western societies, when we wander very far from our familiar environment, we start creating not only a new arrangement for our social life; but also a new personality… and that's generally a painful process.

It is the Plutonian (symbolically speaking) experience of personal transformation, when the Self (or part of it) dies in its known form to give birth to a new form… a new version of the Self.

Death, birth, change… you cannot expect that to not be defined by pain, except if you (as buddhists know… some of them, at least, theoretically) are accustomed to manage your inner life without the weight of cultural identities. How could you do that? By building a personality whose bases are not found in culture, but in the primary experience of the Self, the value (now made cliché) of the here and now.

More than the feeling of longing for the leaved land, it is our cultural personality (which we call ego) that feels such a great shock and resents the change of our conditions. Something that we understand when we practice meditation —exploring our psychological worlds— is that every emotion is temporal, passing. The insights given by Harris about this issue are very revealing. Please take a look at these meaningful lessons:

If we don't cling frantically to the traits built by other life's conditions on our personalities, even the worst emotions get the natural light flow that could make them bearable; and this natural process of periodic personal rebuilding will be free of suffering, though it could be filled with pain… a coherent pain which is only the singing of our flexible souls replying to a difficult or unhealthy reality, and also the reminder that we are still humans.

Pluto only punches hard to the face of those who don't want to accept the insignificance of their own self.