Separation causes you to move from together to alone. The result of this is that the sense of ‘I’, the ego, dominates your life and you make everything about you. Self-confidence, motivation and purpose is shaken in separation and that triggers a protective reaction from the ego, resulting in the personalization of your life. You are literally removing yourself from the general, human flow and moving into a life of isolation, disconnection and confusion.
When you live in separation and your ego is dominating your experience you begin the process of resisting life. Resistance is an outgrowth of fear and separation. Life no longer flows with acceptance, love and trust. In separation you see ‘other’ and limitation and struggle. You see people attacking you, wanting what you have, critical of you. You see yourself as better than and others as less than –or the other way around. This resistance is the basis for competition, distrust, nationalism, and war.
There are two main aspects of resistance; attachment and aversion. The main attachment is to outcomes. Your happiness appears to depend on you achieving certain outwardly focused outcomes. It’s all about you, your needs, your accumulation, your achievement. The main aversion is that you push away anything and anybody that you see impeding you getting what you want. This exacerbates your need to protect and defend. Basically you become attached to what you think will make you happy and you become averse to whatever you think will make you unhappy. You miss the point that you are personalizing and resisting life because you are in fear and separation.
Personalization becomes the effect of your search for worth and your desire to end your suffering. Unfortunately it becomes another layer of suffering. Personalization is filled with judgment and justification. Everything and everyone become high or low, good or bad, wanted or unwanted. You live in the pair of opposites struggling for peace, fulfillment and love.
It becomes a search for silence in your noisy mind, a search for peace in a war of Self-resistance, a search for acceptance in the midst of your own Self-rejection.
Personalization makes your entire life all about you and your struggle. It becomes the way life; attachment, aversion, resistance, judgment and justification. Personalization deepens and solidifies the suffering of separation all the while you think you are ending it.
As separation sets in and personalization becomes your outlook, your life experience becomes less heart centered and more mind centered. In your war with life, in your resistance, you begin to create ever-new, mostly fear based mental realities on an ongoing basis. This becomes the monkey mind. The outgrowth of fear, separation and personalization is a plethora of stories.