If our inner and outer selves can never completely match, are we condemn to live two separate albeit dependent existences?
I don’t think mindfulness practices can ever completely resolve the experience of duality. Subjectivity and objectivity can never really be transcended except maybe by imagination and empathy. What we think and feel we are is and will mostly remain different from what others perceive of us.
Is it then actually a condemnation? Or is it more a blessing that affords us some rest from the incessant change of life and the world.
While our interior self does also experience change, it does not do so at the same pace as the body, even when we try to regulate mind, breath, body and environment through meditation practice. There is a lag, a gap, without which the conscious mind might be overwhelmed.
We can also hide, delay and filter the presentation of our emotional or psychological states of being to the exterior world. This comes naturally, with self-awareness, and it affords us the distance to diagnose, learn and act intentionally, to which we owe our survival as human kind and as psychological individuals.
We want to be perceived as who we think and feel we are. Our condition is otherwise. Sartre was haunted with the idea that part of us did not belong to us and could never be accessed, making us never complete.
With mindfulness practice, we aim at reducing this separation. And while we work on that, we should remember that if part of us is outside of our sovereign self, we should care to collaborate with others that are the only window into our outer self, this partial stranger, that we share responsibility for.
Have you tried sitting in front of a mirror with someone else and asking them what they see of you? How does it correspond to your perception?