Why the City of Separation Is Not Just a Metaphor—It’s Your Facebook Feed
What if the culture around us is designed to keep us asleep?
This post is drawn from our ongoing journey through Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within. In this stage of the work, we reflect on Kabir Helminski’s parable of the City of Separation—not as abstract allegory, but as a map of the world we move through every day. Cynthia Bourgeault invites us to recognize that this “unreal city” isn’t elsewhere. It’s embedded in the logic of consumer culture, spiritual performance, and the endless noise of online life. What follows is a meditation on how that separation manifests in subtle ways, and how the work of waking up begins—not by escaping it, but by learning to see it clearly.
The City That Looks Alive but Isn't
In the Sufi teaching story recounted by Kabir Helminski and explored by Cynthia Bourgeault, the “City of Separation” is described as a place where everything seems in order, but nothing touches the heart. People live predictable lives. Their needs are met. They participate in what looks like meaningful activity. But underneath it all is an absence—something quietly suffocating. There’s no real presence, no real transformation. Just distraction and imitation.
This description isn’t an abstraction. It is an accurate picture of modern life.
The False Self Finds a Platform
We are surrounded by systems and habits that keep us operating on the surface. The endless scroll of social media. The constant push to be more productive. The self-help mantras that promise abundance and fulfillment. These don’t just distract us—they condition our sense of identity. The City of Separation is not somewhere we visit. It’s where we already are.
What Helminski calls the “unreal city,” Bourgeault helps us recognize as a spiritually vacant culture. And perhaps the most pressing example of that culture is the social media feed.
This isn’t a polemic against technology. The issue isn’t that we use it, but that we’ve become shaped by it.
The Self of Compulsion: Normalized and Rewarded
Helminski and Bourgeault both point toward a key teaching: the human being lives at multiple levels of selfhood. The outer self—what Sufi wisdom calls the “self of compulsion”—is driven by instincts, cravings, fears, and the desire to prove and acquire. It’s the part of us that is constantly striving. It’s also the part most visible online.
What’s often marketed to us as “freedom” is really this self of compulsion wearing spiritual clothes. The YouTube ad that promises passive income. The influencer who sells a productivity system based on biohacking and cold plunges. The webinar that says you can change your life by shifting your mindset in three steps. These messages are not grounded in presence. They are built around performance.
When Remorse Is the Beginning
From the standpoint of traditional spiritual work, the self of compulsion is not evil, but asleep. It can’t see beyond itself. It reacts. It defends. It controls. When this level of self becomes the center of our lives—when it runs our day, our relationships, our prayers—we end up disconnected from any deeper knowing of who we are.
Bourgeault emphasizes that real spiritual transformation doesn’t start with improvement. It begins with what she calls “remorse.” Not guilt. Not shame. But the deep, soul-level recognition that something isn’t right. That the world we have inherited—this culture of hustle, success, and control—doesn’t speak to the hunger in the heart. That we are living too far from home.
This remorse is not a problem. It is the beginning of the path.
Distraction Poses as Healing
Many people bypass this stage. Instead of staying with the ache, they try to fix it with another course, another goal, another round of self-optimization. But the ache isn’t meant to be solved. It’s meant to be honored.
The City of Separation thrives on our refusal to stay with this discomfort. It rewards us for staying distracted. It gives us a thousand ways to upgrade ourselves without ever asking who we really are. And when we do feel the ache—when we question whether this life is too shallow or too fast or too fragmented—we’re encouraged to treat that as weakness.
Awakening the Essential Self
Helminski describes presence as the quality that begins to reconnect us with the real. It is not an emotion or a technique. It is a capacity of being. It allows us to notice what is happening in us. To see the patterns we’re caught in. To respond, rather than react. It is a quiet strength, not an assertive one.
In the framework Bourgeault lays out, presence is what allows us to begin the journey from false self to essential self. The outer self isn’t eliminated—it is brought into alignment. It becomes part of a whole, rather than pretending to be the whole.
The Journey Isn’t Linear
This is not an overnight shift. It is not a one-time awakening. It is a path. The early steps are often marked by disorientation, confusion, and even a sense of loss. Bourgeault names this honestly. She points out that spiritual development is not linear, and that we often revisit old wounds again and again—not because we’re failing, but because each time we return, we do so from a slightly deeper place.
The self of compulsion doesn’t disappear just because we meditate or go on retreat. It resurfaces. It reasserts itself. But with time, and practice, we begin to recognize its voice. And we begin to question whether we want to obey it.
A Quiet Connection with God
One of the more hopeful insights in this path is that there is a deeper self already present within us. Bourgeault describes it as the “essential self,” connected inextricably with God. It is not something we create. It is something we uncover. It doesn’t dominate. It doesn’t strive. It listens. It waits. It knows how to love.
And the movement toward that self begins by seeing clearly the world we’ve built around the false one.
Not a System, but an Invitation
That clarity often begins in moments that seem unremarkable. A realization during a walk. A feeling of emptiness after another social media binge. A quiet knowing that success, as currently defined, is not what we’re looking for. These are not failures. They are signals.
What Bourgeault and Helminski offer is not a system or a shortcut. It is an invitation to become more honest. To see the architecture of the City of Separation not as someone else’s problem, but as the ground we live on—and to begin, in small and steady ways, to walk toward something more whole.
No Exit Required—Just Attention
The presence we seek is not waiting at the end of a ladder. It is already here. But we need to remember how to turn toward it.
And that remembering begins in the heart—not the news feed.
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Mic drop. While vaguely aware of much of this, put together in a cogent presentation and fully accessible leaves no room for "light impact." Whoa. Reflection required after reading this (at least for me).
Ah, but the newsfeed hath charms to inspire sometimes! When you find a human who is writing from depth and connection, especially. Thank you, my dear. This just gave me the last number for a combination lock I've been struggling with for a while. The knowing I'm getting is to gut check my mission, make sure I'm not fulfilling the dream of someone I used to be, and neglecting the needs of the person I have become. But I love my "jobs." The difference is presence, not doing but being, listening, observing, feeling. Allowing the world to unfold in the shape of my truest desires and deepest destiny. Beautiful. Thank you, thank you.