Wherever you are, you’re already here. There are no expenses, save for your attention, which I hope you will come to understand is infinitely more precious than any amount of money.
You don’t require fixing, you simply require understanding, which necessitates awareness on your part. This consists in a shift of your attention to what is true, in this moment. It is reality. It is not a spiritual reality, or a scientific reality, or a Buddhist reality or a Christian reality, or an Indian reality or a Chinese reality. It is the one alive, indivisible Truth. All of it is here. It is neither theology or philosophy. The common theme that religious and mystical traditions point to, namely awareness, is the living edge of truth.
The beginning and the end go together hand in hand. Do you recall the lightness, openness and freedom of being a child? Isn’t it odd that we consider an early school environment where the educational focus on a child’s future potential is regarded as more important than Being in the immediacy of the present moment?
As if, perhaps one day when they have had an education and a well-paying job then they will finally be entitled to return to the lightness, freedom and happiness they once experienced as children.
The world teaches us to succeed by striving for what we don’t have, and for what we have been taught to want. Struggle is so commonplace that we take it for granted that it is indispensable. We are taught what we seek should bring us happiness, fulfilment, freedom. But where are these benefits? Didn’t we leave that behind when we left childhood to move into more serious, adult concerns involving strain, stress and discontent? Where are these mythical achievements that are supposed to give us lasting fulfilment, peace and happiness? Why is it that even those who have achieved the most worldly success possible are still looking to the next thing, whether it is a new relationship, the colonization of Mars or becoming the President?
The cultural educational process of our lives is marketed as an existential solution, although it never quite seems to deliver in its promises. We long to return to the freedom of childhood because it was then that we were least distant from the untarnished truth of our being, before experiences such as hurt, shame, disapproval and failure conditioned us to harden our hearts and submerge our inmost light in order to navigate a dysfunctional world.
And yet all of the things we consider to be the very fruits of personal success were present right at the beginning of our educational journey, the time where we should have known the least in our lives! We are told that if we ever want to reach the states we experienced in the beginning of our waking lives again, we need to have deserved it by playing according to the rules. We are told we must forego our intuitive sense of value and the immediacy of truth in order to ‘make something of ourselves’, which is how we have been conditioned into a state of believing that peace, contentment and well-being must be seen as earned and stamped with a seal of approval by our benefactors.
Even through all of this discontent, disillusionment and loneliness, that which our hearts most deeply yearns for is still within us, whoever presumes to tell us we are deserving. Happiness is our birthright. There is no moment in which we are cut off from the possibility of remembering the infinite abundance of our true nature. One of the reasons we don’t look at what we actually have is because we are trained to overlook anything that inherently belongs to us. If we ceased to do this, we would learn the value of contentment, and the hungry fire to go on pursuing the next illusory milestone would diminish. We have also inherited the assumption that if everyone has something, or has the same access to it, then that thing must be worthless. Ego rates it as being without value, because it cannot be manipulated in such a way one person or group could hold advantage over another.
The darkness of an insane world needs light, and you are that light. First and foremost, you are awareness itself, undivided and eternal. There is no higher state than to attend to this awakening. It is a suchness to which nothing may be added, and it is neither dependent on nor diminished by anything. None of our words, concepts, or contrived means of objectification catch it.
This is the ancient value we have been taught to suppress in order to render us obedient and industrious. Enculturation puts us to sleep to breed discontented shadows who are encouraged to accumulate, strive and toil to no definitive end. This is to be in a state of hypnotic disconnection, to be ‘cut off from the vine’. I propose that your highest priority in these times, should you feel the call to truth, is the sacred task of remembering of your deepest self as living awareness, as one with your source. I propose that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
There may arrive a point in many of our lives where we begin to feel a natural, indwelling sense of encouragement to question the nature of our lives. I don’t mean that in the traditional sense of reflecting upon who we are and where we are heading with our partners, career and so forth – although that certainly can be a part of it.
Really what I am talking about is looking at is the nature of the entire worldview that we have inhabited, and what is has meant for us to occupy our place within it. Our beliefs, our judgments, our compulsions, neuroses and habits – what has it all meant? Why have we done the things we have, and where did our investment in energy take us along the way?
Self-inquiry in some form or another is often the precursor to great shifts in our understanding, not only of ourselves, but also the way in which we view reality, and ultimately how we move through the world.
Self-inquiry could take the form of ‘something in my life needs to change’. It could derive from a sense of overwhelming dissatisfaction. When I am talking about this line of inquiry, I don’t mean how we can be bigger, better, or different versions of ourselves. Personalities are already very much engaged in this kind task at any given time, so we aren’t talking about that aspect of reflection.
What is however revolutionary in our inner world is to begin to question that which has been fundamental to our entire way of operating.
Changing a partner, a name, or a profession is a little bit like swapping out one pair of shoes for another. We are not talking about touching upon a superficial change. The task of self-inquiry questions in a way that does not emerge from any of assumptions about getting somewhere else, being someone else. It centres its focus on pursuing a clear and direct understanding of the way things are. This is not a relative understanding – how we think they should be, or how they were, but how they actually are right now – in other words, what is actually real?
Who am I really, when all of this personal history with all of its various wants and habits falls by the wayside?
Some people will not feel any clear pull to do this. There are some people who are compelled to do so even from an early age, and even when it was far from comfortable to do so. This inquiry is not necessarily outward – asking our parents or teachers, for example. It is more that is a very direct inner experience of questioning in which we hold in a light of unremitting scrutiny, again, not to look better or to feel better – but to actually know.
The renowned Indian sage Ramana Maharshi famously likened self-inquiry as being like a stick used to stir the embers of a fire. The stick of ‘who am I?’ would stir the hot coals, and in doing so, would itself catch fire and eventually be burned away. This analogy demonstrates something important about the nature of the self-inquiry process – it isn’t really about the power of our answers, but the power of our questions. What is energetically real within those questions does not remain for us as psychological form, but is reclaimed by the truth.
Nothing is perhaps a clearer sign of awakening than the falling away of questions.
When there is any confusion inside us about the nature of things or our true identity, there is usually a persistent sense of being unsettled. Whether we give voice to this confusion or not, there is a yearning for closure that has a way of gnawing at us internally.
Usually, the response for this kind of disturbance or discomfort is some form of going along with a temporary distraction as an analgesic. Making the sense of discomfort going away can work temporarily by any number of methods. Some people do things as simple as ride a bike, watch a movie or listen to the radio in the car.
In other more acute forms, the disturbance of unresolved energies can lead to more dysfunctional patterns. Once you begin to look in earnest upon your inner world, you will begin to see how much of your strange behaviour, built upon years of habit, has been recruited and held in place just to manage certain persistent kinds of unpleasant feelings. My experience has been that in any case in which we experience painful or uncomfortable inner states, we are really being presented with an issue being brought to our attention that asks for closer examination.
Sometimes, the path of inquiry can appear relatively simple. We might have had one feeling haunting us for years when all it was really asking of us was to be looked at once, only to dissipate.
This is not altogether that rare, and it is something I have observed first-hand.
It can be a strange experience waking up into the next moment, only to no longer think or feel something that you might have been unwittingly committed to for decades. Understanding can be a very quick or gradual process of uncovering layers of error. Mostly it is some combination of both. We aren’t problem solving, or committing our inner world to any kind of rigorous psychoanalysis. We are starting out by just looking in the energetic direction the question is coming from.
Do we want to be a bigger, better ‘me’, or do we want to meet the truth with our entire being? Sometimes these confusions and questions carry an immeasurable power behind them. This is why the negative effects we experience from some unresolved questions can seem so turbulent.
Usually the question ‘who am I?’ being the basic question of identity has an enormous momentum, because the reality is that we have either discovered who we truly are and we have stopped seeking, or we haven’t and we’re left unsure.
There’s an enormous amount of energy that can be tied up in this question. Strangely enough, this can also be one of the reasons people are so terrified of dying (specifically our ideas about what death might be), because they don’t know who they are yet, and they feel an extraordinary compulsion issuing from within for them to find out before it is too late.
It is a grand irony that the one thing that is asking you to stop for one moment in total stillness, also happens to be very same the force within us prompting our frantic searching in all directions.
Have you ever had the thought occur to you ‘Imagine what I would get done in life if I no longer had to worry about this?’ It is very much like that. What the process of self-inquiry is doing for us is freeing up our energy so that we can really get on with this task of living, and not persist in driving with our brakes on.
My own experience has shown that the most powerful of these questions have been, for me: ‘who am I?’ and ‘what is actually true?’ The form your own questions take will vary, but choose whatever you feel resonates as the most important and meaningfully worded line of inquiry for you.
There are no predetermined answers here – a volume of written answers would not be worth one true revelation within you, however small. It is critically important that you meet this inquiry, whatever the result, in the privacy of your own heart. After all, the benefit of the authenticity of this intimate process is that you are not taking anything for granted. In this inquiry, no reference is being made to what anyone else has taught you or imposed upon you. You are a free agent.
If the will is pure, and you will know the degree to which you seek truth for its own sake, you will happen upon whatever is most important for your own unfolding.
In what we call spiritual affairs, there is no truth so certain and universal that is justified asking someone to believe on your behalf. It simply doesn’t work this way.
This is illustrated in the Chan tradition (the Chinese origin of the Zen tradition) in the following way: to have a piece of knowledge as a belief or a commitment is like someone giving you a cup of tea. You could be anyone, holy, righteous, high ranking – if you had the tea given to you, you could show everyone else that you had the tea, and bring it out any time you wanted. However, having the tea is not the same as tasting the tea – if you have not tasted it, then you haven’t connected with the real value in having it.
All true spiritual revelation comes to us by way of tasting the tea. Many people insist on believing things they have never experienced that have simply been bequeathed to them by other people they once placed their trust in, whether it was friends, family or cultural institutions.
If someone attempted to tell you who you were, in the closest, most exact definition possible in your native language, that would still get you nowhere. You would maybe have a nice definition, and you would run around reproducing that definition as a thought form. It might even change your life in all kinds of ways, but it would never be the truth. In self-inquiry, we’re not after mixing things up in our life, we are after a revelation of truth. Therefore, we have to meet it directly, or not at all.
This process can seem intimidating for a number of reasons, the first of which is that we have erroneously been led to believe that the unknown is always dangerous, and therefore to be avoided. The second reason, whether we are aware of it or not, is that our sense of psychological survival is tied up in who we believe ourselves to be as a conglomeration of memories, thoughts, beliefs and identities imposed by ourselves as well as others.
When these are met with challenge, this arouses within us a kind of existential fear. In the realm of self-inquiry, both of these fears are unfounded. They really are phantoms of conditioning. Of course, it will not help you to believe that, but I hope this at least gives you a sufficient nudge of encouragement to brave the first meeting with yourself.
You will not disappear, die, or be possessed by evil spirits.
The only thing that is real in us is what has been here all along, so know that you will not be facing anything that cannot be met fully. The ground of being is a little like a universal safety net. You’re not going to lose ‘you’, but you likely have entertained very distorted ideas of who ‘you’ were thanks to our collective enculturation. You may arrive upon a very different understanding of who you are, but you are only going to find more of what is real inside there, not less of it.
Who you are is something that is not an idea. It is not encapsulated by ideas. The only things that can fall away are illusory. Because what is real in us is very powerful, it is also prone to misunderstanding. When you come upon it, it is likely to surprise you. Sometimes losing our psychological definitions can be sudden, dramatic and unsettling, but more often than not, the alterations are more gradual, nuanced and bring with them a sense of having weight taken off your shoulders.
These moments of realisation, even when they are small, carry the quality of having woken from a troubling dream.
Likely everyone has had the experience of being asleep, fully convinced that something very complex, involved and stressful was happening, only to realise upon awakening that actually this wasn’t true at all – you were dreaming the whole thing. Waking up from the dream of personal identity is much the same type of experience. Don’t take anyone’s word for it – go and discover this all for yourself. You will not regret it.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
One of the most influential social phenomena in the modern world is also one of the least understood. It is the widespread denial of the laws of biology and of the biological reality in which the human species has evolved. Although this might seem, to some, to be an academic point, denial of biological reality can have an immense impact on a person’s values and political opinions.
The reality is that human society and behaviour is primarily a biological phenomenon.
Psychologists today know that all the warring and aggression shown by humans in today’s society is little more than adaptations to a biological past where violence was commonplace. In a state of Nature, resources are scarce. Because of this scarcity, it can happen that multiple creatures desire them. When that happens, conflict is the inevitable result.
The same is true of co-operation and love. It’s been well established, ever since the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, that it’s impossible to make sense out of human history without understanding that the human species evolved sociality for the sake of overcoming survival challenges.
Human society, then, is most easily understood as a web of mutual aid that increases the survival and reproductive opportunities of all of its members. The more cohesive groups drive out the less cohesive ones. The Rambo-style individualist doesn’t survive a state of Nature, because one serious injury will kill him. The tribe that works together, on the other hand, can easily recover from non-fatal injuries to individuals.
However, this neat and elegant explanation for much of the complexity of the world does not appeal to some. There are some out there who deny that human behaviour is analogous to primate behaviour, or that human behaviour has evolved to meet survival and reproductive challenges in the natural world, or that significant biodiversity exists within the human species, or that ethology and evolutionary psychology are valid approaches that can make accurate predictions.
This insanity is known as biology denial.
As it turns out, there are several reasons why a person would deny biological science.
One of the most common reasons is narcissism. This is particularly true when it comes to evolution by natural selection. Many people don’t like to think that they evolved from a common ancestor with today’s monkeys. They prefer to think of other animals as a different category to themselves, something categorically lower.
This is related to another major reason to deny biology – religious reasons. The fundamentalist religious nutter believes that Yahweh created the entire Universe, perhaps as recently as 6,000 years ago, and therefore there’s no such thing as evolution. As anyone who knows anything about biology can tell you, if you deny evolution you deny all of biology. This is the reason for the “never say dinosaur” strain of Christcuckery.
The main reason why people deny biology is for political reasons.
This is most obvious when it comes to the subject of race and IQ. Every primary school student learns that there are no two things within Nature that are exactly the same – no two snowflakes, no two cats, no two mountains, no two races. Because biological life evolves to fill different ecological niches, the characteristics of life within those niches is always different.
On the subject of race and IQ, however, the truth is just about the most politically incorrect subject that it’s possible to speak of. As per Ibram X. Kendi, one of the world’s foremost biology deniers, “the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences”. Anyone who disagrees is cancelled.
In reality, Blank Slate Theory (what Kendi is pushing) is a form of biology denial, because it denies the heritability of natural characteristics. This goes against the available evidence, which is why Steven Pinker was able to meticulously and comprehensively demolish it in his book The Blank Slate. That biology denial can reach pathological proportions is evident from the magnitude of the evidence in favour of heritability.
Because biology denial is political, it varies in intensity depending on the aspect of biology under discussion.
Some people deny it totally. One notorious case involves a university student who believed that the reason why men are stronger than women is because they are encouraged to play more sports as children. Most children figure out when very young that there are significant physical differences between men and women. That an adult might deny this is incredible.
The modern transexual fad is another example of biology denial. Some heterosexual men are getting called bigots for preferring biological women over biological men pretending to be women, as if there was truly no difference between the two.
That men are naturally more violent than women, on the other hand, is accepted without question. That this heightened propensity towards violence necessitates exclusion of males from female spaces is, likewise, accepted without question. Any degree of biology can be denied, but whether it is depends on who would benefit from the denial.
All are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The ultimate end effect of biology denial is delusion and suffering. As Philip K Dick wrote: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Westerners are now discovering that human biodiversity is a real thing, and that immigrants from low-IQ nations can’t simply be educated to behave exactly the same way as everyone else.
Biology deniers are so twisted up in their irrational thinking that they believe Asian immigrants to America to have white privilege. Asian students in America frequently find themselves having to get better grades than non-Asians to access the same privileges. Sometimes they need to get even better grades than white students.
Biology denial can only lead to inaccurate perceptions of reality, and thereby to a failure to accurately predict human behaviour, and thereby to political policy that harms instead of helps. Had it been widely understood that intelligence was genetic and that some human populations are an entire standard deviation or more less intelligent than whites, the mass immigration of cheap labour from the Third World to the West might never have happened.
At time of writing, biology denial is one of the greatest threats to our ability to wisely navigate the ship of civilisation through the challenges facing us.
No-one virtue signals harder than Abrahamists bragging about how anti-racist they are. Some have argued that this reflects a deep-seated guilt complex – the Abrahamist’s attempt to atone before a wrathful deity. This essay will argue that the Abrahamist rejects race and nation for the same reason they reject family: because Abrahamism is an inherently unnatural mentality that perverts all thought and all morality.
For all their disagreements, the followers of the various Abrahamic cults can agree on one thing: cult comes before kin.
For the Christian, this is simply following Jesus’s threat from Matthew 10:37: “Anyonewho loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” Here Jesus, like any other cult leader, rejects those who will not reject their own family in favour of him.
This sentiment is harmonious with the sentiment that, for Christians, there is neither Jew nor Greek, for all are one in Rabbi Yeshua. The Christian abandons his ties to the natural world in order to earn the grace of his universalist god. Yahweh and his prophet Rabbi Yeshua are not pleased by those who maintain the natural consciousness of family, nation or race. All are to be subjugated to cult consciousness.
Muhammad, for his part, is recorded as having preached that “All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black, nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action.” Here, “piety and good action” means, of course, submission to Islam.
This has led some to state that “The religion of Islam forbids racism and racial inequality.” Certainly, the Muslims of the Barbary slave trade were not white supremacists. Like the Christians, Muslims are happy to admit that they consider people who share their cult, but not their race, to be of greater importance than those who share their race but not their cult.
This is why both Christians and Muslim immigrants to the West are constantly screaming about racism. In destroying the national consciousness of their host nations, they achieve the Abrahamic objective of destroying all competing power structures. It’s also why Christians credit all of the achievements of whites to Christianity, but blame all of the crimes of Christianity on whites.
It’s more complicated for Jews. Being both religion and race, Jews lack the self-destructive, self-righteous masochism of Christians and Muslims. But, like their Abrahamic brethren, they still do everything they can to destroy family consciousness, national consciousness and race consciousness. This is why organisations that lobby to increase refugee quotas are often full of Jews.
Marxists, who are realistically just a secular form of Abrahamist, are little different. They seek to destroy familial, national and race consciousness for the same reason as the other Abrahamists – because those are competing loyalties. The Marxist puts his ideology above his kin, just as the religious Abrahamist puts his cult above his kin. Also like the other Abrahamisms, Marxist ideology is universal, which manifests as globalism in secular space.
For the Abrahamist, religious or secular, creed comes before kin, always. In fact, it goes much further. The more you can reject your own kin, the more righteous and holy you are. The highest moral achievement of the Abrahamist is to completely sever ties with one’s blood family and race. Yahweh is a jealous god, and all other loyalties must be abandoned. It must be all Yahweh, all the time.
Highest of all in the Abrahamic moral hierarchy is the one who can impassively watch on as their nation or race is destroyed, or who can even assist in that destruction. To resist the destruction of one’s own kin, in the Abrahamic mindset, is to cling to the material world, and is therefore a spiritual failure. The person who identifies with their blood family and race is the equivalent of the devil worshipper.
Someone indifferent to the destruction of their family, nation or race, on the other hand, can be said to have transcended petty material concerns and become something truly holy. If you can sit back indifferent while your family, nation or race is destoyed and replaced, you have truly achieved divine status.
Like everything else Adharmic, this mentality is an unbalanced phenomenon that goes against natural law, and therefore will not exist forever. The balanced Dharmic view suggests that one’s yin energies might come from one’s physical incarnation, and that one’s yang energies might come from one’s spiritual incarnation, and therefore that the two must be kept in balance.
The mentally ill person says No to life, sacrificing the physical as if it was something evil. They do not play their role as a being trying to overcome challenges for the sake of entertaining the gods. Rather, they withdraw, and neglect their physical, recreational, social and even their survival needs.
The mentally healthy person says Yes to life, and exults in the niche that they inherited from their forebears. They set aspirations, and then strive to achieve them, overcoming the challenges that they encounter. They understand that the material world is not something to cower away from, but is rather the stage on which the play of life takes place.
This doesn’t mean that saying Yes to life requires indulging in all of the cruelties of the natural world.
It means finding the correct balance between spiritual and material concerns. The Elementalist suggestion is to live one’s life to the fullest, but in the knowledge that the material world is not the fundamental basis of reality. The material world is one Great Fractal dreamed up by God for the purpose of entertainment, and the most important thing is to correctly play one’s role within it, whatever that might be.
The Abrahamist fails to understand this need for balance, choosing instead to virtue signal their moral superiority to the material world, which they reject in favour of a promised land in the afterlife. This is a fundamentally unhealthy and unnatural attitude that only leads to great suffering.
