Growing Roots Within

All attention you spend on the interior journey is valuable, and encourages the growth of roots within. It is all too easy for this to simply become talk. The fact is, this awakening business isn’t some step by step program for self improvement or self development. This is about pointing you back to what is real, what has always been real, and then dispensing with actors such as myself. When we speak or write, there is a brief role to play in life, and then it is done. This isn’t the vector of wisdom. The vital wisdom of the response, at best, is elicited in you. Engage your own interior journey: that is the encouragement.

Now, I’m not saying leave your job, your partner, your family – this is not about the radicalisation of your outer life. This is simply about your direct discovery of what it means to really be you.

Imagine wanting to gravitate towards blame, an accident, an argument, someone else getting in trouble. To want a problem, to feel the desire for there to be drama and trouble. Have you observed this others? Yourself? It is quite prevalent, so chances are you have crossed paths with this phenomenon many times. This represents a kind of dysfunctional energetic ecosystem, a pathological twist in the psyche. It is both an inner and outer ill. People become entrained by society to actually desire and seek pain and conflict, and the false self is primed to take this programming onboard as a matter of course. As a common example, have you ever said something to someone and they ‘took it the wrong way’, almost as if on purpose?

If you examine this, it could of course be the case that you perhaps said something inflammatory, but that is by the by. What really matters is that this person had the option to minimise their upset, but they chose to become aggravated. Maybe you baited the hook, but they took it.

Why would they want to be upset, to adopt the role of the incensed victim? Psychology refers to the value perceived in this type of martyrdom as ‘secondary gain’ – which is really just a way of pointing out that when someone acts out personal drama, they do so on the basis they are getting something out of it. There is a neurochemical satiety associated with being incensed, offended, or cast into the role of the victim. This is rooted within the brain and body, and is certainly capitalised upon by the separate sense of self. The notion that secondary gain is of personal value is only viable because someone has shallow roots within – if any at all. It is all too easy to be swept up in the drama if you are not grounded.

The drama on offer, as miserable as it is, outcompetes any value in peace for one without roots within. For the one so divided, it feels fleetingly better to be in conflict, butting heads and playing out the personal drama of being a separate ‘someone’ in competition with everyone else. This can only be possible when someone is so lost, so deluded and indoctrinated by culture, that they aren’t even aware that real peace could exist. If they were, they would never abandon peace to play out these minor dramas.

This process may affect someone in scarcely noticeable ways, and yet even a small degree of seperation entertained in this way is sufficient to create vast rifts between the you and the perception of your true nature – there cannot be any actual separation, but I don’t want to go into that here. The point is that you do not have to be in the throes of being a total drama queen in order to suffer the consequences of perceived separation. Even just permitting yourself to be slightly irritated by the way someone else in your household puts something away in the fridge can be enough to hurl you out of the gates of the kingdom and lashed onto the spokes of the wheel of becoming.

There are those inclined to think this is all very abstract, out of reach, or that such minor attention to the relationship between one’s inner and outer environments is inconsequential.

It really isn’t. All of this is not only very basic, but it is also of direct and immediate consequence. You wouldn’t know unless you went inside to directly investigate the nature of this experience. It isn’t theoretical, it is phenomenological – only *you* can show up to observe this. The greatest teacher in history could only at best meet you halfway in this. You are asked to walk the final leg of the journey alone. Because that either appears intimidating or isolating, and with no clear material advantage promised, most people won’t ever bother over the course of a lifetime. In the absence of a teacher, you nevertheless have ordinary people around you who have taken up the torch and encourage you to try doing the same – not because it will make you noble, good, or morally correct, but because you haven’t yet gone outside your limited perspective. If you had, your life would unfold completely differently, even if no one else should ever notice.

Growing roots within is very simple. The more attention we give to our true nature, our deepest inner silence, the more this presence naturally takes root within us. A plant doesn’t need to be directed and micromanaged about how to take nutrients and develop, nor does your true nature. You simply give it the attention and nourishment it asks for, and just allow the entire miraculous process to unfold from within.

The remarkable thing about this is that what is undesirable in you is crowded out by the internal growth taking place. Again, not to make you holy, but to make you whole. All of this inner dysfunction is fuelled by you seeing yourself as separate, not whole. All of that is illusory, but there is no way someone can tell you that and have it blossom into full effect. It is the case that you must come to a meeting with this in your inner space so that enough soil is there for the seed that is always already there to take root.

You may be wondering if all this is simply about the time you spend in meditation. I’d like to clear this up, because meditation as an exercise can easily become misconstrued. Meditation is one avenue by which you may be involved in listening deeply to the music of your own inner world. Like anything, a practice of meditation can easily become an obstacle rather than a help. If you think you are being a good person, a hygienic entity, a spiritually well-behaved person, then you are likely to be entering meditation with an erroneous view to improvement. The notion we need fixing or betterment can be obstructive to our relationship with inner truth. The key ingredient here is listening deeply, intently, without imposing your mental interpretations upon that which you perceive. You don’t need to specifically set time aside in sitting meditation in order to listen deeply. You can do this out walking, or at work as you perform tasks.

No attention given to your inner world is ever lost or wasted. I say this, but you will not know this for yourself until you taste it directly. These roots within produce fruits of stability, connection, resilience, peace and joy that if you only tasted them once, you would be certain that never again would you trade them for the madness of diversion the conditioned world offers. You must be willing to place what you have thought, believed, concluded upon the altar of sacrifice. You must be willing to withdraw every tiny habit of revenge, resentment and personal superiority. In one shining moment, you might just see that this was all the product of a conditioned personal history, a history that doesn’t even exist except as an etheric record of what has been chosen prior. You are not bound to repeat inner or outer history. This is remarkable good news for freedom. The tragedy is, very few people are even capable of conceiving that such freedom, such a deeply beneficial inner expansion is even possible.

This is the meaning behind the myth of the Bodhisattva. There are those who have for all intents and purposes left this world behind, yet they remain among us. They return again and again into the darkness, not because they are still stuck upon the wheel of becoming, nor because they have to somehow earn nobility through some moral crusade, but because it is actually their deepest joy to extend this help to others. They completely understand that their own well-being is inseparable from the well-being of all.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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Acclimating to Not Knowing

There are many levels at which you know and you don’t know, as well as levels at which you think you know, and think you don’t know. There is no way to systematise or explain these levels, simply because they will be vastly different for each being. I don’t ask anyone to take this on faith. I am far more interested in encouraging your exploration in this direction. What I would like to suggest are some tools with which you can begin to call into question some of the things you think you might know.

Sometimes you have to move in a direction that appears backwards in order to go make what we could call ‘progress’. In true self-inquiry we are always extending a foot out into the darkness, and although the results aren’t always guaranteed, the intention does always count.

In conventional terms, I couldn’t put anything on a piece of paper as ‘truth’. I am really no better positioned than you are. I am however aware of many things I thought I knew, and I am increasingly skeptical of the value these things carry. I have witnessed so many of them dissolve or break away like chunks of sea ice. Sometimes these fragments are never to be seen again, sometimes they occasionally drift back within sight, but never again taking up the same amount of space on the horizon. These are things I relied upon at some point as inviolable facts, what I assumed to be truth itself. What I witness when this kind of inner event happens, whether through inquiry or accident, is that there is an exceptionally fine line between a sense of liberation and horror. The prospect of freedom simultaneously exhilarates and terrifies us.

On the one hand, the sense of teetering over the abyss, looking down into the black unknown is horrifying – but only to one part of the self. That is the part that thinks it knows, that thinks it should understand, that thinks it ought to have some grasp over the management of its inner topography. It turns out that part of us is very minor upon investigation. That part of me, despite being so tiny, has historically been like a finger held up in front of my eyes only an arm’s length away, but has seemed big enough to blot out entire galaxies in the night sky. The tiniest parts of us inside can block out the greater portion of reality, if adequate care and attention is not taken.

To the greater part of me, so witnessed, there is a sense of freedom and liberation as these pieces of knowledge once claimed as firm ground have broken away. It reveals what was always really there, which is not the black abyss we thought would swallow us. There is a space there, alive and whole, that only seems to increase in plenitude with each inner discovery. This is the space in which I know that I don’t know, and it is alive.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite referred to this state of not-knowing as ‘agnosia’, which is distinct from mere ignorance. In fact, my knowing that I don’t know is the primary condition to be in maximal congruence to this greater reality. It is neither silence nor non-silence, neither darkness nor light, neither everywhere nor nowhere. It is a living state of pure potential. There is nothing behind it; everything is out in front of it.

At our level of being, the coordinates at which it may be located are ‘here’ and ‘now’. For the purposes of having something to refer to it as within human language, it could be called ‘the unmanifest’ or ‘the unborn’. It doesn’t really matter what we choose to call it. We could always call it ‘consciousness’, but I would rather use a term that you are likely to have less immediate familiarity with so that it doesn’t dock in at the port of your intellect carrying with it too much by way of unnecessary cargo.

For reasons suggested earlier, thinking you know anything about this isn’t overly helpful. This includes everything you have ever read about it before, whether religious, scientific, philosophical or spiritual. At the same time, thinking you don’t know anything about it also isn’t especially useful, because you certainly will have had some experience with it, since it is the foundation of your entire inner life. What I find is more useful is de-emphasising your insistence on what you think you do or do not know.

This is what the Zen practitioner Shunryu Suzuki refers to as ‘beginner’s mind’. It then doesn’t really fall within a category of what we ordinarily think of as something we know or don’t know, understand or don’t understand. It is more to do with what we are, with what our direct, unaltered experience is when we aren’t consumed by the common human endeavour of cramming it full of new content, maps, systems, or other frames of reference.

You may have noticed that many people are often extremely bothered by not having anything to talk about. Thinking that you don’t know, but assuming you need to know, creates violent ripples of dissonance in the human mind. Often these people will attempt to remedy this with talking incessantly, or via outsourced mental noise such as reading, radio or television. This is because silence is highly detrimental to this limited sense of self which lives off reams of acquired mental content. It is almost like it can sense an undercurrent of awareness that it has been taken from a space of freedom into a tiny, separate skull cramped full of beliefs and prejudices. Silence is corrosive to this illusion, and it can make people nervous to the point of being physically ill with fear when they don’t have something to occupy their attention.

Lack of self-understanding is the modern disease. It was Blaisé Pascal who correctly observed that the root of modern man’s ills is his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself. This highlights the symptoms of modern man’s materialist syndrome as a being that has either willfully or ignorantly acquired no familiarity with their own soul.

Before I understood that the abyss beneath our claims to knowing wasn’t annihilation, I was extremely terrified of anything that threatened what I had claimed in belief or knowledge. It felt like impending doom to me that the things I thought I knew might be threatened, questioned or even subjected to slight modification. If I came across something that disturbed this sense of knowing, or forced me to modify the way I think, I would spend dutiful hours repairing thoughts, making new connections, reframing, re-routing.

The nature of this activity wasn’t noticed at the time. I just thought I was a bit depressed, or ‘thinking things over’, although what I was really doing was making sure the new disturbances would not affect the total structure of my established worldview – I was in damage control.

If someone had told me at an early age that none of this was necessary, and had I heeded this advice, this would have been like being led to a goldmine. Of course, you cannot be told this, because no-one would ever listen unless they were truly ready to hear – in which case, they would be led there eventually anyway.

True knowledge, which is a term I would hesitate to throw around, does not fall within our usual system of values, because everything we have collectively developed by way of what we have call ‘wisdom’ is something employed instrumentally to in order to get something else beyond it – spiritual wisdom is not like this. It is not what we think we know. It cannot be learned from someone else, it cannot be mooched, it cannot be bought or sold, and it cannot be gifted, inherited or stolen. It is exclusively earned through a combination of experience and direct application of your inner attention. You have to be looking, listening – you have to be interested in how this experience right here deepens and unfolds. Not for some new acquisition, status, or a new set of mental toys, but because you are inherently interested in what is here, and what you are.

A worldview, being a constellation of mental positions about the way we believe things are, isn’t true knowledge in this sense. It is acquired over time, and maybe it is closer to an accurate picture of the way things are relative to others. A worldview represents a high investment of one’s life energy – at least, insofar as a psychological entity is concerned, in its time-bound personhood. The necessary feature of any and every worldview is that it is limited – it portrays an image of reality at the vital cost of its limitlessness.

To the selfless-self discovered beneath the turmoil, this is all neither here nor there. The unborn doesn’t exist in psychological time like our worldview does, it exists here and now. That is what qualifies it as alive rather than being some kind of coral-like accretion running backward throughout personal and human history. No worldview is required to engage in Being, although the false self has zero tolerance for the unborn. You might be surprised at what can and will be discarded without harm to you. I certainly was, and I still am quite routinely. The universe never seems to run out of surprises.

What do you think you know? That might be a good place to start. Chances are, if you think you really know something that isn’t subject to criticism or doubt, then I’m willing to bet that you probably haven’t inquired very far into it. If you think of your beliefs and conclusions as each having a piece of string attached to them, try following the string all the way from one end to the other.

People are generally reluctant to do this, or at the very least unpractised. This is partly because questioning the things you took for granted as true is of such high novelty that there isn’t widely available information about it. Most people will discover that there are strings they are more comfortable to follow than others. There are many strings we absolutely do not want to follow, because part of us recoils in horror at the thought of what we may or may not find at the end.

Fear can actually be your friend in this exercise, because you will learn by your apprehension which conclusions you have set aside as inviolable and sacred. The difference between these beliefs and others you aren’t afraid to investigate is that these are cherished beliefs, probably touching on core beliefs that structurally support your worldview. Can you afford to lose your worldview in the pursuit of truth? Your view of who is right and who is wrong? Who are the blameless, and who are the damned?

Maybe these are all just temporary roles within the play of consciousness, or, maybe this universe has some kind of insubvertible structure. Take a look though, see whether there are strings worth investigating while others can be left trailing into the darkness. The discovery you will be making here is not directly about truth, but your inner relationship to truth. Am I willing to question everything, or do I have a set of rules set aside that make me feel safe, that I choose to never pursue in inquiry, because I already know the answer?

We might begin with some really simple, but big questions, such as: how do you know who or what you think you are? What makes you think that you are who your memories tell you that you are, and is there a difference? If you lost everything you had ever learned or remembered, who would you be? Who would you seem to be, to yourself or to other people? Is there any difference? What do you think you know that cannot be undermined by any reason, any doubt? If there is anything that you have taken on authority, whether philosophical or religious, and how do you know that you have not been knowingly misled by some kind of demon? What can you be sure of? Will you have some answer in the future? Did you once have some answer in the past, which you have now lost?

The goal here isn’t for you to settle upon some profound new answer to worship and hold onto, but to crack open some of your pre-existing assumptions.

Our culture doesn’t generally do a great job of preparing us for this scale of inquiry. Culture is for the most part a topographical map permitting exploration in very limited regions, providing the illusion of limited freedom and reduced options within the prescribed system. There are of course plenty of roadblocks and no-go zones. Some of these directions are so taboo that other people will attempt to repudiate your claims by agreeing in knowing falsehood that you can’t have gone to the places you claim, simply because it is easier for them to believe a lie that preserves the structural integrity of the consensus than it is to embark upon overhauling their own inner realm.

A classic example of this is the person who leaves a religious organisation claiming that they have seen unwholesome things that led them to leave it behind. The cultural response encouraged and supported within the remainder of that group will be some version of “yes, but the devil would try to convince you of that. We, however, are standing firm, because the devil will not succeed in tricking us”.

This effect is everywhere. It isn’t really religious, it is human. It happens in the church, the school cafeteria – it may even happen in killer whale pods, for all we know. We revile the dissenter because they threaten to inform us of something concerning our choices and position that we would really rather not see the light of day. It exposes our foolishness. If our choices that were made in the sleep of ignorance were to become subject to any form of scrutiny, the only possible outcome insofar as ego was concerned would be damage and destruction. If you placed yourself in a position of allowing this damage, you would be forced to repair or even entirely discard what you had invested in for many years.

Of course, some people have no control over this collapse and are forced to act when it comes upon them. When we turn a blind eye, we are allowing cognitive dissonance to win at the expense of truth. Truth has to be at stake, not because anything we believe could be inherently true, but because anything that is formed as belief in darkness is going to be subject to falsehood – even if it just so happened to turn out to be true. You can be wrong by mistake, but you can’t ever be right by mistake – see whether this is true in your own experience.

Again, wisdom or self-knowledge can only come as result of your deliberative inner attention and receptivity. It isn’t mysterious or elusive, but it does ask you to put all that you hold dear to the highest scrutiny.

Truth is not going to arrive as the addition of something new, it is going to consist at a minimum of disempowering the falsehoods that predominate the collective mind. We have found ourselves as humans in a position of needing to urgently assess the collective structures we have agreed to. Unless we allow those structures to fall under the light of examination within ourselves, what hope do we have as a species? What value can we really claim to put on honesty and integrity?

What might you lose if you were to loosen your death-grip on your worldview? What kind of world do we want to leave to our children? And if it doesn’t begin directly with ourselves, in our own inmost world, then where else could it possibly start?

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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The Case For Rejecting The Consensus

Here, I would like to suggest some reasons why someone might be justified in questioning their tacit, unswerving allegiance to the consensus.

Firstly, did you realise you were in an ongoing agreement? Because you may not have realised this, and you may not have already decided to say ‘no’ and walk away. What would that take? Simply that. Your refusal to continually go into agreement to that which no longer serves you – in your outer life, as well as your inner life. One produces a reflection of the other.

We have wars started by greedy idiots, bloodthirsty zealots and control-hungry ideological fundamentalists. We are brought to question whether we might abstractly agree or disagree that a given group of people could justifiably be blown to pieces, as though this were somehow our call. Your agreement or disagreement here doesn’t matter in order to qualify as insanity; what matters is that you are demanded to be on beck and call to participate in the insanity served up to you by a mentally diseased consensus.

The consensus wants to force your hand into playing the game to power the illusion that you were the one choosing it. Your choice to bear witness to all of this is your agreement to it. This happens in the same way a hostage might be forced to dictate the methods of his own torture – as though being invited to weigh your opinion on this narrative represents some kind of fairness, or democracy of mind.

We have political systems which are presented on the presumption of self-evidential necessity. You may choose this stream of madness, or the other – but you must choose. Remember that you tacitly agreed to this system, because you were born into it? At least, this is the narrative, as fragile as it is. Even the most benignant and equitable of these are a travesty – you are presented with an ultimate option of choosing one terrible option over another, as though there was no alternative.

This is in the service of democracy, the abstract notion that what is best for you lies in the appearance of having the ‘freedom’ to choose what is best for your region or your nation, when all of the information you are being fed derives from a source with an agenda to exert influence and control. Everything that was ever claimed to go to work on your behalf was an empty promise, a sham.

We are the inheritors of a scientific materialism, which against all true scientific spirit, presumes to dictate the total conditions of the universe at the level of human meaning. Specifically, that there is no possibility of individual or collective human participation in divinity, because we are all simply evolutionary automatons.

Science is far from objective or disinterested – there is a wider agenda to uphold. Detraction from the mainstream narrative is punished through control of funding and decisions about how much influence you will continue to exert in academia. This is how public talks can justifiably be banned without red faces.

The new paradigm of the evil is named ‘pseudoscience’, although it has born different names as were suitable to the era or context, such as ‘witchcraft’, ‘atheism’, ‘socialism’ – essentially though, all it consists in is ‘the other’. It is the elephant in the room no one wants to discuss because it would undermine the authority of the institution in question.

All that this ‘other’ is ever reminding you of is the simple fact that you can’t ever know for certainty what you think you know – that is all it is, and yet this represents the vital human umbilical connection into the wider spiritual universe.

Our various cultural institutions’ insistence on the rigidity and finality of the knowledge they produce is leading us to squander our multidimensional heritage, our imagination, our shared godhood. What appears to be the groundlessness of epistemic uncertainty is far too subversive to those who pretend to this authority. So, the label ‘pseudoscience ‘is the new brush you will be tarred with if you dare detract from this reactive and emotionally fragile scientific consensus.

These are churches, if you haven’t noticed – there are priests, altars and rules to be followed. Dissent is not appreciated, and while we may no longer burn people at the stake physically, the same consequences can now be effected ruthlessly via social media. Technology has ironically permitted the expansion of ostracism to the digital realms, which are the foreshore of our mental meeting grounds as human collectives.

To adhere to a mindset whereby the majority of people in your culture will turn their backs on a person and say ‘we don’t acknowledge this person anymore’ is not only merely unhealthy, it indicates a collective personality disorder. Refusing to acknowledge a person whom the mainstream collective disapproves of is one of the tallest, broadest and brightest of red flags. It happens in small groups such as family groups and office environments, and it happens in nations – as above, so below. And yet, we retain the freedom to decide as the inheritors of the totality of human culture as to whether such behaviour is worthy to be kept.

The catch is, anything we sleep on is kept automatically. All it takes for the majority to continue to harbour such systemic insanity is to pretend that we don’t suffer from it, thereby immunising it from scrutiny. Staying asleep then becomes akin to alcohol as the ’cause of’ and ‘solution to’ all of life’s various social ills.

We have a culture in which religious institutions are offered as fictitious oases from an insane materialism, only to discover that you are being thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire. The desire to save your soul and claim you for the eternal turns out to be yet another tentacle operating on the behalf of control and delusion, though flown under the banner of spirituality. The grandiose fantasies of the worldly ego are here offered in the spiritual realm, success, being chosen, included, and living forever as the personal self you know and love. The monotheistic religions reflect all the ego’s madness and self-importance back to it in an imaginary monarchy, which consists in a personal being at the top who variously approves, disapproves, judges, or becomes pleased or angry with you as the mood takes him. Your virtue and worth will be decided by how close you can get to the feet of the king at the expense of others through your various deeds, devotions and cringing prostrations. This is all for your group, the blessed and chosen, while those who have chosen incorrectly, believed wrongly, or failed to meet the standard within your group will be expelled like refuse through a cosmic garbage-chute.

The false promise propping up all of these religious institutions is this one delusional creed: unity through separation. Be better than the others, be better than the other groups. Then you will earn favour, then you will be united, so you had better make sure you beat down all the others. In other words, the spirit realm, as contextualised by the consensus ideocracy, is that if you are well-behaved, then you will be rewarded, but if you are poorly behaved or you have believed incorrectly, you will be punished.

You are either in line, or out of line.

Can you see how the cultural influence from the consensus reveals itself in the projection of the religious? It promises you the favour of an authority who is responsive to your own animal needs, wants and desires, and unresponsive of those whom you deem unworthy or inferior. Could there be a more tantalising ego-trip on offer for the disturbed human animal?

We have a media which enjoys success on the basis of how accurately the content resembles juicy gossip. We are offered these hints of what those individuals who are implied to be far more important than us are doing with their lives such as celebrities, including those we imagine to have sufficient fame and money to have earned freedom and happiness. The more important a person is deemed to be, the less significant the news about them need be in order to warrant publication.

For example, it is more important whether members of royalty are having a minor spat or social disagreement about wearing a certain hat in public than any question of whether you have any personal freedom or satisfaction in your life, from birth to death. Most of what we call ‘news’ is presented as a drama triangle in which you are framed as the victim, in the hope of inflaming your censure toward those framed as the perpetrators.

When slaves were kept, it was a common practice to lure them with the possibility that one day they might be freed by their own efforts. This ensured that they kept up the good work and didn’t lapse into despondency which might eventually collapse into such dense suffering as to spark an inner or outer revolution.

If you want to see how it is the consensus would prefer you to keep acting and thinking, take a look at how they medicate you with empty promises of your eventual success and freedom. These empty promises are on offer at every street corner, in every wing of human society. They are all clamouring for your investment of attention.

Does this sound like a balanced, sane society? Does this sound like a valuable investment of your ongoing input as a free being? What would it take to simply say ‘no’, and walk away from all of this idiocy once and for all – even if this only happened within your own most private inner sanctum?

Perhaps Aristotle was correct in his analysis of man as a political animal, and that humankind will always be bound by social conventions and the need for society in general. The big question however is: are you human? If not, what are you? Because if you are not what you think you are, what makes us think it is sensible to reduce our deepest needs to humankind’s needs, to the needs of the animal?

What are the requirements of the soul, what are the values of the true self? Maybe there are none, perhaps consciousness is just a temporary phantom. But how would you ever know unless you first cleared the table before you of all of the clutter?

There may not be very much time left to decide, as the human animal is now engineering intelligences capable of outsmarting itself. Consider the simplicity of the parlour tricks that have led man down the garden path over ages past. What is to come will likely consist in even more powerful demonstrations of illusion and persuasion.

What better time than now to inquire into the truth of who you are?

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

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The Drop Of The Penny

by Simon P. Murphy

There is a trajectory within you like a hunger. That hunger is the drive to reconnect with what is true. It is not about belief, simple or complex, and is not about being holy or righteous. It is about one thing only – seeing clearly, and revealing that which is true and whole. Another way of putting this is that it is the drive to come to the full conclusion of your existential seeking.

Why would someone be averse to seeing clearly? Because usually, there is a whole raft of illusion at stake. If you chose to see clearly, through inner eyes unfettered by illusion, you might discover that what you have invested years into will someday end, despite your best efforts to the contrary. You might see that the knowledge will disappear, or the money, the health, the relationships, the career, the house, the identities, the religious or philosophical commitments. Why else would something feel fragile or impermanent, unless it carried within it the promise of its ending? Why would it not feel like inherently immutable truth?

That is something we often choose not to look at, because it tends to render the scope of the illusion far less satisfactory than it already is. If we found ourselves examining the contents of our inner lives, which consist in the relationship we have with our illusions and what we think they afford us, we might find all of our illusions quite rapidly deteriorating or becoming displaced. And who would want that?

Interestingly, the part of us that is real actually wants that. Not to get rid of what is around us – but to critically examine our relationship to everything we hold to be real, permanent and meaningful in order to make space for what is actually real to shine through our inner world. That is basically the entire spiritual project in a nutshell – the discovery, sudden or gradual, that there is not one true thought.

What is real that shines through has a curious origin – we are responsible for none of it. We can choose to be instrumental to its coming forth. This is where the sense of existential dissatisfaction and dislocation in life issues from – not from being alone, not from not belonging, or not knowing or believing the right things, but from having not been willing to see how things are clearly. This asks that we meet all the things that we have been responsible for. All of our choices, all of our beliefs, our cultural creations that we have been party to, all that was formed out of darkness in the strange refusal to look at who and what we truly are in our essence.

Most everyone would prefer to be told who and what they are in their essence, because that is simply the way that humans have become accustomed to living a conditioned life. We are used to being told who and what we are by our various cultural institutions, and then moving ahead with our lives. Those sources have presumed to give us everything we thought we needed by giving us what we are ultimately not – our names, roles, etc. The Truth of who you are, however, isn’t like that at all – not in the slightest. You absolutely cannot be told who you are, nor can you be given who you are. You also cannot have a belief so sophisticated or clearly refined that would provide the detail of who you are in a neat envelope.

There is a way of knowing for certain that you have not met the vital recognition of who and what you are in truth. It will be this: the question of who you are will continue to have some appeal to you. In other words, you want to know who you are, because you are under the impression that you don’t already know. The reason for this is simple: absolutely nothing else in your life has been able to tell you what you are with any degree of satisfaction. When you know who you are in truth, the question has fallen away completely- you have no question to ask about who you are – period. That is how you will know. No one alive has partial knowledge as to who they are; they either know who they are at this level, or they don’t.

The next question is: now that you know that you don’t know, that you have not yet met the recognition of who and what you truly are, what do you want to do with that?

Chances are, it will be one of the following – either you don’t want to look at it just yet, in which case you probably will not have read this far, or, you are so hungry to know the truth of who you are, that you are willing to push ahead in your integrity, even if it might mean losing everything that you know. Because after all, if you don’t know who you are, how much of your inner or outer world can you be certain is illusion? How much can you really say for certain will remain or fall away as a result of your discovery of your true identity?

If you are like most people, including myself, you will have gone a lifetime of feeling a sense of grave unease about not being sure of who you are, to a greater or lesser degree. You will have attempted to establish it through many courses of action which haven’t quite settled the matter. All of these ways have been tried before by people of all times and places, and without effect. This is because there is only one certain way of settling the whole question once and for all, and that is by coming to a true meeting with who and what you are.

Discovery of who you are is a milestone of what we might call spiritual evolution. It doesn’t begin there, and it certainly doesn’t end there – but it is the vital step forward. I like to frame this discovery to the drop of the penny. The penny drops, a realisation is forged, and a connection that wasn’t made before in this life suddenly clicks into place, and you can never, ever see the world or your place in it quite the same way as you did before. This experience will leave you altered, even if you do your best to forget it ever happened. There is also no guarantee whatsoever that your life will turn out great or awful as a result of this discovery- but you do have to decide how much you want to know, because the fact is, it could cost you everything.

It cost you your personal future, it could certainly cost relationships, and it could cost everything you thought you knew was real. The question is: just how much are you willing to know who you are? What is the deepest calling guiding you? For myself, there were certain moments in my childhood that led me on paths of discovery that gave me a hunger to know who I was that in some ways seemed almost an inevitable collision course. But that only relates to me. What about you? Can the hunger within you, the divine yearning, be set aside for another few years? Or maybe for the rest of your life? Or are you willing to come to the truth of the matter now, in this moment? Is the yearning for self-knowledge diminishing of its own accord, or is it making itself known in more pressing ways?

I truly don’t have anything of value to say to anyone who isn’t genuinely interested in the truth of who we are. There is simply no capacity to help. For my part, there is no sales pitch, there is no ‘ought’ or ‘should’, no prescription for what you should be interested in, nor how you should be managing your life. There is nothing to teach those who aren’t curious. However, if what you actually feel within yourself is being geared toward waking up into you-don’t-know-what, then what I can tell you is this: in no way can you force this process or make it happen, but you can invite a meeting with your true self. In other words, you can facilitate a space within yourself, your inner being, to become available to that which is living and true, that which has always been ready and available if we were simply to take the time to look and listen with an attitude of open attention.

What will happen, with time, is a true meeting with yourself. How that will look, I cannot tell you. In my own experience, I can tell you that there is an encounter with Being possible that is dependent on no time, no thought, no belief, no self. When you meet this for the very first time, after even a second you will no longer question the nature of who and what you truly are. The penny will have dropped, and all of the abstract and philosophical questions about your being you once found so ineluctable, so pressing, so heavy and urgent, simply cease, like engines which have been exhausted of fuel. All of the momentum of your endlessly tiring self seeking and self definition simply ends, and you probably never realised just how desperate and tiring it all was, until the relief of it ending – at which point, there is usually years worth of psychological mess to clean up.

You are suddenly in completely new territory. You come to ask yourself new questions, such as “what happens to my energy and attention that has gone into this absurd, erroneous pursuit?”

You may be surprised to find just how much of that energy was allocated into the seeking of your true identity via fictionalised structures. How many of your life choices have consisted in some version of “I will invest in this because this will tell me who I am, as well as show others who I think I am or how I want others to perceive me”. What if the very bssis for those kinds of investment of energy, the sense of derived identity, were very suddenly gone, like the floor taken out from underneath you? You have to understand that to thoroughly reveal your identity is a life-altering event, some might even say a catastrophic spiritual and psychological event. Once the horse has bolted, there is absolutely no putting it back, for better or for worse. However, if you look closely enough within yourself, you will know exactly how much this discovery really means to you. You will know what price you would be willing to pay.

To discover who you are can leave you with a lifetime of cleaning up the inner and outer detritus. The great news is that the energy from every illusion you ever invested in, every inner scam, is returned to you and becomes fuel for the glowing fire of your awareness. Nothing real can be lost, only illusion can fall away – and eventually it will anyway, with physical death. All it takes for you to discover the truth of your being now is your willingness to take that first step into the unknown. You aren’t even coming into something new. The strange thing about this experience is that it is a re-membering. You are pooling together once more the parts of you that somehow became divided. You are certainly not adding something new; you are removing something that has served as an obstacle to that which was always already here and available. It is not complicated, it is simple. Complexity and simplicity are like directions in self-inquiry. If you follow complexity further, you are moving further away from the truth. If you are following the direction of simplicity, you are always moving closer toward truth, being the recognition of that which is already here in unity and wholeness.

There are many who have gone before you, as there are many who are making the same journey now. The encouragement I would give is this: the only thing you will ever have to lose is that which you aren’t going to keep anyway.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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