The Transmutation Of Silver Into Copper

The third stage in the katabasis is the dullening, which occurs when silver dullens into copper. Having already deteriorated below the level of spirituality in the previous stage, here a character loses some (but not all) of that pro-sociality which demarcates humans from beasts. Herein the vision narrows further, to the level of simpler pleasures.

This descent occurs within the intellectual or mental realm. If silver is high intellectualism, copper is a lower form. As with the other steps of the katabasis, this transmutation implies a narrowing of focus, in this case from social to sexual. This narrowing of focus comes with an increase in animalistic impulses and sentiments.

For the most part, the descent from silver to copper leads to an obsession with sex. Copper is still a fairly high level of the Mithraic Ladder, so the sexual degeneracy here does not imply crimes. A character descending to copper does not become a rapist or child molester. But it does imply the capacity to be brought low by sexual desire.

One of the most common ways for this to happen is for an intelligent person to develop an obsession with their own sexual value. If they start thinking too much about whether they can attract sexual partners, and too little about their social obligations, they can decline from silver to copper.

Developing habits of constant preening and strutting are typical behaviours for a character undergoing this transmutation. Vanity is therefore a common emotion for characters at this stage. The pro-social engagement of the stage of silver becomes slightly more selfish as it becomes copper. As such, a character transmuting to copper can come to neglect social obligations in favour of opportunities to impress the opposite sex.

As alluded to above, a character who degrades from silver to copper won’t undertake antisocial actions for sex – but they will take plenty of asocial ones. The kind of person who goes to university, and then gives up on taking their study seriously to get laid and to watch pornography, is archetypal of this transmutation.

A pornography obsession is emblematic of this descent, which is why a character making it may come to resemble Coomer from Clown World Chronicles. A strained, dope addict-like stupor, constant enervation and sensory dullness, coupled with an inability to appreciate actual women, are the signs of a porn addict.

Sex obsessions in general are emblematic of this level. A relatively high-frequency character who finds themselves engaging in pestering their wife or husband for sex could be making the descent to copper. This can happen to a character at just about any age. As such, it’s not necessary for a character to be old before it becomes possible for them to make the transmutation from silver to copper.

Characters at this level don’t just become dull spiritually, they become dull to talk to. The obsession with sex leads to the stereotypical “One-track mind”. This is especially true if it takes the place of what would otherwise have been meaningful cultural or scientific considerations. So the socialite of the level of silver, in degrading to copper, becomes boring when they used to be charming.

A character making this descent can reveal their degeneracy through an obsession with sexual innuendo and gossip. Where they once focused their minds on intellectual concerns, this discipline appears to falter leading into this stage. In faltering, it becomes degenerate and bestial, but only to a minor extent.

This transmutation can be motivated by a loss of faith in the intellectual world. A character who learns how corrupt academia is might lose their ambitions for intellectual achievement, and might sink that energy into getting laid instead. Another motivation can be a character’s realisation that they will never attain the heights of mercury. A character who understands that they will peak at silver might become resentful, and, in their resentment, allow themselves to slide down the Mithraic Ladder (at least as far as the level of copper).

Insecurity is a feature of all of the levels lower than mercury, and at the level of copper this insecurity typically expresses itself as jealousy. At this level, insecurity is managable but still reasonably powerful. A character of silver who begins to suffer insecurities related to their sexual market value can degrade into copper.

Although silver is generally associated with middle-aged people, this transmutation can easily occur in younger characters. It’s said of many young people that their lives were looking promising until they discovered girls/boys, at which point their academic aspirations were left to decay. This is a typical form of this transmutation.

For middle-aged characters, this transmutation can occur as part of a mid-life crisis. Male menopause can make a character insecure, and that insecurity can find expression in a desire to date younger women. The stereotypical middle-aged man buying a sportscar and trying to attract women in their 20s is probably undergoing this transmutation.

Taking a mistress is a typical example of behaviour at this stage, as is a woman who becomes a cougar and takes on a toyboy. This is doubly true if the relationship with the younger person leads to a loss of social status for the older one.

Another example of behaviour typical for characters making the descent from silver to copper is infidelity. Giving in to one’s lower urges to reproduce, at the expense of one’s marriage and social standing, pulls a character out of the realms of the precious metals and back into the prosaic. In degrading to copper, a character proves that there’s little truly special about them.

Fighting over women is also a feature of this stage, although the fighting tends to be social and not physical. Where the character of iron throws fists, the character of copper tends to throw words. If the transmutations to tin and lead involve major sexual degeneracies, the transmutation from silver to copper is about a large number of more moderate errors.

Herein it must be emphasised that the descent to copper does not imply that a character become a rapist or any kind of sexual abuser. That kind of behaviour is the speciality of the character of lead.

Neither is it even necessary for this stage to involve sexual relations or romance. The transmutation from silver to copper could be made by a character becoming cheap, stingy or miserly for some reason. Alchemical copper generally refers to the affairs of Aphrodite, but the term also covers the crude merchantry of trade.

A character who failed as a scholar and was forced to become a relatively lowly sales clerk could be a story of this level. So could an inventor who sells a fraudulent product, knowing that it isn’t as good as claimed. A lot of story arcs that involve a decent person selling low-quality products, because they need the money desperately, could fit under this transmutation.

One well-known depiction of this descent in popular culture is the character of Glenn Quagmire in The Family Guy. Quagmire is charming, intelligent and usually pro-social, but also perverted. This perversion prevents him from achieving the social status that his intellect might have suggested he reach.

This is an excerpt from Vince McLeod’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

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

Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2022
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

VJMP Anzac Day Address 2024: The Common Enemies Of The Anzac Nation

It was recently shown in an IPSOS poll that populist sentiments are becoming common among New Zealanders. These sentiments are mostly shared by Australians as well. Both countries are suffering under a callously indifferent ruling class, who democracy seems only to entrench. One of the best arguments for the unity of the Anzac nation is that Australia and New Zealand have common enemies.

These common enemies are both external and internal.

Externally, the Anzac nation is beset by communists and capitalists, who have subjugated the West under their unholy alliance known as “globohomo”. This alliance is a globalist one. The people who make up the leadership of this alliance have no national home, but rather, like John Key, live wherever profits them the most at any given time.

The communists are a motley alliance of Western grifters, invariably middle-class, who have declared war on the working classes of Western nations on the excuse that those working classes refused to support globalist revolution. They are so lost in the labyrinths of their own ideology that they have lost touch with reality completely: they are willing to deny any science or history if doing so would further globalist revolution.

Communists, especially the brown communists, see Australia and New Zealand as settler nations, and therefore illegitimate constructs. If the lands cannot be handed back to the natives, then they must be converted into the common property of all of humankind. This means that infinite foreigners can be imported, and the Anzac people have no right to complain about it.

The global working class was prophecised to unite across national borders by Marx himself. This prophecy is being engineered by the world’s communists, who feel it their duty to destroy all national borders and all national consciousness, those being impediments to the rise of class consciousness.

The capitalists don’t care so much for ideology. They are chiefly concerned with the sober business of wealth extraction. Their main concern is keeping the immigration taps running on full bore, because that maximises rents and minimises wages. Because they own all the rental property, and because they hire all the workers, the capitalists are the major beneficiaries of mass immigration.

For this reason, the capitalists hate the nations: nations are icky things that tend to come together and form unions and enforce labour laws. Nations tend to care about their members not being able to afford housing. Nations tend to pass laws restricting cheap labour importation. Much better to break the nations up, the capitalists reason, into a mindless herd of individualised consumers, indifferent to each other’s suffering. More profit that way.

Both of these forces, both communist and capitalist, constitute a globalist alliance whose interests are implacably opposed to that of the Anzac nation. As globalists, they seek to disenfranchise and disempower the Anzac nation, to confuse us, to strike us ignorant of our history, and of the legacy our ancestors built with the intention that we would inherit it.

These forces couldn’t care less about the actual people with roots in the soil of the lands of the Southwestern Pacific. The actual Anzac nation. These forces have, in fact, done everything they could to impoverish and tyrannise us. Young Anzacs today have almost no chance of buying homes with money from their wages. Our younger generations today are worse off, in homeownership terms, than young people in countries that were Third World a few decades ago.

Qatar, by contrast to the Anzac countries, gives its citizens housing grants of up to 1,200,000 Qatari reals, about AUD500,000. There are no student loans in Qatar. The Qatari Government appears to operate on a logic similar to that of Scandinavian countries in the 1970s: that investing in their own people will produce great dividends in years to come.

We Anzacs, by contrast, are put to work for monkey wages that will never pay for houses. Forget housing grants – our ruling class imports hundreds of thousands of cheap labour units every year to compete with us for housing. Forget Scandinavian logic also. Investing in our people is considered a loss of profit for this quarter.

These external forces, however, would have very little influence had the Anzac nation not already been losing the battle to internal forces. These internal forces are spiritual ones. It’s as true for us as it was for Fight Club – our Great War is a spiritual war.

This spiritual war involves finding the right balance in all of the various realms of spiritual life. We must find the middle path between rashness and cowardice, between gluttony and melancholy, between pride and debasement. Finding that middle path has been difficult, because we have been pulled to and fro by the adharmic philosophies like Abrahamism and scientific materialism.

It’s time for the Anzac nation to forge our own spiritual path, and therefore our own moral path, through the morass of confusion that has befallen the West in the Post-Truth Age.

For anyone descended from the British, of course, our primary spiritual enemies are nihilism and greed.

The nihilism comes from the great void in the centre of our spiritual life. Young Anzacs are not interested in fables about Rabbi Yeshua, and the old myths about Wotan rising from the mist and fog are too distant for the warm lands of Anzac. The great Anzac spiritualities are yet to manifest; our gods are still, for now, dormant. When a true Anzac spiritual movement arises, and when the Anzac gods rise with it, this rising will banish nihilism from our souls.

The greed comes from the grandiosity that is the inheritance of the British Empire. As with all creations of the City of London, the Anzac countries are operated to turn a profit and not to help the Anzac nation meet their needs of life. A political revolution, on nationalist grounds, would allow us to assert a new set of values: one that puts our life quality higher than the mere generation of dollars.

The common enemies of the Anzac nation are not many, but they are powerful. Communists and capitalists, nihilism and greed provide both outer and inner enemies that we must wrestle with in coming decades. These are powerful foes, and their power incites us to come together, morally and spiritually, as one people.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

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

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

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.

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

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

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.

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

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!