Such a great portion of our human lives involves paid work. There is an important sense in which we have been convinced that the ultimate goal of work is to pay off our debts, only to then retire. There is value in challenging the assumptions beneath this kind of myth, because so much of our lives are invested in what is at stake. Unless we come to a very clear understanding of what it is that we feel and what the outcomes are of our participation in this life, we will never arrive at any kind of satisfactory point, nor will we have divined any beneficial understanding of our place in the world.
Firstly, we have inherited a cultural premise that tells us that ultimate well-being can be postponed to the future. This is a very large assumption with far-reaching implications.
Your learned capacity to be happy in the future is a clear reflection of how you have learned to be happy now. Obviously, when the future seems to have arrived, that will also be ‘now’, so your appreciation of your present environment must be managed skilfully.
Have you ever come across people who are retired who cannot stop for one moment? The garden, the housework, the motorhome. These people are continuing the education of a lifetime of work, which is an ethic of keeping busy. People will object: ‘What is wrong if this is what they want?’, but do we really know what we want? Do we know what is best for us, and where we may have misunderstood?
For example, there is hidden assumption that many people have accepted which is that a lifetime of work is also a lifetime involved with suffering, therefore retirement from working life will also equate to retirement from a lifetime of suffering. Just how true is this assumption? It is true that much work, being the expenditure of effort under often physically or mentally stressful conditions, can promote much in the way of personal suffering.
What a lot of people fail to see is that leaving daily work behind is allowing the departure of only one source of suffering, it is not a salvation from suffering as a whole. In fact, the point at which we are accepted to have earned the right to withdraw from a lifetime of work is also the same point at which our mind as well as our physical body is beginning to deteriorate, marking the onset of all kinds of potential physical and medical challenges.
Suffering still follows at our heels from other sources, most notably the illness and death of friends, peers and loved ones who are also subject to the ravages of time. In this respect, retirement enjoys the benefit of a kind of afterlife mythology, in which all of our pain and effort on a daily basis will one day be ultimately vindicated and returned in full measure.
This raises an alarming question: just how much daily tolerance of misery does this mythology support? How many of us are laboring under the illusion that all of our effort is guiding us toward somewhere ultimate where we will have eternal peace and we can finally kick up our heels?
I share a couple of examples of this from my own life which I believe touch upon something relevant here.
I have a friend whose father is in his seventies, and despite remaining reasonably physically fit, he still works himself to the bone every day of his life. He is still in full time employment, despite that fact that he has been given the nod of approval that he could leave his work if he wanted to. Now, you might say ‘If he is doing what he wants to, why not?’ And I would naturally agree, except that all he ever seems to talk about is how much of a welcome change it is going to be when he finally retires.
This poses an odd kind of paradox in which he is on the cusp of retirement, and really past his culturally accepted retirement age, but the actual notion of stopping work seems to terrify him. His insistence on the myth of retirement has been well noted – he has waxed eloquent about the benefits of not having to get up in the morning, to not have to do anything, to have the freedom to kick back with a beer in his hand and watch TV (incidentally, this mythology is also recounted in minor form in the notion of the weekend, almost like a mythic foretaste of Valhalla).
The sad irony is, these are things he has not given himself the permission to enjoy. He may literally never arrive at the point at which he is comfortable with letting go of the ethic of early rising and hard work before he dies. To have lived this way for over seventy years, with no substantial appreciation for being able to allow himself to get a real break, is quite a confounding and yet exceptionally ubiquitous social phenomenon.
We could surmise it comes down to a person’s character and their ethos of being a hard worker, which unsurprisingly is a highly respected social value in any country. It could also be that like the rest of us, he has been successfully indoctrinated into a program of lifelong drudgery, being strung along by an imaginary dangling carrot.
Another example I will give was when I was working out of town one day, an older man came up to me struggling to walk with a stick and specifically wanted to tell me his story. We were the only two people around for at least a kilometer, and he specifically made the effort to approach me from a distance of about three hundred meters.
He told me that he was a keen hunter and fisherman, and that shortly after retiring, he had experienced a stroke which meant that there was no aspect of his retirement he felt he could enjoy. He told me that he worked his whole life, expecting to be able to retire and do what he wanted, except now he felt he had been cheated out of it.
While I don’t believe there is nothing he could have left of value in his life, the fact remains that we do place an inordinate amount of good faith in the application of effort over decades of our lives hoping to have something tangible to show at the end of the process. How does this contribute to us putting off our lives now, and how are we foregoing our responsibility to live wisely and skilfully today?
Are we collectively so enamoured by the prospect of the future holding some form of salvation, either material or spiritual, that we can justify subjecting ourselves to misery today? What would we do differently today, what changes would we be willing to allow in our lives if we discovered the possibility that our imagined future with its ease, relaxation and distance from suffering would never eventuate?
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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.
The title is necessarily misleading here, because for reasons that will hopefully one day become quite clear to you, you cannot discover yourself any more than the eye can see itself directly. Where we do have space to act is in introducing novelty to our otherwise well habituated lives.
The following exercises, whilst beneficial, are not designed with comfort or accomplishment in mind. In fact, many of these exercises will feel about as comfortable and familiar as stepping into a shower fully dressed. There is an enormous comfort in the tried and true, and conversely there can be great discomfort in the discovery of that which is unfamiliar, even when it is wholesome.
The problem with truth is that it is the slipperiest thing in the known universe if your goal is to arrive at it. We can’t grab hold of it for inspection, or to congratulate ourselves upon having caught it. We are it, but it is not ours to own. We can however consent to look with the eyes of innocence, but it asks something in return, and that is postponing our insistence upon asserting the presumed known, which includes the comfortable and the familiar.
One day, all of the familiar could suddenly be gone. This could come by way of death, but not necessarily. The important thing to know is that death, like any other psychic or physical upheaval, is not an obstacle to your ongoing existence. If you ever become determined to uncover that which lies beneath your mind by whichever method, you may end up with these discoveries in spades. For our purposes here, as an introductory exercise in which you are by small degrees introduced to the nature of your soul, it is sufficient to look for the light shining through tiny cracks in the walls of our minds.
Exercise One:Do not justify your choices or actions before other people and do not give in to the temptation to defend your image.
This one is simple and straightforward, yet the core message of this exercise, if explored to its fullest capacity, will reveal the most brilliant jewel of your being; it will also completely suck at first. Make no mistake, it is going to feel terrible – but so would detoxing off of a drug such as nicotine or heroin.
Anything by way of action in defending your ego you thought was going to work in fact didn’t, so what do you have to lose? People berate, judge and insult us in many ways, but what does defending our image actually achieve? Is that which we are defending even real? Really? Do you know that for certain? And if it is indeed real and factual, why should the truth require your defense? Is it temporary nuisance, or do the same issues keep cropping up again and again? Do we really need to either become thick-skinned, or a master of witty comebacks? What about not participating, inwardly or outwardly?
We often feel like defending our image and justifying ourselves is not only so familiar, but feels like coming up for air when we have been trapped under water for a time. It is less an activity than it is a compulsion attached to suffering.
The reason that this feels so central to the way you are used to functioning in social situations is that because of the way humans have been conditioned in our upbringing, you have grown up having conflated the ideas about who you are, with who you truly are.
This is an error of the first order – something you thought was real was not. That has a lot of repercussions, and it is going to take some getting used to once you really see through it. The not so well-hidden secret is that your justifications and personal defenses are intimately linked with your suffering and your sense of separateness. That is what makes you feel like you ought to defend yourself.
The promotion and defense of your false image is the ongoing cause of great pain.
Choosing to not act upon even these often forceful compulsions of psychic activity initially presents a unique discovery when ventured into, which is that you don’t actually have to follow your each and every compulsion. Not only that, but because it is not even really you, it will not ultimately impact you. In other words, the real you cannot be hurt by this. In fact, you can only be liberated by this. Try this often enough and you will eventually discover that whatever people say about you, doesn’t touch upon that which is observably and changelessly true about who you are. We have it collectively wired internally that the complete opposite is true, and the cultural world we inhabit is more than happy to encourage this lie.
If you decide to keep going with this, it could lead you to enormous discoveries. You may also decide that this isn’t for you quite yet. Ego or false self can even in some instances lead to a very buoyant and upbeat life while things seem to be going right for it. The common varieties of ego, however, I find to be quite run-down, generally miserable and exhausted, and very much in need of retirement.
It is relatively easy to stay true to inquiry when there is great pain, but we often don’t recognise what pain includes. It also includes augmentations to our ego such as being told we are wonderful, intelligent, or otherwise special. A more advanced version of this exercise is not to allow compliments to influence your inner states, not because they are true or untrue, but because your worth is elsewhere and independent. Whether you are being insulted or complimented, and you accept it, what is really happening is that you are being presented with a power differential, and you are going into agreement with it. That is a game, and you aren’t being forced to play it, it is a proposition.
All you are doing in this exercise is not agreeing to the power differential being proposed. Do this often enough and it will soon be very clear that what is changelessly real is not subject to personal, social and cultural tides.
Another way of looking at all of this is that one day, your body will be deceased and likely either buried in the ground somewhere, reduced to ashes, or perhaps even strewn out in the open for wild animals to pick amongst. In that situation, if people continue to say upsetting or hurtful things about you, what is going to happen then? One day you will not have any power over this, so you might as well introduce yourself to the truth of the situation now in order to get some benefit out of it.
Exercise Two:Observe the wave-like nature of the present moment
Place your attention on the fact that as time passes, or seems to pass, it consists of an energetic wave, very much like the waves upon the ocean. In the case of water, it appears to be the case that water is moving along, whereas really it is the energy moving through the water itself that seamlessly composes the wave in each instance.
That wave you occupy is very, very special. It is not just an idea. You are always at the peak of this movement, and it is impossible not to be. This is why it is always the present moment whether your body is five, fifty, or one hundred years old. We are all here now, and there is no option but to be here now. This makes this moment supremely worth paying attention to.
All activities, all birth and death come through this one gateless gate. Notice it with diligence and it will reward you with insights beyond what you currently conceive of as knowable. This is not a ploy, and it is not a trick of perspective.
Exercise Three:Become aware of the stream of thought and emotions passing through awareness
Notice at every available opportunity the nature of thought and feeling. You do not need to apply analysis to this, simply observe. Eventually what will begin to happen is that in a very tangible way, it will sink in that you are not a person at all – although being a person is included in the space you currently inhabit as awareness. All things, people, thoughts, emotions and events, real or imagined, come to pass within the theatre of this space. This awareness itself is not localised in space and time, at least not in our usual way of thinking, and its contents are capable of endless permutations whilst that which is unchanging remains shiningly, eternally changeless.
Such is the power of the psyche.
At some point in human history, as well as in our ‘personal’ history, we decided something else was more important, or more worthy of attention. Once you see this, you will not be able to fathom why, nor will you be able to return to the world’s illusions with anything like unwavering commitment. Awareness will become the primary value of your life, your most treasured am-ness.
Plato used the Analogy of the Cave in which the dedicated troglodytes who eventually made it out of the darkness were blinded by the sunlight above, and were thus unable to see the contents of the cave in the same way ever again. The difficulty of seeing this is that your perception of the things that you thought were so important before will be greatly altered. Most people I know who have seen this have had major personal upheavals as their perspective shifts.
You will likely find the majority of cultural institutions and things everyone else is enamoured by quite trivial and uninteresting by comparison. Be forewarned, this isn’t a game. The perception of the soul is a serious business, even though this experience on earth is something of a temporary game. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you would be unwise to seek this for thrills, or for a mere change in scenery.
Dedicated inquiry can and will turn your comfortable inner world upside-down. The only way to stomach the often disruptive results is to have touched upon either an insatiable desire for Truth for its own sake, or a total dissatisfaction with the flimsy and shallow offerings of the material world. You are warned, but you are also encouraged and supported. Eventually every entity on this planet will have to proceed beyond this point anyway, so you may as well start as soon as you sense that you are ready.
Exercise Four: challenge the authority of displacement.
Have you ever noticed within yourself a kind of internal lockdown where you suddenly go into unconscious, automatic and usually negative patterns or thoughts or behaviours? One word for this is displacement. You are being shut down and kicked off your seat of consciousness so that the real ‘you’ is no longer there to observe, learn and act anymore.
This habit is very deeply ingrained. It is a dysfunctional habit of the psyche that has been encouraged by a deeply confused and misled society. It happens most often when emotions which are very powerful such as anger or fear arise. They are strong stimuli that threaten to tug you down into unconsciousness like a swimmer being drawn into a swift, strong undercurrent.
The feeling when this is about to happen is a sense similar to when you first start to fall asleep at night. Witness it in action and get a feel for it so that you can understand the warning signs and remain seated for the coming events as consciousness. You will surprise yourself. Your willingness alone to pursue this will begin to net you immediate results. I know of no one person who has applied themselves willingly to the discipline of awareness whose life was not immeasurably enriched, and usually within a matter of months if not weeks.
For example: someone starts to insult you or imply something facetious about your actions or your motives. You feel the inner urge to react in some way, so you feel the pull to duck down behind a psychic shield. Now your psychological defense mechanisms are active. You are blind, in fact you are not there. Your third eye is squeezed shut whilst fear takes over to run its well scripted code. You begged the mind to keep you safe, and it is dutifully trying to do just that in the only way it knows how. It doesn’t work – at least not for the real you.
The mind’s habituation to withdraw from suffering IS what keeps suffering happening.
Originally, it is the misperception of separation that causes suffering, but it is our panicked reaction to escape that really keeps the fire of suffering alight. Psychological suffering is always represented in our body by some form of discomfort, physical pain or tension, and it is an excellent gauge of the truthfulness of our inner state.
Suffering is how the separate sense of self, being the false self, attempts to convince you that you are not whole, that you should withdraw like a snail into its shell, shrinking from reality. When believed and thus obeyed, it gives birth to inner hells. When firmly rejected, there comes a strange peace that passes all understanding. Despair cannot touch you.
Do you want to give anyone the power over you to turn you into an unconscious, reactive idiot? Does that line up with your inmost sense of who you truly are in spirit? Have you seen those plastic toy animals whose limbs are held erect by cable tension, and when you press the button, all the tension releases and the animal crumples into a heap? That is what you give people the power to do to you, even when you get very angry and respond with what we call ‘assertiveness’.
No one wants this slavery, because it is a lie against the truth of who we are. Once you know about it, that is sufficient motivation to act from a space of wisdom.
If you can stay awake during these episodes of rage, anger, anxiety and fear- and I guarantee that you have the capacity to – what a joy and wonder you will discover! None of it is real. It isn’t a real threat, it is all a mass hallucination. It is instructional in educational terms, yes, but not ultimately real. It is a dream of form we were all born into, with our consent. That birth didn’t happen ‘once upon a time’, it is repeated every day – this is the nature of re-birth. It is happening in every waking moment, every day.
You never need to let yourself throw a tantrum over a dream. Spend some time addressing the illusions of yourself and others – not with more arguments, but with awareness itself – then see what problems you have. Your efforts will be recognized as reality shifts around you to accommodate one who has eyes to see and ears to listen. You will encounter more and more openings and insights until there is only one timeless, uninterrupted seeing. Then, instead of piloting an insane ego that insists upon the totality of the universe being beaten into its preferred shape, you will become a willing student of reality.
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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.
In the most basic sense, meditation could be said to be attending to what is actually happening for you here and now. There are many methods, techniques, schools and goals. The one thing I would like to emphasise is that meditating ‘for’ something is completely different to meditation in its proper sense. The main question is: what do you want out of it? This question, when answered honestly, should reveal important information about where your experience with meditation will lead.
There are many potential outcomes associated with meditation practice. It could be oriented toward health, longevity, stress-reduction, or it could be to experience blissful or altered states. It is important to note that when we are really interested in paying attention to what is, i.e. Truth, there is no outcome or goal associated with it. If you do want to meditate for some of the reasons specified above, there is really no problem with that, have away at it. All I want to make clear is that meditation is not a prescription for an outcome of how we or anyone else thinks things should be.
Over the past twenty years or so there has been a global shift toward mindfulness, which is really a kind of prescribed meditation practice. It holds onto limitation, and in fact issues from limitation – which isn’t to say that it is wrong, only that it is limited. It is encouraged by big business and educational institutions among others and touted as a way to boost inner health and overall productivity.
The reason it must be anchored in limitation is that groups with special interests such as maintaining productivity and satisfaction levels have an agenda.
Mindfulness has indeed been shown in the literature to have measurable benefits upon human well-being. A corporation or institution can achieve much by way of letting out the leash, however it simply cannot afford to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Progressive religions are also generally comfortable with mindfulness, just so long as it doesn’t push you over into questioning the main tenets of their ideology, in which case the leash is very firmly brought back in.
Corporations are happy to implement measures of mindfulness in the same capacity as they promote regular hand-washing, loud-shirt Wednesdays and sneezing into your elbow. Mindfulness is a prescribed form of limited meditative awareness that promotes mental and physical well-being. It makes for a more well-behaved, cohesive team environment, and staff are less apt to flip out and require stress leave.
Please recognise that you are not being blessed with the keys to the kingdom in this scenario.
At the end of the day, the ultimate interest is minimising loss and maximising profit. If you are the CEO of a multinational corporation, your investors and share-holders aren’t going to be terribly sympathetic to you waking up one morning having discovered that you are unconditionally connected with the source of all life and that your deepest being is as timeless, immortal spirit that feels no need to define itself through achieving material goals.
Meditation by contrast does not have a capped limit placed upon it. In fact, if there is any goal or outcome attached to it, you can say it isn’t really meditation in the true sense.
About twenty or so years ago, a group of Buddhist monks were visiting New Zealand. They visited a cathedral and remarked that it was a very holy place. They noted that there was a small chapel off to the side which was clearly labelled ‘Meditation Room’. Naturally, they asked if they could be permitted to use the room for – you guessed it – meditation.
The clergy responded kindly that no, they may not use the room because they didn’t think the kind of meditation that they were planning to do in the chapel would be appropriately Christian in nature. From that point on, the name ‘Meditation Room’ was abruptly changed to the name ‘Contemplation Room’, underscoring with wonderful irony the requirement of established authorities and institutions to maintain limitation, and therefore control.
This story perfectly encapsulates the issue surrounding meditation being held as something in abeyance to something else; some other hierarchy of values. True meditation cannot be this, because there can’t be a fixed itinerary on where you are being taken, otherwise it is not really meditation, it is something else.
So, the question arises, should we meditate? I find people struggle with this question, because it really can’t be prescribed. I personally don’t meditate, but that is because it would be redundant for me to set aside time to engage in awareness when I am committed to that every waking moment. The more interesting question would be, are you curious as to the fact that in spite of all the odds, you just happen to exist? Are you curious that perhaps one of the least possible things in the universe is directly observable within you and as you? If not, there isn’t much reason to advise someone to meditate. You may as well be asking them to join you in going to a movie they have no interest in seeing.
I’m not saying that having no interest in meditation is necessarily a terrible thing. It is admittedly a mystery to me why someone would not have their interest piqued by something that seems so profoundly fascinating as the existence of a universal force which is eternally self-aware, but there are reasons for everything. A simple life with no questions may be just as precious or pleasant to participate in as one filled with inquiry or reflection.
I can’t see why the lives of trees and plants shouldn’t be a perfectly valid form of existence, it’s just that the realm of the vegetable doesn’t share any overlap with my current interests and lifestyle.
As humans, the orientation of the intellect and the judging, perceiving mind is such a powerful and often heavy burden to bear. Meditation can certainly be said to provide perspective on the realm of the mind without turning itself inside out and trying ever unsuccessfully to come at itself from a non-intellectual angle. When minds engage in self-examination and analysis, all kinds of twists, ties, and knots are possible.
That is often what the majority of neurosis is, simply thought wrapping around itself again and again until there is an unbroken knot that results in an anxiety loop.
Meditation offers the promise of space and relief from this kind of insanity. Rather than reformulating new solutions within the structure of the known, it opens the doorway to the possibility of reviewing all of our mental content from a broader phenomenological space in which the contents of our inner lives seem relatively small by comparison.
Whilst meditation can provide the space for the entire spectrum of states possible within the human mind, it needs to be understood that so long as your notion of meditation is fixed upon seeking to experience certain states, it will ultimately fail, even if you get very good at it. This isn’t to do with me being pessimistic about your abilities, but concerns a feature of reality itself, specifically the law of impermanence.
No state lasts forever, so at some point or another it needs to be faced that what we are doing in meditation is not ultimately about attaining states or even insights. These will all come and go. Ultimately, meditation in its purest form is coming into a real relationship with what is true and changeless, that within which all states come to pass, including all those states associated with birth and death.
This is why meditation draws your attention to what is happening directly here and now, because 99% of people will miss the significance of it every time. It really does no justice to truth for me to attempt to describe that which you may come into if you persist – I may as well be trying to describe a sunset in binary code.
I once took it on a heuristic basis that there was more to the world than what was immediately tangible and visible. My curiosity could not be swayed.
A man in the foothills of the Himalayas once said that the best thing that ever happened to him was to have his legs shattered by an avalanche forcing him to live in poverty and solitude, because this allowed him to come into contact with who he truly was. I couldn’t let go of the impetus to understand what inner force could prove that important to a human life. The possibility captivated my attention that something could be so important that it could even be worth losing everything familiar in order to touch upon. Having now looked into this matter satisfactorily, I now hold this to be self-evidently true.
Rather than ask you to believe it, I invite you to consider the possibility that maybe there is as yet undiscovered depths to you that defy description. Awareness is the doorway to understanding the depths of your true nature, and meditation is the opportunity to embrace the awareness of that which is always here, right now.
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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.
The current opportunity we find ourselves faced with is the chance to reclaim that which is true from amidst the vast wasteland of that which has hitherto been claimed as true in falsehood. All of it – all the rubbish and the refuse of centuries that has weighed us down. If not now, when? Is there really going to be some better time, or a better opportunity somewhere down the line to reclaim who we truly are from amongst the ashes?
You might sense that there is a kind of timer within you. Perhaps you sense that you are nearing the end of a great cycle that can no longer be sustained. Or, you may simply feel saturated with the mental and emotional litter of the world and know intuitively that this dimension in its present perceived state has taken you about as far as it can take anyone.
No one is winning any ideological wars, and even those who seemed to have were either usurped or soon may be. Where does it end? Are you still awaiting an external conclusion that would end this charade? Maybe the timer is already going off for you, and the very real sense that there must be something meaningful beyond all of this cyclical, fleeting and ultimately dissatisfactory realm is making itself known to you at very visceral level. The arising of inner questions such as ‘what is the point?’ Or ‘where is all of this leading to?’ are such markers of reaching a phase in which you signal your readiness for change to the universe.
This change is reclamation.
It is far less important to apply some kind of conceptual overlay or philosophical modelling to your existence than it is to broach some very serious inner questions.
So why has everything we have tried, personally and collectively, yielded such unimpressive results? How can it be that our human endeavours have put men on the moon and robotic rovers on far distant planets, but we haven’t solved simple problems of basic human suffering? Why do we still drive ourselves and each other to death and madness in the name of a quick buck, or a belief system? How is it that instead of having a clear understanding of who we are, we reinvent all of these absurd modalities of self-identification over and over again?
Me, the one who adheres to this political system. Me, the one who has been shaped by my circumstances into a victor (or a victim). Me, the one who got it all right, me, the one who got it all wrong. Me, the one who has just the right answers at the right time. Me, the one who has mastered the ability to reason with myself and others. Have you entertained the possibility that this is all just a story, mere narrative pressed into the service of self-torture or as an exercise of egoic masturbation? The conquests, the victories, the shortcomings, the failures.
What if the reason your world looks like trash is because you thought white was black and black was white?
Do the people who love you give you something you don’t have? Do the people who dislike you threaten to take something from you that is real? Are you caught in ‘your’ story? If the story belongs to someone, who is this one to whom the story belongs? Are you a character in your own personal movie, novel or fairy tale?
These questions are all very worth your time, particularly if you don’t have any clarity around what is real. The test for whether you don’t have a clear understanding of what is real is already known to you – it is whether you are still actively searching for something. Really, anything. Material, spiritual, intellectual – it makes no difference. It is the religion of ‘the next big thing’, that which is always coming, but never arrives.
This is goal-driven, seeking behaviour, even if you never go outside of yourself (introverted ‘spiritual’ types are some of the most notorious and imperturbable seekers). If you are, that implies forward momentum into the world, an attempt to manipulate it toward your own ends. The whole project of ego has been an expeditionary foray into the false, with the hope of bringing back something that so glitters that it will make us gods.
Alright, so what has been tried before? What hasn’t?
What has been tried before is: everything under the Sun. Don’t you think if there was some miraculous solution that would save us one person in history would have somehow found it and made it work? Remember those people who were so certain they had the answer that they gave every atom of their entire life in service to it, and it even changed whole countries, political systems, saved some people killed others? Even that level of extreme devotion must meet death, because it is up against the universe itself.
So what exactly is it that hasn’t been tried that would terminate our restless seeking? Is the answer to that collective or personal? Both? We also know that simply giving up in frustrated cynicism isn’t the solution either, because how often has that been tried to no effect?
People don’t see just how simple and straightforward it is to let go of all of this. People fail to see how such a simple factor as their agreement could command such a range of effects. Stories within stories of victimhood and blame, resentment, judgment. These are all chains we happily wear while we pace around our cages. We are so eagerly invested in this crap that we even volunteer to check that what is keeping us caged and chained is in good working order. The locks are well oiled, the bars are secure so that no one will be making it in or out. We make for very well-behaved and cooperative animals in a very bad zoo. Even the rebels and dissidents are all a welcome part of this infernal machine, because every role contributes something by way of rendering the meaning of a collective narrative, from the saints and sages to the corporate elite.
If it was all doom and gloom, we likely would have come out of the collective illusion by now. The difficulty is that we have found ourselves in a set of conditions in which our restraints and limitations are the known and familiar, and as uncomfortable and restrictive as they may sometimes be, they provide us with a miserable sense of comfort, security and reassurance. In other words, the comforts of the known offer protection against the presumed horrors of the unknown.
Being fitted with collar and chain, being broken is the perennial solution the world offers against that which is claimed to be evil in advance of any serious inquiry.
Let’s go back to what hasn’t been tried before. The thing that hasn’t been tried before is the thing you probably haven’t ever even thought about attempting. Stopping. Seeing what is actually here contrasted with what the world has offered you as temptation to keep up a mindless forward momentum. Have you tried stopping for one real moment? Does your body know what it feels like to do anything other than run toward the next day, the next moment, the next imaginary milestone? You’ve actually been so afraid of even looking at it that you built an entire human lifetime, including the complex structures of a human personality to avoid facing it.
Don’t settle for being comfortable in the familiar. It isn’t what you think it is! Don’t settle for being reassured, for having security. Remember this is what has been tried before, this is the old reliable that keeps spouting more and more crap year after year. The world has offered you a phoney promise of comfort to secure your tacit agreement to not look, to not go snooping behind the curtain. Comfortable is self-reinforcing. This is the same phenomenological expression in effect as nepotism or cronyism – keeping the devil you know in power to guarantee more of the same.
In a very real sense, to discover that which is new to you means to effectively guarantee that you will be shaken, disturbed – maybe even wiped out.
If you are utterly fed up with the bullshit of this world, and you will know it, you will arrive at a sense of determination which, if you touch upon it, will provide you with the tenacity and wherewithal to push beyond the known limitations of comfort and security in each new moment. You will know what that entails when you need to know, because you will be fed from the source of that from which all truth springs.
Dissatisfaction with the false feeds hunger for the truth. At some point, more variegated or refined falsity will cease to appease you. How many times can you be lied to before you are willing to question where your allegiance should lie? How much bullshit (from yourself or others) would you be willing to put up with in order to defend your tenuous stake in the ground?
The name of this game is reclamation. Reclaiming the truth of who you are from the tentacles of the false world in which it has so long been wilfully trapped. What is at stake is your inner transformation, the thing that has been waiting to happen for time immemorial.
What happens when the small things that used to bother you don’t do so anymore? That notion may even provoke a fear response in you. But then what about the big things? You might not even know who you are anymore, or who you thought you could be. Your entire perceived world could change, even turn inside out. That could actually be the psychological end of your world as you know it. Does that sound frightening? Who or what is it that is frightened? Is it you (as in the real you) or ‘you’ from the perspective of the configuration in which the way things were?
Could you concede that in the face of reality? Would you be prepared to give up everything you thought you knew, including all of your arguments and conclusions, weak or strong, in order to clear the table for truth? The entirety of the known in your life up to now may be a casualty in the process. Would that be so utterly terrible? How would you really, finally know unless you let it happen? And I don’t mean as some single unchanging conclusion, but as a life ongoing lived at the very edge of mystery?
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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.
