Growing Up Half Asleep

by SIMON P MURPHY

I was raised in a Christian denomination called Roman Catholicism. Despite this influence, I had no understanding of what a religious outlook meant. Frankly, I had no idea I was participating in a religion, nor did I have any idea that I was ensconced in a denomination within that religion. It was just the world around me, like the sky, the grass, and neighbourhood cats.

I did suspect that there was probably something very deep and meaningful behind all of the imagery present in church. There was something inscrutably mysterious about Jesus hanging on the crucifix up behind the altar, his smooth white limbs pinned to beams of wood, his gaze directed steadily toward the sky.

Since I was an attendant of a Catholic church as well as the attached school, I had no formal exposure to other religious or spiritual systems. In a world predating the Internet, my education was limited to the school library. My world was fairly closed in that regard. There was no competition for explanations of the world.

I have no doubt that you would find this kind of cloistered childhood environment, accidental or premeditated, represented in nearly every religious tradition of the world. The closed nature of this education was not unique to any form of Christianity. From the earliest age, I felt a calling to deeper understanding that I find difficult to express in words.

That a faith should outgrow its parent religion now seems to me as natural as that love should outgrow the bonds of its limitations. This is why Buddhism has an image of using a raft (symbolizing methods, techniques, and religious instruction) to cross to the other shore, only to let the raft go once it has served its purpose.

There was a hymn that resonated with me in childhood. It presented the imagery of leaving one’s boats behind on familiar shores, and setting the heart across the deep. This metaphorical imagery was profound to me in value. It was one of the first times I felt the pull of mysticism hidden amongst the ordinary. I realised even from within the confined structure of Roman Catholicism there was suggestion of something so deep and valuable that even that which was conventionally accepted would need to be left behind in order to come into contact with that which was true.

It was like a crack of mystical light shining though the otherwise banal woodwork. This is a theme that would follow me for decades, and an attitude of reverence and mystery that accompanied me into my much later readings in the Buddhist tradition, where I started to learn more about the role and function of an authentic teaching. Such a teaching doesn’t exist purely in and of itself – in order to close the circle, it requires one who is ready and willing to attend the lesson, to listen with every fibre of one’s being as though one’s soul was filled with nothing but eyes and ears.

I would like to share two significant spiritual experiences from childhood that suggest to me that the there is a universality in divine symbology, comprehensible even to a child instructed in limited ways. It may also point to prior existences or learnings. In any case, the point I would like you to remember is that my spiritual education was limited to the mythology presented in Christianity, specifically the version espoused by the Roman Catholic Church. I didn’t even know there were alternative views. That was the cultural framework with which I had to understand what I heard, read, saw and experienced as a child.

I did, however, have television.

There was a critical moment in an animated movie I watched. I believe my age would have likely been four or five. I never usually knew what was happening in movies because I have never had a particularly good attention span. What happened in this movie was that a young boy was stabbed by a sword at sea, on a boat. His lifeless body fell into the water, surrounded by ribbons of red blood. I remember this scene filling me with such a deep sadness as I related to the boy, wondering what it would mean to me and my family if such a thing were to happen to me.

A later scene toward the end of the movie showed the opening of the petals of a flower, and inside was a baby. I had no idea what the movie was about, but I understood intuitively at that moment that this same boy had been reborn into a new form. I suddenly knew the heart of reincarnation without terminology, instruction or cultural framework. It was as clear as watching a new dawn, or hearing the clear peal of a bell. It is difficult to describe what arriving at such an understanding is like, particularly when there is no pre-existing spiritual or religious framework to assimilate the experience. It was, and still is, one of the most profound and spiritually resonant experiences of my life.

The other experience was also due to watching a movie, in this case ‘The Dark Crystal’ on television on Christmas Eve. I believe I may have been between five and six years old. From the opening credits of that movie, I was utterly engaged and entranced. It was as though some vital instructions from the distant past had been set up to examine everything that was to follow in full awareness.

Again, lacking any of the framework which I now see clearly laid out in other traditions, I came across a profound experience of what seemed a soul-level comprehension. As the movie concluded, there was presented what I now recognise as the very distinctively Eastern, very substantially deep Advaitic notion that the duality present in the world expressed in the polarity of good versus evil is actually due to a vital division at the core level of our being.

Insofar as childrens’ movies are concerned, we were typically fed on the standard narrative about the battle between the forces of good and evil, with good always prevailing, and any other result being a kind of sacrilege or a cause for nihilistic despair. The message of ‘The Dark Crystal’ was categorically different, and it left me speechless – really in a state of what I would describe as transcendent awe.

It wasn’t preaching the usual polarity of good versus evil, it was suggesting that the reason there was even a split into this apparent duality was due to a fundamental wound, a core separation. It was further suggested that the healing of this rift not only collapsed the apparent duality of good and evil, but restored to its natural state that which was itself neither intrinsically good nor evil, but whole and therefore inclusive of every possible expression.

Now, I could never hope to explain this to anyone as a child, because I didn’t have the words, only the realisation – but the understanding of the concept of nonduality had shaken me to my core. I believe these two experiences were necessary to awaken me to a lifelong gravitation toward the mystical traditions in which I found gentle directions homeward to that which can never be satisfactorily expressed in words.

There is a point of spiritual maturity at which we forego our preoccupation with good and evil and begin to level our gaze toward wholeness and completion.

It is the stamp of a parent’s spiritual integrity that they give their child permission to find their own path to the truth. To fail to do so speaks to a level of relative immaturity. I had many childhood friends who were home-schooled because their parents did not want their intended course of development to be affected by alternate viewpoints or ‘negative influences’. For the most part, those friends were successfully indoctrinated into adulthood views resembling the closed and limited views of their parents.

I remember well the rationale woven into the mindset across families at the time. It was always some form of: ‘we have been reassured that our views are correct, because the word of God as presented in the Bible is infallible, therefore we reserve the right to override our childrens’ choices and freedoms on the authority of superior access to knowledge. The value of this is that we are only sparing them from error in advance, since any movement away from the path will be error, so in restricting their freedoms we are actually giving them the highest service of love and care’.

Only a lack of faith and a disrespect for human freedom would insist on a child’s staying put in a servitude of blind devotion. Yes, these parents love their children and want what is best for them. This is not a guarantee that they are seeing clearly. Even when superficial systems of inquiry are promoted, one is encouraged to arrive at the ‘right’ answer. Perhaps the reason that fundamentalist religion in every form the world over is so offended by the principle of evolution by natural selection is not so much that it removes the role of a creator, but more that it implies that some form of change might be central to the function of reality.

What could offend a fundamentalist religion more? It consists of an ideology of belief structures which are so fragile, and are up against the weight of the entire universe which is a spiritual masterclass in change itself. Such an ideology is dead and fixed, not fluid and alive, and the significance of this is that you have to work with a system that is completely incongruent with the fabric of reality. This is why those systems of belief must be endlessly promoted and reinforced through indoctrination (our ideas must be right, discard your objections), evangelism, browbeating and wrongheaded pressure to procreate.

Imagine being told that you should morally be bringing another life in the world just as another vector for ignorance and unconsciousness to survive in some form. The value of that life is not intended to be a loving celebration of life and freedom, but a pawn of flesh and bone. It is a powerful trance indeed that would convince a parent to bear children with the lowest, most shadow-enshrouded motivations and still dress it up as obedience and sanctity. To forbid abortion is a perversion of the same reasoning.

Which is not say that such a tradition cannot be composed of beautiful, kind-hearted people, and genuinely loving families. I have found such people in all walks of life. These people are often natural mystics. The knowing of divine truth is not upended by any religious or doctrinal brutality inflicted upon them. Perhaps they can only have continued to survive under such conditions because they have found the means by which their souls find nourishment from within. Perhaps they are divinely called to serve in such dark corners of the world to support similar growth in others.

I remember meetings in which people who had decided to leave were renounced. Different members of the church would have the opportunity to voice what they believed were the persons shortcomings as a Christian and a church member, and I remember feeling that there was a great sense of fortitude amongst the church, establishing who they were defined as, as opposed to who they were not. The ostracizing of the outgroup is in the same movement the building up of the in-group, and everyone felt very cohesive, righteous and proud.

This is a clear example of the ego’s masterful illusion of seeking to establish a sense of unity through separation, or other-making. It may look cosy on the surface, but it is poisonous. This is because in exchange for the precarious sense of cohesion it affords, it demands a human sacrifice. The same thing is ubiquitously present in modern social politics. You are cajoled by your peers to throw the least of your brothers under the bus so that you can feel a fleeting sense of unity.

It is said that the devil’s greatest trick was to convince mankind that he did not exist. I do not think this is very clever at all, and I would have to admit that I think the devil would be far more nefarious in his approach. I think it would be more accurate to suggest that the greatest trick the devil could ever play would be to so convince people that they are on the side of truth, good and righteousness, that they are prepared to close their hearts and minds to those who occupy perspectives different from their own.

The people who either left the church group or were excommunicated were openly decried and generally not tolerated to be spoken to again by other members, even though most remained committed to the Catholic faith. You will find the same blindness in groups the world over, religious or otherwise.

We aren’t talking about good versus evil, right versus wrong. We are talking about educational levels not being universally applicable. And no, I am not claiming that one life philosophy or religious tradition is kindergarten whilst another represents university. My experience has been that wherever you find yourself, in whichever time or space, you will unfailingly find the highest level of education available to you, as befitting your needs.

I believe the syllabus of these educational needs are often far more complex and occluded than we are privy to at the human level. I would never assume someone is either unsophisticated or indifferent to their soul’s education because they adhere to one system versus another, nor would I assume another to be advanced for the same reasons.

Both fools and wise men wear exceptionally convincing disguises in this world.

One of the most prolific theologians of the west, Thomas Aquinas, was an example of a prodigiously educated mind who speculated on the nature of the divine for a lifetime. By some, he is seen as a sainted father of the Catholic faith, a Church Doctor and master theologian whose work is mentioned in the same breath as Aristotle and Plato. Others, particularly those of a more mystical than philosophical persuasion, might be inclined to say that such a person may have been little more than a windbag for most of their life.

Towards the end of his life, however, Aquinas effectively retracted his theological views. He indicated that nothing he had said about anything had touched upon the truth and that all we could know about the divine could not be formulated in words, and in doing so, he took a vow of silence that reputedly lasted the remainder of his life.

I have come across few consistencies in this strange universe, but one of them is that all things contain at their core a valuable lesson, whether a relationship, a miracle, an illness, a disaster, a birth or a death. The opportunity to learn (or unlearn) is never absent. Another is that all things are in a state of constant flux – everything that arises will also pass away. The third is that there is no situation in which waking up to your true nature is anything but beneficial.

You may not like it, you may not be ready for it yet, you may not want it at all – but the path of awakening to truth and setting foot on the path of the Dharma can only bring medicine to the soul.

You could assemble a symposium of the brightest minds on the planet arguing why a plant shouldn’t thrive on sunlight, but this would not impact one single plant’s most fundamental requirement for sunlight. Waking up to your true nature is no different. You can wake up in a church, a mosque, a kindergarten or a psychiatric hospital. There is no prescription for what that should look like, or how that should pan out over the course of that lifetime.

In my own experience, it has been a little like the mind over the course of a lifetime was caught within an artificial hurricane in a cylinder with a separate person in the middle being hit by thousands of chunks of debris hurtling around at tremendous speed.

The noise and chaos force you to cringe, cower and spend your time covering your most sensitive areas, including of course your eyes. You might think such a situation would be like hell, but if you didn’t know any different for 20 or 30 years, it would just be assumed that that was the way things are. Then one day, in some unpredictable and graceful moment out of time, the power to the hurricane machine is suddenly switched off. It just happens – you didn’t do it.

Then, all of the debris that has been flying around punishing you and attacking you loses its momentum and falls to your feet. What would you think, or feel, or conclude if that happened to you? There are no accurate words here. We have all had this revelation to some degree, it is just a matter of how it has caught your attention. You tend to notice it very clearly if you have been involved in turbulent suffering and discord. Other times it will just casually drop in uninvited.

The point is, once you settle into what this realisation has to offer, everything changes. Your entire outlook of reality changes, from the ground up. Now you are looking at a world that was not designed to cause you suffering. How could that even be possible?

You change by degrees at the very centre of your mind and your heart, with no effort on your part, only a willingness and an availability. All of those vulnerable and sensitive areas of your body (yes, including your eyes) are no longer in danger, and so inch by inch, you begin to trust that you can correct your posture of cowering and uncover your eyes. Now what does the world look like?

You are tasked with the discovery of something of critical importance in this world.

I will continue to be drawn to the Sun-like beauty of truth until breath leaves this body. I will continue to explore the depths the great teachers pointed to, even if only through the silence of my being. Beyond that, I neither need nor ask for knowledge, because the light they speak of, the same light I speak of, is unmistakably present here and now. Place your trust in what is real, that which echoes through the halls of your being. You can be very surprised by reality, even shocked, but you cannot be led astray by it.

Hold this lightly as you place a foot into the darkness.

The supreme intelligence inseparable from us is not here to brutalise us into compliance. Only we do that to ourselves, and we are consummate masters at it. It makes no difference which religion or lack thereof someone tells you they are. See the one who comes before you.

As the philosopher Douglas Harding put it so eloquently, to lack divinity is to lack being. This love that is here does not play by the rules we humans have set up – exclusion, denial of affection to manipulate, conditional love. This misunderstanding, this ignorance, is the source of the majority of self-created psychological suffering.

There are at least two things I know would be wrong for me to accept. Firstly, it is that there is anyone in the universe we should harden our hearts to, anyone who is not merely a messenger of the divine in a clever disguise. To accept this would be wrong-minded to me.

The second is that there is anything worth grasping onto for dear life, anything however true or noble, that is not ultimately worth letting go of into the ocean of Truth. Beautiful as they may be, they are all fingers pointing to the moon. They are all contrived means and methods of directing one home to reality.

Liberation isn’t partial, and it isn’t locked away in some imaginary future heaven for nice or obedient people – it is fully here, now, present and ongoing. We only come to it by meeting our present conditions fully and unreservedly. It is there for the just and unjust, the pure and impure. If it wasn’t, what would support reality? Upon what foundations would the universe rest?

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.

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The Path Of Self-Inquiry

There may arrive a point in many of our lives where we begin to feel a natural, indwelling sense of encouragement to question the nature of our lives. I don’t mean that in the traditional sense of reflecting upon who we are and where we are heading with our partners, career and so forth – although that certainly can be a part of it.

Really what I am talking about is looking at is the nature of the entire worldview that we have inhabited, and what is has meant for us to occupy our place within it. Our beliefs, our judgments, our compulsions, neuroses and habits – what has it all meant? Why have we done the things we have, and where did our investment in energy take us along the way?

Self-inquiry in some form or another is often the precursor to great shifts in our understanding, not only of ourselves, but also the way in which we view reality, and ultimately how we move through the world.

Self-inquiry could take the form of ‘something in my life needs to change’. It could derive from a sense of overwhelming dissatisfaction. When I am talking about this line of inquiry, I don’t mean how we can be bigger, better, or different versions of ourselves. Personalities are already very much engaged in this kind task at any given time, so we aren’t talking about that aspect of reflection.

What is however revolutionary in our inner world is to begin to question that which has been fundamental to our entire way of operating.

Changing a partner, a name, or a profession is a little bit like swapping out one pair of shoes for another. We are not talking about touching upon a superficial change. The task of self-inquiry questions in a way that does not emerge from any of assumptions about getting somewhere else, being someone else. It centres its focus on pursuing a clear and direct understanding of the way things are. This is not a relative understanding – how we think they should be, or how they were, but how they actually are right now – in other words, what is actually real?

Who am I really, when all of this personal history with all of its various wants and habits falls by the wayside?

Some people will not feel any clear pull to do this. There are some people who are compelled to do so even from an early age, and even when it was far from comfortable to do so. This inquiry is not necessarily outward – asking our parents or teachers, for example. It is more that is a very direct inner experience of questioning in which we hold in a light of unremitting scrutiny, again, not to look better or to feel better – but to actually know.

The renowned Indian sage Ramana Maharshi famously likened self-inquiry as being like a stick used to stir the embers of a fire. The stick of ‘who am I?’ would stir the hot coals, and in doing so, would itself catch fire and eventually be burned away. This analogy demonstrates something important about the nature of the self-inquiry process – it isn’t really about the power of our answers, but the power of our questions. What is energetically real within those questions does not remain for us as psychological form, but is reclaimed by the truth.

Nothing is perhaps a clearer sign of awakening than the falling away of questions.

When there is any confusion inside us about the nature of things or our true identity, there is usually a persistent sense of being unsettled. Whether we give voice to this confusion or not, there is a yearning for closure that has a way of gnawing at us internally.

Usually, the response for this kind of disturbance or discomfort is some form of going along with a temporary distraction as an analgesic. Making the sense of discomfort going away can work temporarily by any number of methods. Some people do things as simple as ride a bike, watch a movie or listen to the radio in the car.

In other more acute forms, the disturbance of unresolved energies can lead to more dysfunctional patterns. Once you begin to look in earnest upon your inner world, you will begin to see how much of your strange behaviour, built upon years of habit, has been recruited and held in place just to manage certain persistent kinds of unpleasant feelings. My experience has been that in any case in which we experience painful or uncomfortable inner states, we are really being presented with an issue being brought to our attention that asks for closer examination.

Sometimes, the path of inquiry can appear relatively simple. We might have had one feeling haunting us for years when all it was really asking of us was to be looked at once, only to dissipate.

This is not altogether that rare, and it is something I have observed first-hand.

It can be a strange experience waking up into the next moment, only to no longer think or feel something that you might have been unwittingly committed to for decades. Understanding can be a very quick or gradual process of uncovering layers of error. Mostly it is some combination of both. We aren’t problem solving, or committing our inner world to any kind of rigorous psychoanalysis. We are starting out by just looking in the energetic direction the question is coming from.

Do we want to be a bigger, better ‘me’, or do we want to meet the truth with our entire being? Sometimes these confusions and questions carry an immeasurable power behind them. This is why the negative effects we experience from some unresolved questions can seem so turbulent.

Usually the question ‘who am I?’ being the basic question of identity has an enormous momentum, because the reality is that we have either discovered who we truly are and we have stopped seeking, or we haven’t and we’re left unsure.

There’s an enormous amount of energy that can be tied up in this question. Strangely enough, this can also be one of the reasons people are so terrified of dying (specifically our ideas about what death might be), because they don’t know who they are yet, and they feel an extraordinary compulsion issuing from within for them to find out before it is too late.

It is a grand irony that the one thing that is asking you to stop for one moment in total stillness, also happens to be very same the force within us prompting our frantic searching in all directions.

Have you ever had the thought occur to you ‘Imagine what I would get done in life if I no longer had to worry about this?’ It is very much like that. What the process of self-inquiry is doing for us is freeing up our energy so that we can really get on with this task of living, and not persist in driving with our brakes on.

My own experience has shown that the most powerful of these questions have been, for me: ‘who am I?’ and ‘what is actually true?’ The form your own questions take will vary, but choose whatever you feel resonates as the most important and meaningfully worded line of inquiry for you.

There are no predetermined answers here – a volume of written answers would not be worth one true revelation within you, however small. It is critically important that you meet this inquiry, whatever the result, in the privacy of your own heart. After all, the benefit of the authenticity of this intimate process is that you are not taking anything for granted. In this inquiry, no reference is being made to what anyone else has taught you or imposed upon you. You are a free agent.

If the will is pure, and you will know the degree to which you seek truth for its own sake, you will happen upon whatever is most important for your own unfolding.

In what we call spiritual affairs, there is no truth so certain and universal that is justified asking someone to believe on your behalf. It simply doesn’t work this way.

This is illustrated in the Chan tradition (the Chinese origin of the Zen tradition) in the following way: to have a piece of knowledge as a belief or a commitment is like someone giving you a cup of tea. You could be anyone, holy, righteous, high ranking – if you had the tea given to you, you could show everyone else that you had the tea, and bring it out any time you wanted. However, having the tea is not the same as tasting the tea – if you have not tasted it, then you haven’t connected with the real value in having it.

All true spiritual revelation comes to us by way of tasting the tea. Many people insist on believing things they have never experienced that have simply been bequeathed to them by other people they once placed their trust in, whether it was friends, family or cultural institutions.

If someone attempted to tell you who you were, in the closest, most exact definition possible in your native language, that would still get you nowhere. You would maybe have a nice definition, and you would run around reproducing that definition as a thought form. It might even change your life in all kinds of ways, but it would never be the truth. In self-inquiry, we’re not after mixing things up in our life, we are after a revelation of truth. Therefore, we have to meet it directly, or not at all.

This process can seem intimidating for a number of reasons, the first of which is that we have erroneously been led to believe that the unknown is always dangerous, and therefore to be avoided. The second reason, whether we are aware of it or not, is that our sense of psychological survival is tied up in who we believe ourselves to be as a conglomeration of memories, thoughts, beliefs and identities imposed by ourselves as well as others.

When these are met with challenge, this arouses within us a kind of existential fear. In the realm of self-inquiry, both of these fears are unfounded. They really are phantoms of conditioning. Of course, it will not help you to believe that, but I hope this at least gives you a sufficient nudge of encouragement to brave the first meeting with yourself.

You will not disappear, die, or be possessed by evil spirits.

The only thing that is real in us is what has been here all along, so know that you will not be facing anything that cannot be met fully. The ground of being is a little like a universal safety net. You’re not going to lose ‘you’, but you likely have entertained very distorted ideas of who ‘you’ were thanks to our collective enculturation. You may arrive upon a very different understanding of who you are, but you are only going to find more of what is real inside there, not less of it.

Who you are is something that is not an idea. It is not encapsulated by ideas. The only things that can fall away are illusory. Because what is real in us is very powerful, it is also prone to misunderstanding. When you come upon it, it is likely to surprise you. Sometimes losing our psychological definitions can be sudden, dramatic and unsettling, but more often than not, the alterations are more gradual, nuanced and bring with them a sense of having weight taken off your shoulders.

These moments of realisation, even when they are small, carry the quality of having woken from a troubling dream.

Likely everyone has had the experience of being asleep, fully convinced that something very complex, involved and stressful was happening, only to realise upon awakening that actually this wasn’t true at all – you were dreaming the whole thing. Waking up from the dream of personal identity is much the same type of experience. Don’t take anyone’s word for it – go and discover this all for yourself. You will not regret it.

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.

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Who Should I Be?

You may have sometimes wondered whether you have become the person who you were destined to be, or the person you want to be, or ought to be. How are the expectations about who you are, or who you should be, framed? Do you often pose this question to yourself, with a view of changing or reinventing yourself?

Perhaps you want to be a model, but the most important people around you value you not for your attractiveness, but because you’re the best mother possible for them. It may be that you want to be seen as strong, as a tough guy, but people don’t see this in you at all. Perhaps who they actually see is someone who always knows the right thing to say, who listens, is caring and trustworthy, someone that they can always rely upon to talk to without feel judged. Perhaps we have seen how children who were slow in school were treated by teachers and other students, so we decided we were going to be the clever ones who always had the right answers – but even though we view ourselves that way, others don’t view us as intelligent but just as a hard worker.

Maybe you view yourself as successful, but everyone else in your family feels like you are trying too hard to seem special, and what they really value about you is how you cook amazing food, or make thoughtful birthday cards.

Learning these kinds of things may even be very disappointing to our ego. I know it was for me. We may find it disempowering and frustrating that people just don’t see us in the way that we expect that they should. This is often because the masks we try to wear never tend to do anywhere near as good a job at representing us as we think they should.

In a world full of horses trying their hardest to be unicorns, just a simple, honest horse is a rare phenomenon. Striving to be special has become thing one thing we can expect from nearly everyone, making the thrust toward specialness perhaps the most ordinary of human traits.

The way we build our expectations about who we are, or how we should be in our minds is often bound up with our core beliefs about who we originally learned to want to be. These are often conclusions made very early on in life about our role and our place in the world. Maybe when we were children, we thought we weren’t safe, so we wanted to be viewed as a strong protector. Perhaps we saw how unhappy that the people in poverty were around us, so we concluded that appearing well-off and fancy was valuable.

What really matters is that we have unexamined core beliefs that feed directly into who we think we should be, how our role should play out in life, and how this ought to be reflected in the eyes of others present in our lives.

Instead of recommending that we go about throwing out every single belief we have about ourselves and others, why don’t we simply start by looking at how we hold onto our own views about ourselves and how we expect to appear before others? If we can just loosen our grip on these expectations, we might be surprised at what rises to the surface in our relationships without forming any firm rules about how we would like to appear.

The mind can act as an extremely powerful filter. Our beliefs can totally cloud what appears in front of us to the point where we are not seeing any of reality.

Some lines of self-inquiry in a quiet space might be: how important is the way that I am perceived by others relative to the truth of who I am? Who am I, truly? Who am I without the influence of expectations from myself or others? Is it true that I will only be a success as a person if my circumstances and appearance match up with my ideas of what a successful person is? What are some of the ways in which I have created and been following my own recipe for misery?

Would my true conditions for success ever strike anyone as particularly commendable or special? If yes, or no, would that ultimately prove of lasting consequence? What if I found my calling, along with peace, happiness and well-being, but nobody on the planet ever recognised the value of that for my entire life?

Would I be able to live with that, or would I choose what my mind had in store for me that has not made me happy or peaceful, but might convince others that I was special, powerful, advanced or successful? What would the ultimate value of that be? Could you dispense with every idea of being whatever your version of a worldly success was? How would that feel, and what exactly would be left?

Our masks for ourselves have been tailored since childhood. Some of the shaping of that mask is due to the efforts of others imposing their values and expectations upon us, and still more of it is about how we have continued to shape that mask in response to others’ expectations.

Those claiming power and authority demand we act one way, so we make our mask look like we either obediently conform, or we are in rebellion against them. Perhaps because the world tells us that tough guys are survivors, we wear a mask of being a man of the world, an impervious survivor. Perhaps the world tells us we have nothing material to contribute to society because we lack success or attractiveness, so we wear the mask of the intellectual one, or the holy one, the one who is mysteriously above it all.

Point this out to any mask-wearer and they will be angry and embarrassed. Mask-wearers the world around seem to hold to a mutual understanding of not calling each other out, because we risk exposing ourselves.

The simple fact of the matter is, a mask is just a mask. Other egos know that. They even rely upon it to make sure you will fall into line with their delusions.

In the game of delusions and lies, the demon Mara is always one step ahead of you. You aren’t ever going to out-illusion the source of all illusion. No one succeeds in the world of Maya, the world of illusion, they just keep going around in smaller or bigger circles. The only progress we can make in this is when we give up the game of appearance. Our activities beyond this then are virtually invisible to the world of ego, because they don’t factor into ego’s schema of gaining and getting.

Only appearances matter to the False Self, so why would it value authenticity? We can’t even say whether our masks are even perceivable to other egos in the way we think they are. We assume that one way of appearing, behaving or speaking makes us seem powerful or admirable in the eyes of people, but to most people it may make us appear reaching or weak-minded. We wear a mask that we assume means people will think we are insightful and have special access to all the answers, whereas people might really just see us as a blowhard.

Even when people agree exactly with the fiction we portray, then what? Does our fiction become true? Even if our ruse is successful, what will sustain us until next time?

I remember as child I was obsessed with every subtle movement of my body conveying the appearance of having a robotic metal skeleton like the Terminator. This was mainly because I had concluded, in my nine-year old’s mind, that nothing else in the world would impress pretty girls more. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I would bet my last dollar that over the course of that time I was engaged in this ruse, not a single person (never mind a pretty girl) concluded that I was just a skilfully disguised Terminator.

What most people don’t focus so much upon is that wearing a mask is painful, however you have made it. It is uncomfortable, it is heavy, it is unnatural. We all wear them because we think we have to, being part of the human tribe. When I was pretending to be a Terminator, I was not experiencing joy. I was experiencing great suffering, having concluded that I needed to beg others for love and a sense of worth.

Taking a mask off is a relief for people, which is why people feel such relief when they are by themselves. Note that when we are around entities that we do not perceive as judgmental of us, such as our cats or dogs, we can still unwind and relax. It is fellow humans where we invest the sense of not only threat and demand, but the sense of promise that we may be meted out a rare share of love, praise or worth.

Our masks rarely convey the impression on others that we assume they do. We all take them off when we go to sleep at night, so why not practice leaving them off when we wake up in the morning? See what the real-world consequences are of you not following your own rules about how you should appear , and who you think others should think you are.

You might just find a welcome respite.

I have personally discovered that the greatest possible gift I could have given myself and the world is to retire one mask-wearer, one source of delusion. Looking back on this life, I maintain that I would rather have this freedom than any mask the mind could conjure. The really relevant question is: who should you be?

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.

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The Subtle Trap Of Misunderstanding

Choosing wisely and unwisely, along with the consequences that follow, constitutes the greater part of our human lives. We will all make many wrong choices in our time. Don’t be tempted to withhold from making the wrong choice because you think you need to be good, or in order to be worthy or righteous. This is a subtle misunderstanding.

The only way for wisdom to really bear fruit in this life is to move and act from a space of understanding. The goal here, as with all things in this life-long project of self-inquiry, is understanding.

Understanding requires that you meet what is trying to move out of your inner state into an expression in the world. We begin with mind in all things, and then it moves outward into an expression.

This can be either wise or unwise, skilful or unskilful. This is what eventually affords us with wisdom or what the Buddha referred to as ‘Right View’. Right View is not a claim there is an objectively correct solution for everything, rather it indicates a correct way of looking things. It speaks to our orientation. Are we wanting to be right, or are we wanting to understand? Are we wanting justification in all we do, or do we want to see deeply into the way things really work?

In some ways we are better off making mistakes again and again if we don’t understand yet – but at least choose with your eyes open. Then you will learn something. When understanding arises for you, it will have substance and lasting value. You will then have the capacity to be grateful for the mistakes you have made and see how graciously you have been humbled and corrected.

A lot of people find this mysterious, but it really needn’t be. If you know what to look for, it won’t be mysterious. The small windows with which you see into unconscious patterns of behaviour, when used regularly and with ongoing commitment, eventually allow you to see more. The windows gradually become wider, allowing for a broader view of things within.

Many things are so small that we are content to simply let them fly, whether it is making a comment, using a certain tone, allowing something to privately irritate us, or withholding affection or appreciation from someone as punishment. This is because we don’t tend to be aware of the total impact of our small errors.

If you want to get grit out of your shoe so that you can stand and walk comfortably, you don’t just want the biggest pieces out, nor do you only want most of the small bits out – you want all of it out. The smaller pieces will bother you even more when there is less grit in there.

It is the same principle with your inner environment.

If you want peace, you need to look at every tiny factor that contributes towards an outward movement from misunderstanding. Grit in your shoe is grit in your shoe – one subtle interruption to peace of mind is an interruption to all of your peace of mind, not just a part of it. The False Self can be deluded into thinking that it wants certain particularly troublesome pieces of grit out so that it can focus on keeping the others, but that is the power of delusion for you.

Some suffering actually works for ego as a convenience, other suffering not so much. If you want to get rid of your suffering but keep your unreasonable expectations, or your long-standing arguments, your progress in self-discovery will be impeded. You can only go so far when you place artificial limitations on your process of inquiry.

A lot of writers on this subject tend to hesitate from giving specific examples. I’m not sure why this is the case. I think it may be because when we are given specific examples, it is seen as a little like being spoon-fed, and the idea is that it may reduce our capacity to independently assess for ourselves whether an act expressed is unconscious or in harmony or with the truth of who we truly are.

It makes sense to me that we can’t just be given beliefs or moral principles to fall into alignment with, because this would disregard the role of understanding. I feel that in some cases, being given specific examples does serve to shine some light on the kinds of things we are looking for in this type of exercise. Perhaps not all the time, because we do need to learn a measure of independence in this arena. We should be able to look for ourselves with fresh eyes and discover what is pertinent to us, not because someone who thinks they know better has told us that this behaviour is wise – this won’t help much.

The Buddha is reputed to have once said:

“…just as a goldsmith would test his gold by burning, cutting, and rubbing it, so you must examine my words and accept them, but not merely out of reverence for me.”

The Buddha was first and foremost a human, and he was being totally upfront with us about our shared human interest in discovering for ourselves the value of what is said, not the projected image of whoever appears to be saying it.

You don’t need someone you think is enlightened telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. That wouldn’t be revolutionary, that would be old hat. Do you really want to give the power of your mind away so easily? What if it is the only realm of jurisdiction that you really have? What would you do with the knowledge of an enlightened being if you didn’t totally understand it? Would you keep it in your head, like a treasure kept in a box?

Again, understanding is paramount – you need to know what it is, how it works, how to use it – otherwise it is no good. If I write a sentence, I anticipate that it will be tested by a discriminating reader, not swallowed hook, line and sinker. If you test what is said, you are practicing what the Buddha taught; you are practicing wisdom. If you do not test what is said, but you take hold of it anyway, you are practicing idolatry or false religion – even if what is said is true.

This is what a baby does. A baby will suck anything that is put into its mouth. If we want to be adults in this world, if we want a life that reflects our maturity, we can’t afford to just take anything in without knowing what it is. Abandoning all discrimination is not the same thing as faith.

I will give some examples of typical unconscious patterns, not to tell you what is wrong and what is right, but to help open your eyes to areas of your life which you may need to examine in order to foster skilful living. There will be many areas close by that require similar attention. As always, the responsibility for a thorough investigation lies with you.

Maybe no-one has told you this before, but I have total confidence in your capacity to examine your inner world in a balanced, healthy and truth-conducive way.

It is not a chore; it is one of the most beautiful things humanly possible. The results remain to be seen. I do not withhold an attempt describe the results in order to be mysterious, but to respect the freshness of your own experience. Suffice it to say, those who have gone before you in this venture have discovered that all we have to lose in self-inquiry is that which is not real to begin with. Then you can marvel at what remains.

I will now share some brief examples followed by a specific thought form that might accompany them, and afterward, a general explanation of how these contribute to our suffering. Some of these may be things you have noticed before either in yourself, or perhaps in others. We are all particularly adept when it comes to noticing symptoms of falsehood and delusion in other people.

When you deliberately leave certain books out to imply to others how complex or intelligent you are. “I’m great. I know so much – people love me”.

When you want to demonstrate to strangers that you are capable of walking or driving away from the traffic lights with a high reaction time. “I am faster than you. See?”.

When you walk, speak or move a certain way hoping that others will make the connection that there is something very special or distinguished about you. “I am a dark horse – I am very sophisticated”.

When you feel a sense of desperation when you want to win an argument, defend yourself, or make a point to others. “I just have to be right and express my opinion”.

I have given just a few examples, because we really could fill a book with them. I know some of them seem juvenile, but we do carry a lot of misunderstandings all the way from childhood through to adulthood in only superficially modified form – it is all a way of begging for love, worth and attention.

We don’t need many examples for the spirit of these movements to be identified. You can sense the place within you that they emerge from. More generally people just call this suffering, but in Buddhism, this is referred to specifically as ignorance. It is a gut-level sense of being a separate being, a fragment of the universe that defines itself as so small that it must be promoted and defended in order to ensure its foothold in existence. It is ignorance in the respect that the attitude is in ignorance of your true nature.

Our true nature rests in unity, and doesn’t need to be promoted or defended. Interpersonal advertisements are not a tool of the true self, which has no need to show strength, skill or virtue. Being itself establishes worth, and understanding will reveal this.

Every little thrill that you get when you entertain any one of these deluded thought forms is strengthening and supporting that separate sense of self. When a spider builds a web, it has to maintain the structure constantly, making repairs and adjustments in tension here and there, otherwise the whole thing will decay and fall apart. The false self is doing the same thing.

Every minuscule portion of energy you send its way will keep the whole operation running – and an ego can subsist on very little energy for a very long time.

Have you noticed what happens for example when you really make an effort to look attractive, and you haven’t received a compliment about your looks for a long time? If that sort of thing is really important to us, we might start to remember a time where a compliment did make us feel wonderful, if however very briefly, and relive it all over again. Or, we might fantasise about a fictitious scenario.

This helps an ego in starvation mode so that the sense of a separate self is held more firmly in place. What would otherwise happen is the pain of withdrawal might become so great that the deficiency of the personality structure is itself called into question. This variety of ‘rock-bottom’ event could provide the critical mass needed to awaken out of the mind’s dream-state, so the False Self tends not to let that happen.

I say this in some regard to appease the honest part of your curious mind, but please respect that none of this is to be believed. It is to be explored and investigated by you.

These brief examples I have given you may seem paltry and trivial, but like the grit in your shoe, every tiny bit contributes and something small can ultimately result in a great deal of suffering.

None of this is of any use if we don’t arrive at some measure of true insight, allowing for the relief of suffering. I wouldn’t mention these small things otherwise. What I most want you to see about them is the way in which they promote a certain aspect of you while simultaneously denying another. You should also see how each of these brings two things with it – thrill and suffering, inseparable like two sides of a coin.

Do you get a sense with each of these examples how the tiny revenue of excitement that is a reward in each one of them contributes to keeping you locked into a worldview in which there is a separate ‘you’ there, stretched between duality of values, worthy or unworthy, good or bad, strong or weak? See whether you can get a palpable sense of what it feels like to be rewarded chemically and psychologically with each of these, because this is the thrill of the ego, the False Self.

The tiny thrill is a poison that is making you sick, because you have misunderstood through a culture of learned ignorance. You thought that the only way to feel anything was to be addicted to thrill, and then confuse that with happiness. You actually got it totally backward – thrill is suffering, and real joy comes through peace which is the absence of suffering.

We all got it completely backwards.

It is all the small links in the chain that bind the addiction to personal identity. Each one is worth examining, because you might just find the chain falls away altogether with a little persistence. Successfully understand one dysfunctional energetic form deeply within your mind and heart, and you will be well on the road to understanding them all and discovering a peace without boundaries.

We were all caught in the same honey-trap. This may be embarrassing for a time, but that too is a natural phase. See what it feels like to give yourself some peace and let that embarrassment and shame go – we don’t need to make another victim identity out of it.

When we use a sense, or a muscle, we know what happens. Our abilities become clearer, stronger. Our task in inquiry is just the same way. We develop an acute awareness of when energetic movements within our minds or hearts are coming from a place of separation, wanting to isolate ourselves as an identity – the special one, the rebel, the hero, the holy man or the victim – and we sense keenly when movements originate from a sense of unity.

The latter are harder to spot, especially at first, because they are spontaneous, and lack of premeditation that the movements of separateness thrive on. This is why the unity that moves through you is sometimes referred to in Buddhism as sunyata or emptiness.

It isn’t that there is literally nothing there, it is that unlike separation, it doesn’t depend on structured form and content to maintain its abiding existence. This is why it never feels compelled to promote or defend itself, and why it feels peaceful and secure without clinging to anything even though change is happening all around it.

Sadly, many people in this life will never come to know the value of this because of just how deeply we have been collectively enthralled by the addictive conditioned states that the modern world excels at producing. The truth is, you can’t serve two masters, and you can’t bend two bows.

I have confidence that what is true in us wants so profoundly to express itself through us, particularly at this time when our established human ways are consistently failing us, that those of us who are called to the responsibility of self-inquiry will meet this task head on, and likely with rapid success. Not only is this peace waiting for us in our own lives, but it is waiting to be shared with every entity in all times and places.

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.

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