The Cosmic Penitentiary

My mother has a theory that this world is one gigantic prison, known as “The Pen”. This theory is based on the observation that most of the people walking the streets of the West look like the inmates of mental asylums. It’s apparent on first glance that there’s something seriously wrong with most people here – so what’s going on?

This essay will explain from an Elementalist perspective.

Many of us have found ourselves wondering how we got here. Of all the possible worlds that one might incarnate into, what did we do to deserve to incarnate into this one, full of violence, sickness, death and misery? It seems like a punishment to be born into a world where we inevitably die, and almost always in extreme pain.

The truth is that we’re all in The Cosmic Penitentiary, a.k.a. “The Pen”: a prison for criminal souls.

As above, so below: we got put in The Pen for the same reason that criminals in the human world get put in prison. In the human world, society decides that certain elements within it are injurious to the greater good, and so it expels them into quarantine zones that we call jails, prisons or penitentiaries. This is roughly analogous to how the human body expels excrement and urine.

In the cosmic world, elements that are injurious to the greater good are similarly expelled – into lower dimensions that serve as quarantine zones. In Elementalism, these dimensions are collectively known as the Hell Realms, as depicted in the theology of many different religions. This world is one of them.

If we do enough self-inquiry, and are fully honest with ourselves, we will agree that it’s perfectly fair that low-frequency fragments of consciousness are forced to incarnate among their own kind. Once this is accepted, it’s possible for true healing to begin; it’s possible to direct one’s life in such a manner that low frequencies are transmuted into higher ones.

A penitentiary is somewhere a person is sent to if they are too arrogant and need to learn some humility. Each of us have been forced to incarnate into The Pen on account of that our selfish behaviour in previous lives has disgusted God. The punishment for this is to die – that is to say, to experience the utter helplessness of dying and death, with a view to being inspired by this into spiritual reformation.

The beings in the higher dimensions, who we share the Great Fractal with, did not want to have low-frequency consciousnesses stinking up their otherwise pleasurable experience. This is entirely understandable. Public restaurants don’t allow people who haven’t showered for months to stink up the ambience, so why would beings in higher dimensions allow the spiritual equivalent?

We are forced to incarnate among our own kind, whether we like it or not.

In the same way that trashy people attract trashy people in this world, and in the same way that classy people attract classy people, trashy fragments of consciousness attract trashy areas of the Great Fractal, and classy fragments of consciousness attract classy areas of the Great Fractal. As per the Law of Assortative Reincarnation, every fragment of consciousness reincarnates in a world full of similar frequencies.

All of us have a relatively low frequency of consciousness as a result of crimes committed in previous lives. Some of us were murderers, others were rapists, robbers, liars, fraudsters. All of us were odious enough that the majority part of the Great Fractal does not want to be associated with us. But because of our pride we are unrepentant. As such, we have to be punished.

To punish a criminal consciousness, it isn’t enough to subject it to suffering. So the Hell Realms are not full of demons who were created specifically to torment their victims. It’s much simpler than that. The Hell Realms are populated by beings who create Hell around them through their own selfishness. And as such, they punish each other.

A being sentenced to The Pen, therefore, has behaved in such a selfish manner that the rest of reality has forced them to incarnate here, where they are surrounded by other selfish beings, and thereby learn that selfishness is antithetical to Godliness. This they learn from the suffering caused to them by the other beings, all a reflection of themselves.

Proof that this world is one of the Hell Realms comes from the fact that everything here must die, and that we must kill each other to live. Such a grisly reality makes clear to even the most incalcitrant fragment of consciousness that selfishness is against the Will of God. And if it doesn’t? You just reincarnate here again until you do figure it out.

A world in which one must die is a perfect ego shredder. Just as people are humbled within this lifetime by being put in prison, people are humbled between lifetimes by being put in The Pen.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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!

The Power Of Preconception

If you really want to understand where someone is coming from, why begin with a label? Isn’t that the final nail in the coffin of open-mindedness? Just what do we think it means being open-minded, or open-hearted?

If you are meeting someone for the first time and you have heard in advance that he or she has certain political or religious commitments that you are uncomfortable with, then in some way you make your mind up ahead of time – certainly if you give him one or more labels. Just watch for yourself how in advance of even meeting him you put him into a mental box.

“I would open myself to you more, but I learned that you are one of the types of people I tend to disagree with. You are easily confused, weak, gullible and deluded.” You would be surprised just how much of our mental content we can pack into our own personalised labels for other people. Just investigate them to find out. So he is this, or she is that – what does that mean to you? That is the important question.

Not what that means in regards to them, but what it means for you. What assumptions do you have pinned onto them? Does that ball fall within their court, or yours? Do they have to change, or is there something in you that needs to change?

There is a kind of litmus test for whether somebody is causing you suffering, specifically whether the trouble is coming from their end or whether the trouble is actually flaring up at your end. This is to ask whether the same thing you are having a problem with from them is also the exact same thing bothering everyone else.

The fact is, other people around may be being triggered by other things this person does or says that don’t bother you. What if you can’t stand their attitude, and someone else who talks to them has no problem with it? Maybe they have some friends or acquiantences who see the world similar to them, and those people aren’t put off at all by their attitudes or the way they talk.

Perhaps they even prefer to spend their time around this person than they do with you. Maybe you don’t help support their ideas, maybe you don’t laugh at their jokes. If there is even one other person who is not disturbed by this person in the same way that you are, this is proof that what is coming from them is not inherently problematic.

Perhaps the person who are having this difficulty with is your colleague at work, and you can’t stand hearing anything he has to say. What if his father speaks to him and wants to hear everything this person has to say because he loves his son? The father is not necessarily an enlightened being, he just has a completely different relationship with this person than you do. He sees this person a way that involves an entirely different set of circumstances.

Have you ever had the experience of seeing people meet, maybe exchanging a few sentences, then one of the people afterward confiding in you “I don’t like her, she’s a bitch”, or “that guy is such an arrogant idiot.” The complexity of a human being is packed into a minute reductive judgment, based upon our first impressions.

Now, I will concede that there are plenty of times where our first impressions of a person can indeed pass on a lot of valuable information about them. I’m not disputing this. What I want to discover is, what does our judgment actually, finally say about them? What does it say about you? Can they never change? Can you never change?

It is easy to go around looking at people through a lens of judgment. It is so easy that once we are taught to do it, we can easily keep doing it all the time, just like being taught to ride a bike. Why stop? This is how I do it, just the way I was taught! We may even conclude that we are benefitted by this conditioning we agreed to, that we are somehow one-up on the play. However, we are actually missing something in holding to this conditioning – we are missing reality. The stakes are that high.

If you think you know someone based on conclusions drawn from brief social interactions, or even ways they have behaved or spoken historically, then your perception is crippled and you are entirely missing what is real about them. Look at anyone through your filters and you will always be in error. You cannot hope to learn anything new in this way.

Do you know yourself? Because if you were truly acquainted with your own nature, you would never have cause to refine your superficial judgments about other people into some kind of lasting conclusion. Do you ever remember a time where you have heard someone else’s opinion about you and how you reacted to that? Do you remember how it felt to know that they couldn’t possibly have sufficient information to reach that conclusion about you?

If you know who you are, you know who they are. Conclusions inside us are a little like people living in the same city. They may live in the same place, but they don’t necessarily come into daily contact with each other. Perhaps these things inside you have never even met.

You can facilitate this kind of meeting by allowing stillness inside. Stop shaking, stop stirring. All of your activity is actually causing the great majority of the problems. You won’t arrive at an acceptable mental position or conclusion. You know that they are all inadequate, because how would somebody you know describe you?

You know who you are, and you know that the descriptions and conclusions don’t touch you. If they did, the depth of you would be describable to another person, but it isn’t, and never will be.

Not even close – words do not do us justice. If someone describes me and says “he is melancholy” I know it is rubbish, because they have never seen how much joy is inside me. If someone describes me and says “he is such a good brother” I know that they haven’t seen the times where I have been deliberately cruel to my siblings. People don’t have the facts. Their judgments are operating within an extremely narrow band and on very limited data. It is simply bad science to say you know someone in any conclusive way.

Even the best way I can describe a person’s true nature as Being doesn’t really suffice. I can paint a picture with words, but that would be all it is. I could say that a soul or psyche is like a very deep ocean, and only the most superficial currents appear to other people. The lower parts are immeasurably deep and still, and most of who a person truly is resides there. This gives us a nice image, painted by words, but it doesn’t really do any person true justice as a description.

A painting of a sunrise is still just a painting of the sunrise. The painting can lose its hue, or be damaged in a flood. The sunrise can’t, because that is the real thing.

What exactly is the remedy to this nonsense? We invite a place of stillness within us. In this respect, I mean stillness as in refusing to move outward into judgment. Instead of stepping forward as is our habit, we step back. It is easy to just say “don’t judge people because it is bad” but that doesn’t really work, because people say that all the time and we still judge. A moral precept imposed upon you isn’t going to change anything because it is simply a command issued on presumed authority, it can’t be a catalyst for understanding.

The change we need to invite is not at a superficial level.

We aren’t looking to program ourselves with some new conditioning. Just try meeting a person with the notion that they aren’t who you say or think they are. They aren’t even who they say they or think they are! Why should your description of them be any more accurate than their own? Remember that these are only words spoken by them, and those words are prone to further distortion having to pass through your own mental filters. A person may take a very dim view of themselves, or a very optimistic view, or even a completely delusional view. So instead of meeting them on the level or their or our interpretations, what if we commit to meeting them on the level of reality?

I’m not saying that when we refrain from forming judgments that we are therefore seeing through perfectly clear windows. All I am suggesting is that it is fine to meet someone and not draw any conclusion about who they are. We can start to give ourselves a deeper permission to release the habit and burden of doing this because it really is our burden, because it is robbing us of authentic interaction with others. It does us an injustice as much as it does them.

We may even think we need to do all of this in response to some kind of moral imperative about going easy on other people, but that is really just more conditioned self-talk. It is really just as much us that we are releasing from suffering in this loosening of our grip on these judgments and preconceptions. We aren’t improved by them at all – we really do suffer because of them. Not only do we punish ourselves by pushing away authentic intimacy in meeting with others, but we also punish ourselves by way of agreeing that others’ judgments about us are as legitimate as our judgments about them.

It is a two-way deal.

We are conditioned to be so hard on ourselves that we rarely if ever stop and see how simple reflection and consideration of what is true might relieve our suffering in this life. Our ongoing task is to keep walking this path of discovery and see whether there is any inherent suffering to be found in this world.

Remember that, as the Buddha counsels, the mind is the forerunner of all things. If we experiment with this claim and adopt it as a heuristic, just how much suffering will we find inherent in this world, suffering that we ourselves are not causing? I invite you to find out. I hope you are as pleasantly surprised as others have been.

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!

The Condition of Seeking

When you are in a state of spiritual seeking, you are really in state of looking for a map that would prove so accurate that it can be committed to above all others. You have somehow gotten it into your head that you are after the ultimate representation of truth, and despite having looked for that high and low, you have always come up short – and thus, the seeking continues.

Because of the time and energy you have invested in doggedly hunting for the truth, you expect it to present in the form of representation, not as truth itself. This fact may seem so obvious and self-explanatory that it completely escapes your notice, but in actual fact, this realisation is crucial. You see, everything you have tried before has arrived and left again in the form of a representation.

Oddly enough, the conclusion we end up with is that we must just have not quite landed upon the appropriate representation yet, whether that is in the form of a book, a teacher, a teaching, or a tradition. Perhaps we didn’t quite get what the teacher was really saying, or perhaps we didn’t quite meditate as well as we could have.

This is a strange bind that the seeker has gotten themselves into. The way out is not to find an accurate map, although your total commitment to any one map, accurate or not, might just be sufficient to push you right through – but you won’t end up where the map was showing you.

You won’t end up with a map at all, because that isn’t what you were really looking for in this endeavour.

The yearning for truth you experience comes from deeper than the mind. Although your mind will do its best to convince you otherwise, you don’t need another map – and yet here I am sketching out another unnecessary map. It is unnecessary at my end in the respect that I know it is totally unneeded, though it is necessary at your end for precisely so long as you think it is necessary. The map to the forest is made out of the same thing the trees are made out of, but can you see? Are you willing to bridge the gap, the paper wall, and see past into the trees themselves?

The difficulty in all this is that I am trying to communicate with you in such a way that I am using a map to ask you to put down all maps, including those produced by me. I have no intention of converting anyone to becoming map readers, and I certainly do not intend to inspire map stalwarts who promote one map exclusively over another.

Now, it may be true in a relative cultural sense that a map produced in one particular style and language is more easily accessible to one person or group than another, and there is no problem with this. It doesn’t mean that one map is better than another, because ultimately all maps have to be subordinate to reality, whether they are accurate or not.

Have you noticed that those who are most comfortable in their own skin in whichever spiritual or religious tradition they happen to be a part of seem to have no issue whatsoever in communing with others of different faiths? Someone such as the Dalai Lama is an excellent example of this spirit of universal compassion, understanding and humility.

The reason is that they have pushed through the imaginary boundaries circumscribed by the map, even the one they were taught to revere as the most sacred. They see through to where another person is, regardless of how lost that person might seem to themselves in regard to their own maps – their own beliefs and representations.

Reality is not to be found through maps. To relieve yourself of this notion is one of the most tremendous gifts that realisation has to offer, though it is far from being the only one.

Why not for one moment try what hasn’t been tried before in earnest? Take the maps you have been given, including my own, and those you have inherited from your family or culture, or drawn yourself. Fold them away, gently put them to one side, then see what has always actually been here. When you transcend the maps, you will find yourself exactly where you are, which is precisely where the meeting with your true self was always intended.

See what is right here, right now, without the map, and without forcing any judgment or interpretation upon it. Because you are no longer using a map as a reference tool, there is no relative notion of having arrived, nor is there any relative notion of being off track or lost. What is actually here that all of the maps have been referring to? Then see what happens to your preoccupation with seeking and the maps we have superimposed over it that we refer to as ‘spirituality’.

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!

An Eternal Invitation

Wherever you are, you’re already here. There are no expenses, save for your attention, which I hope you will come to understand is infinitely more precious than any amount of money.

You don’t require fixing, you simply require understanding, which necessitates awareness on your part. This consists in a shift of your attention to what is true, in this moment. It is reality. It is not a spiritual reality, or a scientific reality, or a Buddhist reality or a Christian reality, or an Indian reality or a Chinese reality. It is the one alive, indivisible Truth. All of it is here. It is neither theology or philosophy. The common theme that religious and mystical traditions point to, namely awareness, is the living edge of truth.

The beginning and the end go together hand in hand. Do you recall the lightness, openness and freedom of being a child? Isn’t it odd that we consider an early school environment where the educational focus on a child’s future potential is regarded as more important than Being in the immediacy of the present moment?

As if, perhaps one day when they have had an education and a well-paying job then they will finally be entitled to return to the lightness, freedom and happiness they once experienced as children.

The world teaches us to succeed by striving for what we don’t have, and for what we have been taught to want. Struggle is so commonplace that we take it for granted that it is indispensable. We are taught what we seek should bring us happiness, fulfilment, freedom. But where are these benefits? Didn’t we leave that behind when we left childhood to move into more serious, adult concerns involving strain, stress and discontent? Where are these mythical achievements that are supposed to give us lasting fulfilment, peace and happiness? Why is it that even those who have achieved the most worldly success possible are still looking to the next thing, whether it is a new relationship, the colonization of Mars or becoming the President?

The cultural educational process of our lives is marketed as an existential solution, although it never quite seems to deliver in its promises. We long to return to the freedom of childhood because it was then that we were least distant from the untarnished truth of our being, before experiences such as hurt, shame, disapproval and failure conditioned us to harden our hearts and submerge our inmost light in order to navigate a dysfunctional world.

And yet all of the things we consider to be the very fruits of personal success were present right at the beginning of our educational journey, the time where we should have known the least in our lives! We are told that if we ever want to reach the states we experienced in the beginning of our waking lives again, we need to have deserved it by playing according to the rules. We are told we must forego our intuitive sense of value and the immediacy of truth in order to ‘make something of ourselves’, which is how we have been conditioned into a state of believing that peace, contentment and well-being must be seen as earned and stamped with a seal of approval by our benefactors.

Even through all of this discontent, disillusionment and loneliness, that which our hearts most deeply yearns for is still within us, whoever presumes to tell us we are deserving. Happiness is our birthright. There is no moment in which we are cut off from the possibility of remembering the infinite abundance of our true nature. One of the reasons we don’t look at what we actually have is because we are trained to overlook anything that inherently belongs to us. If we ceased to do this, we would learn the value of contentment, and the hungry fire to go on pursuing the next illusory milestone would diminish. We have also inherited the assumption that if everyone has something, or has the same access to it, then that thing must be worthless. Ego rates it as being without value, because it cannot be manipulated in such a way one person or group could hold advantage over another.

The darkness of an insane world needs light, and you are that light. First and foremost, you are awareness itself, undivided and eternal. There is no higher state than to attend to this awakening. It is a suchness to which nothing may be added, and it is neither dependent on nor diminished by anything. None of our words, concepts, or contrived means of objectification catch it.

This is the ancient value we have been taught to suppress in order to render us obedient and industrious. Enculturation puts us to sleep to breed discontented shadows who are encouraged to accumulate, strive and toil to no definitive end. This is to be in a state of hypnotic disconnection, to be ‘cut off from the vine’. I propose that your highest priority in these times, should you feel the call to truth, is the sacred task of remembering of your deepest self as living awareness, as one with your source. I propose that the unexamined life is not worth living.

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!