The third upward transmutation is that of iron into copper. To move into the fourth stage of the Mithraic Ladder is to move to the central stage: there are three stages both above and below. Befitting this central position is that copper represents the coming together of men and women in bonds of mutual love. This doesn’t mean that the transmutation into copper occurs without drama.
In a state of Nature, men fight for reasons, and the primary reason is women. The hardening to iron of any of the male expressions of life is usually in order to win fights for territory and status, the two prerequisites of attracting women. This is why the man of iron is typically what has been selected for in all low-sophistication cultures throughout time. But as cultures progress towards glorious civilisations, people of higher frequencies than iron start to appear.
In transmuting to copper, a man of iron begins to colourise. Lead, tin and iron are all a shade of grey. Copper, by contrast, has colour, reflecting the fact that it is a semi-precious metal, unlike lead, tin and iron. The reddish hues of copper symbolise the fire of the soul that is now beginning to rise.
This stage of transmutation is just as applicable to women as to men. It might not be as stereotypical for a female character to become a person of iron, in comparison to a male one, but it can still happen – and perhaps would make for a less cliched story. Women might not be as good as men when it comes to fistfighting, but they are just as capable of becoming hard-bitten. Thus, a woman is just as capable as a man of being put in a situation where she must transmute iron into copper.
Copper is a stage in the mental realm, reflecting the fact that intelligence – not of much use in transmuting lead into tin or tin into iron – is of great use in transmuting iron into copper. It’s primarily intelligence that causes a person to see the value in being something more than hard. (this is a foreshadowing of the future transmutation to mercury).
In the same way that the character of lead must let go of fear of death to become a character of tin, the character of iron must let go of fear of weakness to become a character of copper. Iron is the will to physically dominate at all costs. As such, its transmutation into copper begins when a character comes to realise that there are more important things than physical domination.
Once a fighter decides to become a lover instead, they begin the transmutation of iron into copper.
A character can become motivated to make such a change when they realise that other people don’t really respect people of iron. They might fear people of iron, but not respect them. The people of iron don’t get invited to the highest positions, or the best parties, or offered the best jobs, because they tend to scare others too much.
The person of copper is oriented primarily towards their family. At the level of iron or below, a person is primarily concerned with looking tough, cool or terrible in front of their friends or comrades. Such interests fade away when a person is tasked with raising and protecting a family.
Physically, the transmutation of iron to copper is encapsulated in the “Dad bod”. The entire concept of a dad bod reflects the observation that, for many men, once they have children and no longer feel the pressure to be tough and to fight over women, the incentive to maintain fitness and leanness is gone. A female character can also, of course, become fat once they advance past the imperative to attract a romantic partner.
It’s also reflected in general appearance. The character transmuting from iron to copper stops wearing black and starts wearing colours. They stop wearing skulls as adornments and start wearing love hearts. Their entire vibe switches from trying to intimidate to trying to win love.
Copper is, of course, better for making weapons than the other metals than aren’t iron. This is reflected in the fact that characters of copper are still highly effective at fighting, they’re just past the physical fighting prime that was achieved in the frequency of iron.
A character of copper is also signficantly more social than a character of iron. When the character of iron starts to realise that, through polishing their social qualities, they can obtain pleasures that cannot be obtained through violence, they start to transmute to copper. Because copper is a semi-precious metal, a character of copper can seem like a kind of nobility to characters of lower tiers. The ensuing admiration can be what drives such characters to rise to the level of copper.
Reflecting this increased sociability, a character of copper can play with children in a way that a character of iron cannot. In fact, the reaction of children can demonstrate that a transmutation from iron to copper has taken place. A character of iron might not care if they lose a game to a child, because they’re indifferent. A character of copper doesn’t care about the loss, because, unlike the character of iron, they care about the child and its socialisation.
Psychosexually, the transmutation from iron to copper is analagous to going from having sex to making love. The character of iron doesn’t feel the need to make love – they doesn’t care too much about how the other person feels. The character of copper makes love, reflecting their superior capacity for empathy in comparison to the lower three levels.
A typical psychosexual transformation at this stage might be a woman who learns to control men of iron through her sex appeal. Copper learns to dominate iron, not through hardness and violence as iron dominates tin and lead, but through subtler means. Copper is that in civilisation which tames the beast. This is why copper can also represent small-scale trading and business.
Spiritually, the colourisation characteristic of copper represents the first real flowering of divinity. The lower three metals are all dull, the higher four are all colourful. Copper is the first of the colourful, representing a character’s first inkling of some higher order of divinity in the world.
Copper can be realised just as easily through masculine as feminine energies. However, in transforming from iron to copper there tends to be less fiery energy and more watery energy. This quenching of rage is perhaps the essential emotional and spiritual transformation. A character must learn to sublimate anger into something higher in order to pass beyond the frequency of iron.
Perhaps the best-known transmutation of iron into copper is that of Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings. Indeed, completing a great journey and winning your dream girl is an archetypal hero’s journey. Spiritual purification need not end there, however: a minority of characters go further, to the realm of silver.
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This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.
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If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!
All attention you spend on the interior journey is valuable, and encourages the growth of roots within. It is all too easy for this to simply become talk. The fact is, this awakening business isn’t some step by step program for self improvement or self development. This is about pointing you back to what is real, what has always been real, and then dispensing with actors such as myself. When we speak or write, there is a brief role to play in life, and then it is done. This isn’t the vector of wisdom. The vital wisdom of the response, at best, is elicited in you. Engage your own interior journey: that is the encouragement.
Now, I’m not saying leave your job, your partner, your family – this is not about the radicalisation of your outer life. This is simply about your direct discovery of what it means to really be you.
Imagine wanting to gravitate towards blame, an accident, an argument, someone else getting in trouble. To want a problem, to feel the desire for there to be drama and trouble. Have you observed this others? Yourself? It is quite prevalent, so chances are you have crossed paths with this phenomenon many times. This represents a kind of dysfunctional energetic ecosystem, a pathological twist in the psyche. It is both an inner and outer ill. People become entrained by society to actually desire and seek pain and conflict, and the false self is primed to take this programming onboard as a matter of course. As a common example, have you ever said something to someone and they ‘took it the wrong way’, almost as if on purpose?
If you examine this, it could of course be the case that you perhaps said something inflammatory, but that is by the by. What really matters is that this person had the option to minimise their upset, but they chose to become aggravated. Maybe you baited the hook, but they took it.
Why would they want to be upset, to adopt the role of the incensed victim? Psychology refers to the value perceived in this type of martyrdom as ‘secondary gain’ – which is really just a way of pointing out that when someone acts out personal drama, they do so on the basis they are getting something out of it. There is a neurochemical satiety associated with being incensed, offended, or cast into the role of the victim. This is rooted within the brain and body, and is certainly capitalised upon by the separate sense of self. The notion that secondary gain is of personal value is only viable because someone has shallow roots within – if any at all. It is all too easy to be swept up in the drama if you are not grounded.
The drama on offer, as miserable as it is, outcompetes any value in peace for one without roots within. For the one so divided, it feels fleetingly better to be in conflict, butting heads and playing out the personal drama of being a separate ‘someone’ in competition with everyone else. This can only be possible when someone is so lost, so deluded and indoctrinated by culture, that they aren’t even aware that real peace could exist. If they were, they would never abandon peace to play out these minor dramas.
This process may affect someone in scarcely noticeable ways, and yet even a small degree of seperation entertained in this way is sufficient to create vast rifts between the you and the perception of your true nature – there cannot be any actual separation, but I don’t want to go into that here. The point is that you do not have to be in the throes of being a total drama queen in order to suffer the consequences of perceived separation. Even just permitting yourself to be slightly irritated by the way someone else in your household puts something away in the fridge can be enough to hurl you out of the gates of the kingdom and lashed onto the spokes of the wheel of becoming.
There are those inclined to think this is all very abstract, out of reach, or that such minor attention to the relationship between one’s inner and outer environments is inconsequential.
It really isn’t. All of this is not only very basic, but it is also of direct and immediate consequence. You wouldn’t know unless you went inside to directly investigate the nature of this experience. It isn’t theoretical, it is phenomenological – only *you* can show up to observe this. The greatest teacher in history could only at best meet you halfway in this. You are asked to walk the final leg of the journey alone. Because that either appears intimidating or isolating, and with no clear material advantage promised, most people won’t ever bother over the course of a lifetime. In the absence of a teacher, you nevertheless have ordinary people around you who have taken up the torch and encourage you to try doing the same – not because it will make you noble, good, or morally correct, but because you haven’t yet gone outside your limited perspective. If you had, your life would unfold completely differently, even if no one else should ever notice.
Growing roots within is very simple. The more attention we give to our true nature, our deepest inner silence, the more this presence naturally takes root within us. A plant doesn’t need to be directed and micromanaged about how to take nutrients and develop, nor does your true nature. You simply give it the attention and nourishment it asks for, and just allow the entire miraculous process to unfold from within.
The remarkable thing about this is that what is undesirable in you is crowded out by the internal growth taking place. Again, not to make you holy, but to make you whole. All of this inner dysfunction is fuelled by you seeing yourself as separate, not whole. All of that is illusory, but there is no way someone can tell you that and have it blossom into full effect. It is the case that you must come to a meeting with this in your inner space so that enough soil is there for the seed that is always already there to take root.
You may be wondering if all this is simply about the time you spend in meditation. I’d like to clear this up, because meditation as an exercise can easily become misconstrued. Meditation is one avenue by which you may be involved in listening deeply to the music of your own inner world. Like anything, a practice of meditation can easily become an obstacle rather than a help. If you think you are being a good person, a hygienic entity, a spiritually well-behaved person, then you are likely to be entering meditation with an erroneous view to improvement. The notion we need fixing or betterment can be obstructive to our relationship with inner truth. The key ingredient here is listening deeply, intently, without imposing your mental interpretations upon that which you perceive. You don’t need to specifically set time aside in sitting meditation in order to listen deeply. You can do this out walking, or at work as you perform tasks.
No attention given to your inner world is ever lost or wasted. I say this, but you will not know this for yourself until you taste it directly. These roots within produce fruits of stability, connection, resilience, peace and joy that if you only tasted them once, you would be certain that never again would you trade them for the madness of diversion the conditioned world offers. You must be willing to place what you have thought, believed, concluded upon the altar of sacrifice. You must be willing to withdraw every tiny habit of revenge, resentment and personal superiority. In one shining moment, you might just see that this was all the product of a conditioned personal history, a history that doesn’t even exist except as an etheric record of what has been chosen prior. You are not bound to repeat inner or outer history. This is remarkable good news for freedom. The tragedy is, very few people are even capable of conceiving that such freedom, such a deeply beneficial inner expansion is even possible.
This is the meaning behind the myth of the Bodhisattva. There are those who have for all intents and purposes left this world behind, yet they remain among us. They return again and again into the darkness, not because they are still stuck upon the wheel of becoming, nor because they have to somehow earn nobility through some moral crusade, but because it is actually their deepest joy to extend this help to others. They completely understand that their own well-being is inseparable from the well-being of all.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.
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If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!
The second transmutation on the path up the Mithraic Ladder is that of tin into iron. The jovial, laid-back energy of tin becomes the martial and grim energy of iron. This second transmutation completes the physical realm, and produces a character who is optimised for war and combat.
As a character enlargens when they transmute from lead into tin, they sharpen as they transmute into iron. This sharpening is the characteristic action of this third level. The character thereby becomes harder and more warlike. The person of iron is, of course, the warrior.
The transmutation of tin into iron begins when a character comes to see recreation and play, characteristic of the second level, as childish. No longer are the frivolities of tin seen as an esacpe from the cruel pressures of survival. A character starts to yearn for more than just recreation. A character aspiring to the realm of iron years to test themselves, to test their strength against opposition.
As such, the attitude of a character transmuting to iron sharpens as well. Iron is the frequency of maximum possible cruelty – but it doesn’t have to be cruel. It’s also the frequency with which a man protects his family. That might involve cruelty, but it can also involve acts of the most extreme physical rectitude. A character might come to learn this rectitude when they first have a family, giving them something to defend.
This stage can involve a character who has lapsed into gluttony getting fit and strong. Getting off the couch, and starting to lift weights, is an example of the sort of transformation that occurs in physical space at this stage. Thus the sharpening can involve pain – the pain of weakness leaving the body (as the US Marines would put it).
Motivation to get stronger comes mostly from the archetypal motivation of the stage of iron, which is honour. If a character comes to feel humiliated and dishonoured on account of being fat and unfit, the reader will easily understand that character’s motivation to become lean and fit instead. If a woman rejects them, or if they can’t climb a set of stairs, or if a child laughs at them, they might develop a powerful desire to get fit.
The transformation of tin into iron occurs primarily within the physical realm, being mostly a matter of sharpening the body. The two classic ways this can be achieved is through conflict against the environment or conflict against other people.
Conflict against the environment can come through means such as climbing a mountain, traversing a desert or sailing a vessel through stormy waters. The same way a blacksmith purifies iron by continually striking it, so can a person purify their body by continually taking one more step up the mountain.
Conflict against other people, in this context, primarily means battle. Many a man of tin has gone into battle with a distant grin, only to harden up quick when the man next to them got a spear through the chest. The deprivations of war will reliably harden a person more than anything.
The typical background of the transmutation of tin into iron is the gym. The fat of tin becomes the iron of muscle through repeated action.
This is especially true if the gym is a martial one. The line in Fight Club goes “A guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” That line summarises the nature of the transformation of this stage. One puts the drinking vessel away and picks up the rifle.
A character who has transmuted their consciousness into that of iron will look at the pastimes that obsessed them in youth, and see childishness of no importance. Games in which defeat used to upset them now only evoke laughter. If a person can lose a game to a child with complete indifference, they might have passed into the realm of iron.
Although the transmutation of tin into iron is primarily a physical phenomenon, there are mental and spiritual aspects to it. A character that has mastered iron will be much harder to intimidate than one who has not. That character’s physiology will be like iron, in that they will not be nervous in the face of physical danger. They could stand on the edge of a precipice without feeling fear.
The character who has successfully developed a soul of iron will also be more inclined to think about eternity than the characters of lead and tin. To a character of iron, the character of tin seems like a degenerate and the character of lead seems like a wretch. The character of iron is the first on the ascent up the Mithraic Ladder to actually enjoy their life, i.e. not to suffer significantly.
The major mental transformations, however, are still to come, the mental realm being that which lies inbetween iron and silver. A character that completes the transmution into iron might have become an awesome fighter and the master of themselves, but they will only master themselves. Iron is still too low a level to command from. So a successful transmutation into iron will come with a new set of ambitions.
A famous example of this transmutation in popular culture is that of Rocky in Rocky 3. He starts the film fat and out of shape, and ends it super-fit. Another example is that of Conan in Conan the Barbarian. He gets put to work on the slave wheel as a boy, so that by the time he is a man he is exceptionally strong.
When the character of iron feels like they have truly proven their physical courage, they can begin the transmutation to copper.
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This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.
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If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!
There are many levels at which you know and you don’t know, as well as levels at which you think you know, and think you don’t know. There is no way to systematise or explain these levels, simply because they will be vastly different for each being. I don’t ask anyone to take this on faith. I am far more interested in encouraging your exploration in this direction. What I would like to suggest are some tools with which you can begin to call into question some of the things you think you might know.
Sometimes you have to move in a direction that appears backwards in order to go make what we could call ‘progress’. In true self-inquiry we are always extending a foot out into the darkness, and although the results aren’t always guaranteed, the intention does always count.
In conventional terms, I couldn’t put anything on a piece of paper as ‘truth’. I am really no better positioned than you are. I am however aware of many things I thought I knew, and I am increasingly skeptical of the value these things carry. I have witnessed so many of them dissolve or break away like chunks of sea ice. Sometimes these fragments are never to be seen again, sometimes they occasionally drift back within sight, but never again taking up the same amount of space on the horizon. These are things I relied upon at some point as inviolable facts, what I assumed to be truth itself. What I witness when this kind of inner event happens, whether through inquiry or accident, is that there is an exceptionally fine line between a sense of liberation and horror. The prospect of freedom simultaneously exhilarates and terrifies us.
On the one hand, the sense of teetering over the abyss, looking down into the black unknown is horrifying – but only to one part of the self. That is the part that thinks it knows, that thinks it should understand, that thinks it ought to have some grasp over the management of its inner topography. It turns out that part of us is very minor upon investigation. That part of me, despite being so tiny, has historically been like a finger held up in front of my eyes only an arm’s length away, but has seemed big enough to blot out entire galaxies in the night sky. The tiniest parts of us inside can block out the greater portion of reality, if adequate care and attention is not taken.
To the greater part of me, so witnessed, there is a sense of freedom and liberation as these pieces of knowledge once claimed as firm ground have broken away. It reveals what was always really there, which is not the black abyss we thought would swallow us. There is a space there, alive and whole, that only seems to increase in plenitude with each inner discovery. This is the space in which I know that I don’t know, and it is alive.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite referred to this state of not-knowing as ‘agnosia’, which is distinct from mere ignorance. In fact, my knowing that I don’t know is the primary condition to be in maximal congruence to this greater reality. It is neither silence nor non-silence, neither darkness nor light, neither everywhere nor nowhere. It is a living state of pure potential. There is nothing behind it; everything is out in front of it.
At our level of being, the coordinates at which it may be located are ‘here’ and ‘now’. For the purposes of having something to refer to it as within human language, it could be called ‘the unmanifest’ or ‘the unborn’. It doesn’t really matter what we choose to call it. We could always call it ‘consciousness’, but I would rather use a term that you are likely to have less immediate familiarity with so that it doesn’t dock in at the port of your intellect carrying with it too much by way of unnecessary cargo.
For reasons suggested earlier, thinking you know anything about this isn’t overly helpful. This includes everything you have ever read about it before, whether religious, scientific, philosophical or spiritual. At the same time, thinking you don’t know anything about it also isn’t especially useful, because you certainly will have had some experience with it, since it is the foundation of your entire inner life. What I find is more useful is de-emphasising your insistence on what you think you do or do not know.
This is what the Zen practitioner Shunryu Suzuki refers to as ‘beginner’s mind’. It then doesn’t really fall within a category of what we ordinarily think of as something we know or don’t know, understand or don’t understand. It is more to do with what we are, with what our direct, unaltered experience is when we aren’t consumed by the common human endeavour of cramming it full of new content, maps, systems, or other frames of reference.
You may have noticed that many people are often extremely bothered by not having anything to talk about. Thinking that you don’t know, but assuming you need to know, creates violent ripples of dissonance in the human mind. Often these people will attempt to remedy this with talking incessantly, or via outsourced mental noise such as reading, radio or television. This is because silence is highly detrimental to this limited sense of self which lives off reams of acquired mental content. It is almost like it can sense an undercurrent of awareness that it has been taken from a space of freedom into a tiny, separate skull cramped full of beliefs and prejudices. Silence is corrosive to this illusion, and it can make people nervous to the point of being physically ill with fear when they don’t have something to occupy their attention.
Lack of self-understanding is the modern disease. It was Blaisé Pascal who correctly observed that the root of modern man’s ills is his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself. This highlights the symptoms of modern man’s materialist syndrome as a being that has either willfully or ignorantly acquired no familiarity with their own soul.
Before I understood that the abyss beneath our claims to knowing wasn’t annihilation, I was extremely terrified of anything that threatened what I had claimed in belief or knowledge. It felt like impending doom to me that the things I thought I knew might be threatened, questioned or even subjected to slight modification. If I came across something that disturbed this sense of knowing, or forced me to modify the way I think, I would spend dutiful hours repairing thoughts, making new connections, reframing, re-routing.
The nature of this activity wasn’t noticed at the time. I just thought I was a bit depressed, or ‘thinking things over’, although what I was really doing was making sure the new disturbances would not affect the total structure of my established worldview – I was in damage control.
If someone had told me at an early age that none of this was necessary, and had I heeded this advice, this would have been like being led to a goldmine. Of course, you cannot be told this, because no-one would ever listen unless they were truly ready to hear – in which case, they would be led there eventually anyway.
True knowledge, which is a term I would hesitate to throw around, does not fall within our usual system of values, because everything we have collectively developed by way of what we have call ‘wisdom’ is something employed instrumentally to in order to get something else beyond it – spiritual wisdom is not like this. It is not what we think we know. It cannot be learned from someone else, it cannot be mooched, it cannot be bought or sold, and it cannot be gifted, inherited or stolen. It is exclusively earned through a combination of experience and direct application of your inner attention. You have to be looking, listening – you have to be interested in how this experience right here deepens and unfolds. Not for some new acquisition, status, or a new set of mental toys, but because you are inherently interested in what is here, and what you are.
A worldview, being a constellation of mental positions about the way we believe things are, isn’t true knowledge in this sense. It is acquired over time, and maybe it is closer to an accurate picture of the way things are relative to others. A worldview represents a high investment of one’s life energy – at least, insofar as a psychological entity is concerned, in its time-bound personhood. The necessary feature of any and every worldview is that it is limited – it portrays an image of reality at the vital cost of its limitlessness.
To the selfless-self discovered beneath the turmoil, this is all neither here nor there. The unborn doesn’t exist in psychological time like our worldview does, it exists here and now. That is what qualifies it as alive rather than being some kind of coral-like accretion running backward throughout personal and human history. No worldview is required to engage in Being, although the false self has zero tolerance for the unborn. You might be surprised at what can and will be discarded without harm to you. I certainly was, and I still am quite routinely. The universe never seems to run out of surprises.
What do you think you know? That might be a good place to start. Chances are, if you think you really know something that isn’t subject to criticism or doubt, then I’m willing to bet that you probably haven’t inquired very far into it. If you think of your beliefs and conclusions as each having a piece of string attached to them, try following the string all the way from one end to the other.
People are generally reluctant to do this, or at the very least unpractised. This is partly because questioning the things you took for granted as true is of such high novelty that there isn’t widely available information about it. Most people will discover that there are strings they are more comfortable to follow than others. There are many strings we absolutely do not want to follow, because part of us recoils in horror at the thought of what we may or may not find at the end.
Fear can actually be your friend in this exercise, because you will learn by your apprehension which conclusions you have set aside as inviolable and sacred. The difference between these beliefs and others you aren’t afraid to investigate is that these are cherished beliefs, probably touching on core beliefs that structurally support your worldview. Can you afford to lose your worldview in the pursuit of truth? Your view of who is right and who is wrong? Who are the blameless, and who are the damned?
Maybe these are all just temporary roles within the play of consciousness, or, maybe this universe has some kind of insubvertible structure. Take a look though, see whether there are strings worth investigating while others can be left trailing into the darkness. The discovery you will be making here is not directly about truth, but your inner relationship to truth. Am I willing to question everything, or do I have a set of rules set aside that make me feel safe, that I choose to never pursue in inquiry, because I already know the answer?
We might begin with some really simple, but big questions, such as: how do you know who or what you think you are? What makes you think that you are who your memories tell you that you are, and is there a difference? If you lost everything you had ever learned or remembered, who would you be? Who would you seem to be, to yourself or to other people? Is there any difference? What do you think you know that cannot be undermined by any reason, any doubt? If there is anything that you have taken on authority, whether philosophical or religious, and how do you know that you have not been knowingly misled by some kind of demon? What can you be sure of? Will you have some answer in the future? Did you once have some answer in the past, which you have now lost?
The goal here isn’t for you to settle upon some profound new answer to worship and hold onto, but to crack open some of your pre-existing assumptions.
Our culture doesn’t generally do a great job of preparing us for this scale of inquiry. Culture is for the most part a topographical map permitting exploration in very limited regions, providing the illusion of limited freedom and reduced options within the prescribed system. There are of course plenty of roadblocks and no-go zones. Some of these directions are so taboo that other people will attempt to repudiate your claims by agreeing in knowing falsehood that you can’t have gone to the places you claim, simply because it is easier for them to believe a lie that preserves the structural integrity of the consensus than it is to embark upon overhauling their own inner realm.
A classic example of this is the person who leaves a religious organisation claiming that they have seen unwholesome things that led them to leave it behind. The cultural response encouraged and supported within the remainder of that group will be some version of “yes, but the devil would try to convince you of that. We, however, are standing firm, because the devil will not succeed in tricking us”.
This effect is everywhere. It isn’t really religious, it is human. It happens in the church, the school cafeteria – it may even happen in killer whale pods, for all we know. We revile the dissenter because they threaten to inform us of something concerning our choices and position that we would really rather not see the light of day. It exposes our foolishness. If our choices that were made in the sleep of ignorance were to become subject to any form of scrutiny, the only possible outcome insofar as ego was concerned would be damage and destruction. If you placed yourself in a position of allowing this damage, you would be forced to repair or even entirely discard what you had invested in for many years.
Of course, some people have no control over this collapse and are forced to act when it comes upon them. When we turn a blind eye, we are allowing cognitive dissonance to win at the expense of truth. Truth has to be at stake, not because anything we believe could be inherently true, but because anything that is formed as belief in darkness is going to be subject to falsehood – even if it just so happened to turn out to be true. You can be wrong by mistake, but you can’t ever be right by mistake – see whether this is true in your own experience.
Again, wisdom or self-knowledge can only come as result of your deliberative inner attention and receptivity. It isn’t mysterious or elusive, but it does ask you to put all that you hold dear to the highest scrutiny.
Truth is not going to arrive as the addition of something new, it is going to consist at a minimum of disempowering the falsehoods that predominate the collective mind. We have found ourselves as humans in a position of needing to urgently assess the collective structures we have agreed to. Unless we allow those structures to fall under the light of examination within ourselves, what hope do we have as a species? What value can we really claim to put on honesty and integrity?
What might you lose if you were to loosen your death-grip on your worldview? What kind of world do we want to leave to our children? And if it doesn’t begin directly with ourselves, in our own inmost world, then where else could it possibly start?
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.
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If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!
