Everything ever written about the project of self-examination and awakening has at least two potentialities – it could aid in your progression, or it could prove to be obstructive. The inherent problem which anyone who talks or writes about self inquiry faces is that there is a crucial danger of all of this being interpreted as mere talk. In the process of awakening, which is really simply a direct experiential meeting of ourselves, no adding of concepts is required, nor is any kind of conceptual understanding or analysis.
The primary problem I find is that people become so intrigued with the potential suggested by mystical experience that they skip the only important part and wind up erecting a teetering mental tower of beliefs, concepts and assumptions, all resting on a foundation which is itself conceptual, and therefore not grounded in direct experience.
This is the primary danger of the project of self-discovery. If you trip at the very first hurdle, you might delay your awakening for decades, or even indefinitely. The mystics of every tradition have advised us unanimously not to take any assumption for granted in self-discovery, to turn within and find out for ourselves. You may observe that this is the opposite of philosophy or theology, in which a vast body of concepts is accrued and then some degree of rationalistic intellectual commitment is apportioned accordingly.
This is not the case at all with turning inward. In any other endeavor, it is always the last steps that are considered to have the highest importance, whether it is earning a military rank, a degree, a belt in martial arts, or a professorship. In self-discovery, in the meeting of our true self, the first step is always of the highest importance. The authenticity of the drive to self-knowledge is at the beginning, or it is nowhere. We do not accrue it after years of gaining conceptual understanding, nor through years of sitting in meditation, for that matter. This is because awakened nature has absolutely no dependence upon the conceptual.
The fact is, you could have studied anything and if you had not met your true nature from the beginning in total innocence and curiosity, then your understanding will be totally impoverished. This is what is meant by building a house upon a shifting foundation.
None of this other stuff, including everything we talk about to do with the various nuances of self inquiry, ego and spiritual sounding concepts, is finally necessary. In fact, I would go so far as to say that no spiritual concept, however sophisticated or meaningful, is ultimately more important than your actual awakening. There isn’t a universal checklist of things for you to believe or ways to behave after you wake up – it doesn’t work like that. It is certainly true that there are trends, but there is no prescription for what you waking up to yourself should look like. You start fresh every day, or you are really not starting at all – you are simply back in the temporally dominated realm of the egoic mind.
Meeting who we truly are is utterly simple.
The problem is that often once we are implored to turn within, we flex and twist in meditation as if we are in a gym trying to develop muscle for the ultimate test of strength. This isn’t what is being asked of us. We have what we are looking for, because it is unconditionally with us all right from the very beginning of our journey. It is consciousness here and now, the thing we always mistook as being so commonplace and ordinary.
What people don’t typically see is how that ordinariness is actually woven into the other aspect, which is the totally miraculous infinite. Since we could first comprehend language, we were all effectively brainwashed into thinking that this innate experience should be met with anything other than gratitude and astonishment.
All that is ever being asked of you in this mystical venture of turning within is that you stop your trying to get somewhere else, right where you are in this moment, and put down your baggage long enough to see what is really here. Your baggage is your beliefs, assumptions, expectations. Put it all aside for long enough to get a glimpse of that which was always already here and see that it is an immediately available miracle, a flower eternally blooming, an endless act of divine creation.
You only need to see the beginning of the experience once. You will give up every concept for it if you knew what it was, because you would immediately see concepts as chaff before a great fire of being which, at your core, you are. Then, once you have tasted directly from the well of your own soul, see what ventures and beliefs you are drawn to and go about your own way. But I cannot overstate the value of a true meeting with your soul. The fruit of this meeting is not a strengthening of belief, but Gnosis.
I would like to conclude this by saying that if you have not had this meeting, I would encourage you to prioritise it to the point of putting aside everything else practically possible. The alternative is to have a house built upon sand. No matter how elaborate and beautiful the house, it has no lasting basis – it is temporary. When the bedrock is discovered, anything built upon is merely a ‘nice to have’. The bedrock is discovered to be primary and indispensable. That rock is Being – but this is too easy to talk about merely conceptually.
See that which cannot be unseen, discover that which was always there beneath your each and every belief, idea, and concept, with every step and every breath. People are looking everywhere for how they are going to end up, but only because they have a poverty of experience when it comes to understanding where they begin.
Reality is not a belief, it is an experience. Because it is misunderstood as the former, religions and philosophies find disagreement and discord. Precisely because it is the latter, mystics of all traditions find no disagreement. You can believe in infinite variations of what is false conceptually, but you can only ever meet one Reality. So the invitation, as ever, is to turn within. Not for becoming better or more advanced, but to Know once and for all where you begin and end.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
The choice between love and fear is the most vital choice available to us as human beings, although it is typically misunderstood or misconstrued. Fear and love don’t always look like you would expect them to.
Fear we equate with horror movies, or material fears pertaining to the physical world. You may be surprised just how many of these inner machinations of fear are purely ethereal or intellectual- the mind simply being afraid of ideas that it has construed as threatening.
Love, too, is greatly misunderstood. We often characterise it as arriving in the form of affection, but this is just our human patina colouring our world. If we are lacking an existential sense of connection, then we feel we need to be affirmed to be worthy or loved, so we continue to seek this outwardly in manifold ways, most of which are merely fantasies. We find ways to move in the world that encourage other people to tell us we are special, we seek out soulmates and endlessly outsource our need for specialness to others, when really all that is needed is a supremely deep dive inward.
The game of fear cannot be won. To engage it at all represents an inherent loss, hence the state of the world. There is no hierarchy within fear – the bully or tyrant is just as much a victim as those he abuses. To step into the game of fear is therefore to choose to court misery. It cannot be foisted upon you; it can only be chosen. This is because we are ultimately responsible for our own states of relative wisdom or ignorance.
Fear is regularly chosen out of conditioned habit and miseducation. Recognize every small decision of fear, and choose to disengage from that illusion into the truth of love where you already are, the truth of I AM. Awareness is the golden key to this. The truth of who you are cannot be trapped in darkness against your will.
The game of love, by stark contrast, cannot be lost. To choose it represents an inherent victory. There is no hierarchy in the participation of the love of the divine. To enter it, in other words, to choose to engage it, is to experience immediate success. You are not granted external reward – it constitutes its own reward. It must be chosen eventually, because the only other choice begets sorrow, loneliness and misery. Real love is never separate, real love is shared amongst all or it is nothing.
Look at all the tiny ways fear continues to dominate our thoughts, and therefore our lives. The great teachers consistently taught that the kingdom of heaven, whether they called it ‘moksha’, ‘liberation’ or ‘nirvana’, was always all around us, but they were also careful to add that no one is typically willing to look at it, because the price would be giving up all that you think you know. What we are afraid to give up in this equation is the paltry kingdom of our own making, the constellation of our egoic arguments, arrogant conclusions and our blithe confidence about the way the world appears to us at this level.
That is because those who do not understand their true nature are loath to look through the eyes of anything but fear. The opposite of this eternal teaching is simultaneously true – hell is all around us, but none can understand that it is both temporary and illusory. In this self-imposed blindness, people resort to the only solutions they have learned in their life-long ignorance, all of which serve to dig them into an ever-deeper hole. For one who chooses fear, suffering is their constant companion. Is there any among us who has ears to hear this timeless message? This is what the teachers of the past across the globe have implored us in unison.
There is no moral ‘ought’ in choosing love over fear, or unity over separation. This is simply the choice that is always freely available to you. If you know your true nature, the light that you are doesn’t really have much of a choice anymore, because what is good chooses the good, and what is light moves toward the light. Do you choose your thoughts, actions, and attitudes to confirm the deeper nature of love and unity? Or, do you choose that which separates us indefinitely from that simple realization? With what ongoing result? No one will judge you for what you have chosen – they don’t need to, because it would be of no use. Pointing out how you were wrong cannot make love feel better about itself, because love is not an insecure ego.
Are you choosing the love that is the source of all, or are you choosing the denial of love which is fragmentation and disunity? Are you choosing the same thing over and over and somehow expecting miraculously different results? You are free to sow your fields with any seeds you wish, but don’t sow them with nettles and expect a bumper crop of apples.
Fear is above all a prodigious liar. It shows you not only glimpses by way of mental images, but also glimpses of projected feelings pertaining to what your choices and actions might lead to, such as the projected feeling of ultimate contentment, peace, or sweet success. Furthermore, because it was born inside your mind, it knows your weaknesses. It promises you results entirely different than it is capable of producing. Most people are unaware that it was fear that glued together their entire worldview.
The ongoing purpose of fear is to create more fear. Like love, it is self-propagating. Do not believe this, because that would be of no help to you – observe it in your thoughts and actions and experiment with it. Have you ever seen an evangelist spread a message of fear? Why are those who promote fear so loud and obnoxious? Why are the peaceful, tolerant, compassionate and inclusive so quiet? Because they don’t stand on soap boxes exhorting change from everyone around them on pain of exclusion. The message that ‘all is well’ is an exceptionally quiet but powerful message. It is extremely difficult to make that out amongst the clamour of the deluded masses shouting themselves hoarse.
People nevertheless continue to feed fear. This is because in some way, those empty promises about the survival of the frightened fragment you had assumed yourself to be have been believed and invested in. You repeated the choices again and again, which bought you more of the same. There is no use in claiming you were swathed in darkness of ignorance because what is past is past – what counts is what you are choosing now in the light of awareness. Perhaps you were ignorant and in darkness, but you are not now. This is what is meant by putting one’s hand to the plough and not looking back.
This is also why the great teachers and mystics placed such an emphasis on the dictum ‘know thyself’. The contents of your soul need to be made clear to you, no matter what. It is the number one primary good to be self-knowing, in other words to be ‘awake’. Being awake has nothing to do with being a walking encyclopaedia of conspiracy theories. It has to do solely with your access to the depth of your own truth in the flow of this eternal now, moment to moment.
Thankfully, for many of you reading this, the time for choosing fear has actually ended. Further investment in fear is no longer tenable in your life, and the deeper part of you knows this to be so.
Examples of fearful thoughts:
Get them to like you, then you will feel conditionally worthy.
Put yourself first, and you will be safe.
Use reverse-psychology, then you can manipulate your partner into giving you more of what you want.
Tell your partner you can change or become a different person, then they will not leave you.
Treat them respectfully now so that they will look after you when you are in trouble.
Do what they say you ought to, and then you will fit in and not be excluded.
Make them think your role is more important than it is, then they will respect you.
Bury the problem and ignore it for long enough, and it will leave you alone.
Notice how many of these are consequentialist in nature. Fear projects horror into the future and asks you to fritter away the only thing that is real, the ‘now’, in cascading delusions. It casually disrespects the well-being of others in favour of short-sighted self-preservation and self-promotion. Anything that depends upon a projected result in this way does not touch the realm of love, which is about service and the inherent value of doing, not consequence. I would rather refrain from giving too many examples of love, because I don’t wish to imply that you are being given a moral prescription, however, take the following example. A mother bird pushes her fledgling out of the nest because she trusts her offspring is mature enough to spread its wings and attempt flight. Is it bad to push, or is it loving to respect what another is capable of?
The same kind of love may be available to you when for example your friend or spouse refuses to agree with your claim of being a victim to a particular situation. Maybe that doesn’t feel immediately nice, as how we often portray love, because you aren’t being shown affection. Despite this, maybe you really are being supported and given exactly what you need for your continued growth and liberation. Such is love; it doesn’t always look the way we think it will, and sometimes it can appear less like being wrapped and swaddled and more like being dunked into cold water.
If you knew you were eternally loved, worthy, valid, and included, and you were never once considered by the divine source to be a candidate for exclusion, what would you do in light of that unconditional love and acceptance?
The traditional argument is that if there were no tough rules, people would just do whatever they want. Don’t forget that the only reason tough rules are even introduced in the first place is in response to an already dysfunctional society poisoned by the very institutions placed to protect it. Throwing more dysfunction into play will do nothing to heal the core failure.
A society can function perfectly without harsh rules if it is founded upon love. This has nothing to do with dancing around in circles wearing daisy chains saying ‘anything goes, man’. Love is not laissez-faire; it is intelligent, cohesive and wise. It attends to specific situations with a high respect for context, because love means that aware attention is given, unlike the vacuous bureaucratic processes we are all-too familiar with. If society is founded upon separation and inequality, then those harsh rules will convey the optical illusion of their necessity.
Disengage fear and you are in your authentic, natural state, the great ‘I am’. Unbeknownst to almost everyone, this is the core message that the world’s highest teachers have brought to us. They all had to skirt around this core message, because it was so simple that people wouldn’t accept it. The human mind craves narrative and substance around messages, hence all of the mystical parables and stories we have inherited. The kingdom of heaven is at hand, not reserved for those who are morally good and conform to authority, but for those who remember their heritage in spirit and choose to leave fear behind along with all the other things of the past that did more harm than good, such as bloodletting and prefrontal lobotomy.
The very remembrance of this heritage is sufficient to elicit in us all of the virtues that the world traditions have valued and promoted – not acting so as to become good, but because this is how goodness itself naturally acts when given the appropriate encouragement. This represents the final layer of self-inquiry and self-discovery – that we in our natural state are divinely free and unblemished. The ego fearfully misinterprets such a statement as mere arrogance, but what it really represents is the final challenge of love to confront and therefore understand who you truly are – this is the timeless meaning of the dictum ‘know thyself’. This vital ‘I AM’ marks the eternally available choice to participate in Love, which is by the same turn to permanently deny the movement of fear.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
Such a great portion of our human lives involves paid work. There is an important sense in which we have been convinced that the ultimate goal of work is to pay off our debts, only to then retire. There is value in challenging the assumptions beneath this kind of myth, because so much of our lives are invested in what is at stake. Unless we come to a very clear understanding of what it is that we feel and what the outcomes are of our participation in this life, we will never arrive at any kind of satisfactory point, nor will we have divined any beneficial understanding of our place in the world.
Firstly, we have inherited a cultural premise that tells us that ultimate well-being can be postponed to the future. This is a very large assumption with far-reaching implications.
Your learned capacity to be happy in the future is a clear reflection of how you have learned to be happy now. Obviously, when the future seems to have arrived, that will also be ‘now’, so your appreciation of your present environment must be managed skilfully.
Have you ever come across people who are retired who cannot stop for one moment? The garden, the housework, the motorhome. These people are continuing the education of a lifetime of work, which is an ethic of keeping busy. People will object: ‘What is wrong if this is what they want?’, but do we really know what we want? Do we know what is best for us, and where we may have misunderstood?
For example, there is hidden assumption that many people have accepted which is that a lifetime of work is also a lifetime involved with suffering, therefore retirement from working life will also equate to retirement from a lifetime of suffering. Just how true is this assumption? It is true that much work, being the expenditure of effort under often physically or mentally stressful conditions, can promote much in the way of personal suffering.
What a lot of people fail to see is that leaving daily work behind is allowing the departure of only one source of suffering, it is not a salvation from suffering as a whole. In fact, the point at which we are accepted to have earned the right to withdraw from a lifetime of work is also the same point at which our mind as well as our physical body is beginning to deteriorate, marking the onset of all kinds of potential physical and medical challenges.
Suffering still follows at our heels from other sources, most notably the illness and death of friends, peers and loved ones who are also subject to the ravages of time. In this respect, retirement enjoys the benefit of a kind of afterlife mythology, in which all of our pain and effort on a daily basis will one day be ultimately vindicated and returned in full measure.
This raises an alarming question: just how much daily tolerance of misery does this mythology support? How many of us are laboring under the illusion that all of our effort is guiding us toward somewhere ultimate where we will have eternal peace and we can finally kick up our heels?
I share a couple of examples of this from my own life which I believe touch upon something relevant here.
I have a friend whose father is in his seventies, and despite remaining reasonably physically fit, he still works himself to the bone every day of his life. He is still in full time employment, despite that fact that he has been given the nod of approval that he could leave his work if he wanted to. Now, you might say ‘If he is doing what he wants to, why not?’ And I would naturally agree, except that all he ever seems to talk about is how much of a welcome change it is going to be when he finally retires.
This poses an odd kind of paradox in which he is on the cusp of retirement, and really past his culturally accepted retirement age, but the actual notion of stopping work seems to terrify him. His insistence on the myth of retirement has been well noted – he has waxed eloquent about the benefits of not having to get up in the morning, to not have to do anything, to have the freedom to kick back with a beer in his hand and watch TV (incidentally, this mythology is also recounted in minor form in the notion of the weekend, almost like a mythic foretaste of Valhalla).
The sad irony is, these are things he has not given himself the permission to enjoy. He may literally never arrive at the point at which he is comfortable with letting go of the ethic of early rising and hard work before he dies. To have lived this way for over seventy years, with no substantial appreciation for being able to allow himself to get a real break, is quite a confounding and yet exceptionally ubiquitous social phenomenon.
We could surmise it comes down to a person’s character and their ethos of being a hard worker, which unsurprisingly is a highly respected social value in any country. It could also be that like the rest of us, he has been successfully indoctrinated into a program of lifelong drudgery, being strung along by an imaginary dangling carrot.
Another example I will give was when I was working out of town one day, an older man came up to me struggling to walk with a stick and specifically wanted to tell me his story. We were the only two people around for at least a kilometer, and he specifically made the effort to approach me from a distance of about three hundred meters.
He told me that he was a keen hunter and fisherman, and that shortly after retiring, he had experienced a stroke which meant that there was no aspect of his retirement he felt he could enjoy. He told me that he worked his whole life, expecting to be able to retire and do what he wanted, except now he felt he had been cheated out of it.
While I don’t believe there is nothing he could have left of value in his life, the fact remains that we do place an inordinate amount of good faith in the application of effort over decades of our lives hoping to have something tangible to show at the end of the process. How does this contribute to us putting off our lives now, and how are we foregoing our responsibility to live wisely and skilfully today?
Are we collectively so enamoured by the prospect of the future holding some form of salvation, either material or spiritual, that we can justify subjecting ourselves to misery today? What would we do differently today, what changes would we be willing to allow in our lives if we discovered the possibility that our imagined future with its ease, relaxation and distance from suffering would never eventuate?
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
The title is necessarily misleading here, because for reasons that will hopefully one day become quite clear to you, you cannot discover yourself any more than the eye can see itself directly. Where we do have space to act is in introducing novelty to our otherwise well habituated lives.
The following exercises, whilst beneficial, are not designed with comfort or accomplishment in mind. In fact, many of these exercises will feel about as comfortable and familiar as stepping into a shower fully dressed. There is an enormous comfort in the tried and true, and conversely there can be great discomfort in the discovery of that which is unfamiliar, even when it is wholesome.
The problem with truth is that it is the slipperiest thing in the known universe if your goal is to arrive at it. We can’t grab hold of it for inspection, or to congratulate ourselves upon having caught it. We are it, but it is not ours to own. We can however consent to look with the eyes of innocence, but it asks something in return, and that is postponing our insistence upon asserting the presumed known, which includes the comfortable and the familiar.
One day, all of the familiar could suddenly be gone. This could come by way of death, but not necessarily. The important thing to know is that death, like any other psychic or physical upheaval, is not an obstacle to your ongoing existence. If you ever become determined to uncover that which lies beneath your mind by whichever method, you may end up with these discoveries in spades. For our purposes here, as an introductory exercise in which you are by small degrees introduced to the nature of your soul, it is sufficient to look for the light shining through tiny cracks in the walls of our minds.
Exercise One:Do not justify your choices or actions before other people and do not give in to the temptation to defend your image.
This one is simple and straightforward, yet the core message of this exercise, if explored to its fullest capacity, will reveal the most brilliant jewel of your being; it will also completely suck at first. Make no mistake, it is going to feel terrible – but so would detoxing off of a drug such as nicotine or heroin.
Anything by way of action in defending your ego you thought was going to work in fact didn’t, so what do you have to lose? People berate, judge and insult us in many ways, but what does defending our image actually achieve? Is that which we are defending even real? Really? Do you know that for certain? And if it is indeed real and factual, why should the truth require your defense? Is it temporary nuisance, or do the same issues keep cropping up again and again? Do we really need to either become thick-skinned, or a master of witty comebacks? What about not participating, inwardly or outwardly?
We often feel like defending our image and justifying ourselves is not only so familiar, but feels like coming up for air when we have been trapped under water for a time. It is less an activity than it is a compulsion attached to suffering.
The reason that this feels so central to the way you are used to functioning in social situations is that because of the way humans have been conditioned in our upbringing, you have grown up having conflated the ideas about who you are, with who you truly are.
This is an error of the first order – something you thought was real was not. That has a lot of repercussions, and it is going to take some getting used to once you really see through it. The not so well-hidden secret is that your justifications and personal defenses are intimately linked with your suffering and your sense of separateness. That is what makes you feel like you ought to defend yourself.
The promotion and defense of your false image is the ongoing cause of great pain.
Choosing to not act upon even these often forceful compulsions of psychic activity initially presents a unique discovery when ventured into, which is that you don’t actually have to follow your each and every compulsion. Not only that, but because it is not even really you, it will not ultimately impact you. In other words, the real you cannot be hurt by this. In fact, you can only be liberated by this. Try this often enough and you will eventually discover that whatever people say about you, doesn’t touch upon that which is observably and changelessly true about who you are. We have it collectively wired internally that the complete opposite is true, and the cultural world we inhabit is more than happy to encourage this lie.
If you decide to keep going with this, it could lead you to enormous discoveries. You may also decide that this isn’t for you quite yet. Ego or false self can even in some instances lead to a very buoyant and upbeat life while things seem to be going right for it. The common varieties of ego, however, I find to be quite run-down, generally miserable and exhausted, and very much in need of retirement.
It is relatively easy to stay true to inquiry when there is great pain, but we often don’t recognise what pain includes. It also includes augmentations to our ego such as being told we are wonderful, intelligent, or otherwise special. A more advanced version of this exercise is not to allow compliments to influence your inner states, not because they are true or untrue, but because your worth is elsewhere and independent. Whether you are being insulted or complimented, and you accept it, what is really happening is that you are being presented with a power differential, and you are going into agreement with it. That is a game, and you aren’t being forced to play it, it is a proposition.
All you are doing in this exercise is not agreeing to the power differential being proposed. Do this often enough and it will soon be very clear that what is changelessly real is not subject to personal, social and cultural tides.
Another way of looking at all of this is that one day, your body will be deceased and likely either buried in the ground somewhere, reduced to ashes, or perhaps even strewn out in the open for wild animals to pick amongst. In that situation, if people continue to say upsetting or hurtful things about you, what is going to happen then? One day you will not have any power over this, so you might as well introduce yourself to the truth of the situation now in order to get some benefit out of it.
Exercise Two:Observe the wave-like nature of the present moment
Place your attention on the fact that as time passes, or seems to pass, it consists of an energetic wave, very much like the waves upon the ocean. In the case of water, it appears to be the case that water is moving along, whereas really it is the energy moving through the water itself that seamlessly composes the wave in each instance.
That wave you occupy is very, very special. It is not just an idea. You are always at the peak of this movement, and it is impossible not to be. This is why it is always the present moment whether your body is five, fifty, or one hundred years old. We are all here now, and there is no option but to be here now. This makes this moment supremely worth paying attention to.
All activities, all birth and death come through this one gateless gate. Notice it with diligence and it will reward you with insights beyond what you currently conceive of as knowable. This is not a ploy, and it is not a trick of perspective.
Exercise Three:Become aware of the stream of thought and emotions passing through awareness
Notice at every available opportunity the nature of thought and feeling. You do not need to apply analysis to this, simply observe. Eventually what will begin to happen is that in a very tangible way, it will sink in that you are not a person at all – although being a person is included in the space you currently inhabit as awareness. All things, people, thoughts, emotions and events, real or imagined, come to pass within the theatre of this space. This awareness itself is not localised in space and time, at least not in our usual way of thinking, and its contents are capable of endless permutations whilst that which is unchanging remains shiningly, eternally changeless.
Such is the power of the psyche.
At some point in human history, as well as in our ‘personal’ history, we decided something else was more important, or more worthy of attention. Once you see this, you will not be able to fathom why, nor will you be able to return to the world’s illusions with anything like unwavering commitment. Awareness will become the primary value of your life, your most treasured am-ness.
Plato used the Analogy of the Cave in which the dedicated troglodytes who eventually made it out of the darkness were blinded by the sunlight above, and were thus unable to see the contents of the cave in the same way ever again. The difficulty of seeing this is that your perception of the things that you thought were so important before will be greatly altered. Most people I know who have seen this have had major personal upheavals as their perspective shifts.
You will likely find the majority of cultural institutions and things everyone else is enamoured by quite trivial and uninteresting by comparison. Be forewarned, this isn’t a game. The perception of the soul is a serious business, even though this experience on earth is something of a temporary game. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you would be unwise to seek this for thrills, or for a mere change in scenery.
Dedicated inquiry can and will turn your comfortable inner world upside-down. The only way to stomach the often disruptive results is to have touched upon either an insatiable desire for Truth for its own sake, or a total dissatisfaction with the flimsy and shallow offerings of the material world. You are warned, but you are also encouraged and supported. Eventually every entity on this planet will have to proceed beyond this point anyway, so you may as well start as soon as you sense that you are ready.
Exercise Four: challenge the authority of displacement.
Have you ever noticed within yourself a kind of internal lockdown where you suddenly go into unconscious, automatic and usually negative patterns or thoughts or behaviours? One word for this is displacement. You are being shut down and kicked off your seat of consciousness so that the real ‘you’ is no longer there to observe, learn and act anymore.
This habit is very deeply ingrained. It is a dysfunctional habit of the psyche that has been encouraged by a deeply confused and misled society. It happens most often when emotions which are very powerful such as anger or fear arise. They are strong stimuli that threaten to tug you down into unconsciousness like a swimmer being drawn into a swift, strong undercurrent.
The feeling when this is about to happen is a sense similar to when you first start to fall asleep at night. Witness it in action and get a feel for it so that you can understand the warning signs and remain seated for the coming events as consciousness. You will surprise yourself. Your willingness alone to pursue this will begin to net you immediate results. I know of no one person who has applied themselves willingly to the discipline of awareness whose life was not immeasurably enriched, and usually within a matter of months if not weeks.
For example: someone starts to insult you or imply something facetious about your actions or your motives. You feel the inner urge to react in some way, so you feel the pull to duck down behind a psychic shield. Now your psychological defense mechanisms are active. You are blind, in fact you are not there. Your third eye is squeezed shut whilst fear takes over to run its well scripted code. You begged the mind to keep you safe, and it is dutifully trying to do just that in the only way it knows how. It doesn’t work – at least not for the real you.
The mind’s habituation to withdraw from suffering IS what keeps suffering happening.
Originally, it is the misperception of separation that causes suffering, but it is our panicked reaction to escape that really keeps the fire of suffering alight. Psychological suffering is always represented in our body by some form of discomfort, physical pain or tension, and it is an excellent gauge of the truthfulness of our inner state.
Suffering is how the separate sense of self, being the false self, attempts to convince you that you are not whole, that you should withdraw like a snail into its shell, shrinking from reality. When believed and thus obeyed, it gives birth to inner hells. When firmly rejected, there comes a strange peace that passes all understanding. Despair cannot touch you.
Do you want to give anyone the power over you to turn you into an unconscious, reactive idiot? Does that line up with your inmost sense of who you truly are in spirit? Have you seen those plastic toy animals whose limbs are held erect by cable tension, and when you press the button, all the tension releases and the animal crumples into a heap? That is what you give people the power to do to you, even when you get very angry and respond with what we call ‘assertiveness’.
No one wants this slavery, because it is a lie against the truth of who we are. Once you know about it, that is sufficient motivation to act from a space of wisdom.
If you can stay awake during these episodes of rage, anger, anxiety and fear- and I guarantee that you have the capacity to – what a joy and wonder you will discover! None of it is real. It isn’t a real threat, it is all a mass hallucination. It is instructional in educational terms, yes, but not ultimately real. It is a dream of form we were all born into, with our consent. That birth didn’t happen ‘once upon a time’, it is repeated every day – this is the nature of re-birth. It is happening in every waking moment, every day.
You never need to let yourself throw a tantrum over a dream. Spend some time addressing the illusions of yourself and others – not with more arguments, but with awareness itself – then see what problems you have. Your efforts will be recognized as reality shifts around you to accommodate one who has eyes to see and ears to listen. You will encounter more and more openings and insights until there is only one timeless, uninterrupted seeing. Then, instead of piloting an insane ego that insists upon the totality of the universe being beaten into its preferred shape, you will become a willing student of reality.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
