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.
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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.
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