by Simon P. Murphy
There is a trajectory within you like a hunger. That hunger is the drive to reconnect with what is true. It is not about belief, simple or complex, and is not about being holy or righteous. It is about one thing only – seeing clearly, and revealing that which is true and whole. Another way of putting this is that it is the drive to come to the full conclusion of your existential seeking.
Why would someone be averse to seeing clearly? Because usually, there is a whole raft of illusion at stake. If you chose to see clearly, through inner eyes unfettered by illusion, you might discover that what you have invested years into will someday end, despite your best efforts to the contrary. You might see that the knowledge will disappear, or the money, the health, the relationships, the career, the house, the identities, the religious or philosophical commitments. Why else would something feel fragile or impermanent, unless it carried within it the promise of its ending? Why would it not feel like inherently immutable truth?
That is something we often choose not to look at, because it tends to render the scope of the illusion far less satisfactory than it already is. If we found ourselves examining the contents of our inner lives, which consist in the relationship we have with our illusions and what we think they afford us, we might find all of our illusions quite rapidly deteriorating or becoming displaced. And who would want that?
Interestingly, the part of us that is real actually wants that. Not to get rid of what is around us – but to critically examine our relationship to everything we hold to be real, permanent and meaningful in order to make space for what is actually real to shine through our inner world. That is basically the entire spiritual project in a nutshell – the discovery, sudden or gradual, that there is not one true thought.
What is real that shines through has a curious origin – we are responsible for none of it. We can choose to be instrumental to its coming forth. This is where the sense of existential dissatisfaction and dislocation in life issues from – not from being alone, not from not belonging, or not knowing or believing the right things, but from having not been willing to see how things are clearly. This asks that we meet all the things that we have been responsible for. All of our choices, all of our beliefs, our cultural creations that we have been party to, all that was formed out of darkness in the strange refusal to look at who and what we truly are in our essence.
Most everyone would prefer to be told who and what they are in their essence, because that is simply the way that humans have become accustomed to living a conditioned life. We are used to being told who and what we are by our various cultural institutions, and then moving ahead with our lives. Those sources have presumed to give us everything we thought we needed by giving us what we are ultimately not – our names, roles, etc. The Truth of who you are, however, isn’t like that at all – not in the slightest. You absolutely cannot be told who you are, nor can you be given who you are. You also cannot have a belief so sophisticated or clearly refined that would provide the detail of who you are in a neat envelope.
There is a way of knowing for certain that you have not met the vital recognition of who and what you are in truth. It will be this: the question of who you are will continue to have some appeal to you. In other words, you want to know who you are, because you are under the impression that you don’t already know. The reason for this is simple: absolutely nothing else in your life has been able to tell you what you are with any degree of satisfaction. When you know who you are in truth, the question has fallen away completely- you have no question to ask about who you are – period. That is how you will know. No one alive has partial knowledge as to who they are; they either know who they are at this level, or they don’t.
The next question is: now that you know that you don’t know, that you have not yet met the recognition of who and what you truly are, what do you want to do with that?
Chances are, it will be one of the following – either you don’t want to look at it just yet, in which case you probably will not have read this far, or, you are so hungry to know the truth of who you are, that you are willing to push ahead in your integrity, even if it might mean losing everything that you know. Because after all, if you don’t know who you are, how much of your inner or outer world can you be certain is illusion? How much can you really say for certain will remain or fall away as a result of your discovery of your true identity?
If you are like most people, including myself, you will have gone a lifetime of feeling a sense of grave unease about not being sure of who you are, to a greater or lesser degree. You will have attempted to establish it through many courses of action which haven’t quite settled the matter. All of these ways have been tried before by people of all times and places, and without effect. This is because there is only one certain way of settling the whole question once and for all, and that is by coming to a true meeting with who and what you are.
Discovery of who you are is a milestone of what we might call spiritual evolution. It doesn’t begin there, and it certainly doesn’t end there – but it is the vital step forward. I like to frame this discovery to the drop of the penny. The penny drops, a realisation is forged, and a connection that wasn’t made before in this life suddenly clicks into place, and you can never, ever see the world or your place in it quite the same way as you did before. This experience will leave you altered, even if you do your best to forget it ever happened. There is also no guarantee whatsoever that your life will turn out great or awful as a result of this discovery- but you do have to decide how much you want to know, because the fact is, it could cost you everything.
It cost you your personal future, it could certainly cost relationships, and it could cost everything you thought you knew was real. The question is: just how much are you willing to know who you are? What is the deepest calling guiding you? For myself, there were certain moments in my childhood that led me on paths of discovery that gave me a hunger to know who I was that in some ways seemed almost an inevitable collision course. But that only relates to me. What about you? Can the hunger within you, the divine yearning, be set aside for another few years? Or maybe for the rest of your life? Or are you willing to come to the truth of the matter now, in this moment? Is the yearning for self-knowledge diminishing of its own accord, or is it making itself known in more pressing ways?
I truly don’t have anything of value to say to anyone who isn’t genuinely interested in the truth of who we are. There is simply no capacity to help. For my part, there is no sales pitch, there is no ‘ought’ or ‘should’, no prescription for what you should be interested in, nor how you should be managing your life. There is nothing to teach those who aren’t curious. However, if what you actually feel within yourself is being geared toward waking up into you-don’t-know-what, then what I can tell you is this: in no way can you force this process or make it happen, but you can invite a meeting with your true self. In other words, you can facilitate a space within yourself, your inner being, to become available to that which is living and true, that which has always been ready and available if we were simply to take the time to look and listen with an attitude of open attention.
What will happen, with time, is a true meeting with yourself. How that will look, I cannot tell you. In my own experience, I can tell you that there is an encounter with Being possible that is dependent on no time, no thought, no belief, no self. When you meet this for the very first time, after even a second you will no longer question the nature of who and what you truly are. The penny will have dropped, and all of the abstract and philosophical questions about your being you once found so ineluctable, so pressing, so heavy and urgent, simply cease, like engines which have been exhausted of fuel. All of the momentum of your endlessly tiring self seeking and self definition simply ends, and you probably never realised just how desperate and tiring it all was, until the relief of it ending – at which point, there is usually years worth of psychological mess to clean up.
You are suddenly in completely new territory. You come to ask yourself new questions, such as “what happens to my energy and attention that has gone into this absurd, erroneous pursuit?”
You may be surprised to find just how much of that energy was allocated into the seeking of your true identity via fictionalised structures. How many of your life choices have consisted in some version of “I will invest in this because this will tell me who I am, as well as show others who I think I am or how I want others to perceive me”. What if the very bssis for those kinds of investment of energy, the sense of derived identity, were very suddenly gone, like the floor taken out from underneath you? You have to understand that to thoroughly reveal your identity is a life-altering event, some might even say a catastrophic spiritual and psychological event. Once the horse has bolted, there is absolutely no putting it back, for better or for worse. However, if you look closely enough within yourself, you will know exactly how much this discovery really means to you. You will know what price you would be willing to pay.
To discover who you are can leave you with a lifetime of cleaning up the inner and outer detritus. The great news is that the energy from every illusion you ever invested in, every inner scam, is returned to you and becomes fuel for the glowing fire of your awareness. Nothing real can be lost, only illusion can fall away – and eventually it will anyway, with physical death. All it takes for you to discover the truth of your being now is your willingness to take that first step into the unknown. You aren’t even coming into something new. The strange thing about this experience is that it is a re-membering. You are pooling together once more the parts of you that somehow became divided. You are certainly not adding something new; you are removing something that has served as an obstacle to that which was always already here and available. It is not complicated, it is simple. Complexity and simplicity are like directions in self-inquiry. If you follow complexity further, you are moving further away from the truth. If you are following the direction of simplicity, you are always moving closer toward truth, being the recognition of that which is already here in unity and wholeness.
There are many who have gone before you, as there are many who are making the same journey now. The encouragement I would give is this: the only thing you will ever have to lose is that which you aren’t going to keep anyway.
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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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