Chapter 3, The Context of Self

The mind. For me, this is a word as equally incomprehensible as infinity.  How can a mind know itself?  How can a mind know what it is?  Can you see your own mind?  Can you hear it?  Can you ever control what it thinks, how it reacts or how it determines any subsequent actions?  In my opinion, the answer is no, but we’ll get to that later.  You can be aware of its existence and hone this self-awareness with training and practice, but I just cannot see how it’ll ever be possible to define the mind within itself.  If the mind creates the words and stories, surely, it’s beyond its own definition?

Then there’s the body, the physical you, the one made up of 3D matter and material, this supercomputer that runs all by itself without any instruction manual, all it needs is a little fuel in the form of the right nutrients, vitamins and minerals.  Just as a car needs oil to energize action and movement, the only real reason for eating and drinking is to fuel the vessel you use to navigate your way through life.  But sadly, even a concept as natural as dietary requirements has become a maze of misinformation, resulting in nothing but a lack of trust in your own body to know exactly what it needs.  And how does this happen? 

With all the information in the world I do wonder why the education system still resembles Victorian principles.  It is my opinion that in this day and age of sensory overload, mass manipulation and brainwashing, it is our responsibility as adults to teach children and young people about themselves.  About how their mind is vulnerable to believing things that are not true because of some perverse, oppressive notion that adults know best and it’s important to listen to what they have to say. 

You know, even as an adult I must admit that I rarely come across a person worth listening to.  Don’t get me wrong, I love people, I find them interesting, but what is the worth of interesting?  I guess it depends who you’re talking to and what your interests are, but let me expand on this point before I quickly get labelled as arrogant.  I know some amazing musicians, I love to play alongside them and enjoy the vibrational charge of an epic jam sesh, I love to listen to them talk about various artists or songs.  It’s all very interesting, and most certainly holds value as a connected, nurturing and expansive human experience, but I never learn much beyond interesting.  Of course, for a band manager this kind of discourse would be highly valued and enrich a key element of their life, so the worth of the exchange would be very different.

So, what makes something worth listening to in my book?  Well, any lived or learned thing that assists in questioning what you think you already know.  I experienced first-hand how learning about oneself can positively impact the trajectory of one’s life, and from what I observe it seems safe to say that people operate with a subconscious fear of learning about themselves.  You see, that mirror I thought it might be nice to look in earlier, so I might gaze upon my own magical nature, it exists for everyone, the problem lies in the perception of what we see and what that might reveal about our deeper selves.  It is the hardest thing in life, to admit to the truth of oneself, truly, any person that commits to self-work and an honest critique of themselves is a warrior of a new kind, one only understood by another of their own nature.

You see, I transformed myself.  It’s impossible to explain to people who haven’t done it, and I’ve given up trying.  I simply decided to just be this new me now and let go of needing to be understood.  It’s amazing how much conflict is created by the human need to be understood, and even worse, to be right.  Too many people think they’re right about things only because other people who thought they were right about them told them it was right.  The world is built on a cycle of regurgitated stories and beliefs, many of which are fear-based and hold no real worth.  My big question is, can we press pause, can we release fear for a moment, fear of being wrong, and open our mind up to the infinite possibility that humans are in fact wrong about everything, just like they were in the past?

There is only ever the most current knowledge and understanding to inform our ways of life.  And what is knowledge?  It is the catalogue of useful information held within your mind-body.  Knowledge is the only useful thing, it is what we use to make meaning of the world and expand our comprehension of what it means to be human.  There is no finish line in this evolution, not one any of us will live to see anyway.  One day, it is our generations that will be analysed and studied within the history books and what a period in time it will be to dissect, in its ever-changing complexity and ever-expanding variety, the modern world is quite simply a mad house.

In my world, history is but a mirror to see the madness of men.  We look back to the past with an arrogant superiority, taking in how far we’ve come like we had some role to play in the naturally occurring phenomenon of the evolution of man.  I, for one, am able to admit that I had no part to play in the resulting world today, but I do take credit for speedily waking up to the reality of it.  Humans don’t see themselves clearly, they don’t realize that they are just the same as their ancestors, a semi-blank human computer born to Earth and programmed with subsequent patterns, cycles and stories, which then come to manifest as this individual you.  We become this ‘self,’ walking around with a name, happily counting, year by year, how many times we sit on the earth as it circles the sun, which it will continue to do long after we’re gone.

So, let’s return to that word now, energy.  What does it mean, what value does it hold when applied to what we know about the self?  The answer: it potentially transforms the human experience so that it might be lived with more awareness of the unknown.  If you can allow your mind to grasp and then appreciate the concept of yourself as energy in motion, well, you are halfway to heaven.  When you accept yourself as an energetic entity, one that is no more separate from the world than a single drop of water is from the ocean, that’s when you sit alongside something a little more like truth.  The illusions we believe about ourselves and life are merely stories of the past that were told within the realms of accessible knowledge and understanding of different times and places.

Today, so much has changed, it is no longer a tribe facing off against a tribe with slightly different ideologies, the world has become smaller and with it, fear and conflict have grown in intensity, volume and variety.  The threat to one’s ego and self has multiplied, the threat I speak of is conflicting knowledge and experience, the threat of information that may challenge what you think you know.  The ease with which a human mind might dismiss another person’s belief system as ‘wrong’ may just be one of the most hysterical moments a person can live.  Basically, one says, the invisible thing I have faith in is real, but yours is totally imagined. 

But what if neither is real nor unreal?  What if humans got it wrong about these doctrines and books?  What if humans became disciples when they were supposed to thrive as the co-creators of their own lives?  What if these books are all there with one sole purpose, to point you home toward the truth of yourself?  What if somewhere along the way we got lost in the maze of rightness and wrongness, we got lost in the words and forgot what we were looking for all along, a feeling of peace, love and joy?  Before we move on, may I let you in on another little secret?

I’d like to take an honest moment to express my intrigue at the human ability to deny the existence of another person’s god but claim an all-knowing stance on their own.  As someone who grew up on the outside of mainstream religion, I was very much left to define and determine my own thoughts and feelings about life, which resulted in me watching people of faith with a curious interest.  The devotion to the unknown and unseen, a practice I have seen in every corner of the earth I’ve visited, was once something I couldn’t wrap my mind around.  In my early days of travel, I’ll admit I was fairly judgmental, fascinated of course, but internally judgmental too.  I thought that all of these people devoting their lives to religious practices were believing in the adult equivalent of fairy tales, and to an extent I still do, but only because too many people believe blindly and think too little about how they came to believe in what they do.

However, as I sat down to Hindu chanting and meditation in India, as I was welcomed to Islamic prayer sessions or sat in a church in Malaysia listening to hymns being sung, well, I never did start to believe what they did, fundamentally because I understood nothing of the language, but I did get to feel some things.  I’ve cried during the gentle moment of release that meditation provides and felt the vibrational residue linger in my body after a bhajan musical chant in Sanskrit.  I’ve felt the gentle comfort of a community’s faith in Allah as it soothes the pain of a shared loss.  I’ve experienced the hug of the unknown as I’ve sat in a church and listened to a piano and clarinet releasing a soothing melody.  Yet, I’ve also discovered the tranquility of nature and the opportunity it presents to see your own wonder and beauty.  A world without man, that’s the world I enjoy most.  God’s world.  Not mine. 

You see, no one taught me a story about God, and I count myself lucky for that, as it seems I found my own way towards making meaning of this life I am here living.  This is what led me to determine that it really doesn’t matter what path finds you, just welcome it, surrender, and trust that life will always provide you with a road home to the peace that lies in your own heart.  Somewhere along the way we became too reliant on words to point the way and forgot that we should be allowing feeling to inform us to an equal extent.  Feelings tell us so much, they let us know when a situation is good for us or if particular people are toxic to our life.  The trouble is, we’ve forgotten how to truly feel; and no wonder, with so much pain, chaos and destruction, it seems an intelligent survival mechanism of our physical body is to desensitize our system so that it too does not succumb to the pain and destruction of the world.  Smart body.