In parts one and two, we looked at the relationships we build with the world and each other. We see that how we ‘relate’ to the world is coloured by many factors in our early development.

Is there a single technique that will help correctly align us in relationship with the world — with the Universe of our world? Can we really call on any kind of truth to guide us?

There is… and it begins with investigating ‘where’ we live in our human ‘selves’, and taking back responsibility for our worlds.

The anatomy of ‘us’ is quite simple: we have a body and a mind. The mind is not easy to define, but the body is where ‘we’ end and the ‘out-there’ begins… or so we think. Our body is chock full of sensors that relate to us a ‘picture’ of our world and our interaction with it. The body really perceives many ‘grey areas’ but we allocate them the colour of ‘received wisdom’.

Some people even kill for such beliefs, the obvious face-to-face value of compassion and companionship forgotten, in favour of a lethal dogma. Dogmas needn’t belong just to the poor and fanatical. They belong just as much to blind capitalism, which confuses might with right…

If I put my hand on a hot pan, I’ll get burned. So I learn not to. It’s not a matter of opinion, its a matter of physical truth. But the mind is full of opinion, much of it garnered from people we trust and respect. But those opinions – which go to form much of our character – have seldom been tested as truths in our own lives.

Our society is based upon thinking. Thinking is what differentiates the beastly from the elevated and civilised. Only the attempt to shut out half of our real natures leads to the ‘eruption of the untended’ in our consciousness. Freud recognised this and designated it the ‘id’ – the it. The id is the beast. The thought-driven puritan with uncompromising ideals is the ‘superego’… the other end of the psychological self.

Both are false prophets. Our poor egoic selves – holder of the ‘I am’ – are left to wander our lives in search of the truth that harmonises them. It gets hurt, and turns much of its nature to ‘stone’.

There is only one truth worth having and that is our own. It takes a brave soul to say that, and an even braver one to practice it.

To find our truth we need to forget ‘sin’. We need to cast off those old clothes and recognise that we have all we need to find our truths – and that those truths should become our ‘goodness’. We have feelings of goodness and sharing, just as we have temptations of selfishness. We have an inherent gasp of kindness and compassion. We know that they feel like. They come from a place that is more deeply anchored in our truth that our society is.

When we are ready to make the journey towards the real Self, it is powered by the growing certainty that this is the only good that matters. What then springs free in us is an intimacy, a personalness that we have begun a quest which is more important than anything else we could be doing.

As Shakespeare’s Polonius says in Hamlet:

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

In the last part of this series, next week, (yes I did extend this in the writing of this part, in not wanting to put too much into any one post!) we will look at the journey into our own consciousness in search of the real nature of a deeply personal awareness – and the dramatically different picture it paints of our lives.

End Part Three.

Previous posts:

Part One –

Part Two –

©Stephen Tanham 2022

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog