A good friend wrote to me after last week’s Part One of this series. They wondered if they had ever really known their ‘real self’.

It’s a common observation, and people who can say this are being emotionally honest at a deep level. But I can reassure anyone who feels this way that they are mistaken.

The feeling is that life has apparently taken away their ‘real world’ – and there is a correspondent sense of ‘long-term lack’, whereas what has happened is that our reactions to life have obscured a real world that is still there – right in front of us, right now.

In other words, we have changed and not it…

We can compare this process to the ageing of a pair of well-loved glasses that have become scratched and covered in the daily residue of organic living. We believe the view is still there, but we have only one pair of glasses … and we need them to see.

Where is that view? Does it lie in the glasses? Clearly not – no pun intended! Does it lie before us, but now obscured? We have think carefully before we answer this. Have we ever known that view in its actuality, or have always had the glasses; which used to be near-perfect but now have lessened in their acuity?

What we appear to experience is like an equation…comprising what might be really ‘out there’ plus what we do to it when it enters our ‘glasses’…

If we dwell on this for a while, we see that we cannot escape the conclusion that what we experience as our view of the world is a mixing of what might be out tbere – in ‘actuality’ – plus the ‘colouring’ we give it, caused by our states of perception.

Perhaps we can never escape this mixing, never see things for what they are? The truth of this is very subtle… and exciting. We should not be in a hurry to get rid of or diminish any part of our ‘seeing’. Each part is magnificently constructed so that we come at the solution in a particular way.

None of this is accidental. Mankind is both Being and Process, and has a deep relationship to matter and what lies beyond matter.

Our sensual ‘glasses’ are smeared, bent and possibly of the wrong prescription. But they are composed of the stuff that is us. Our bodies are real and are doing the perceiving. The world ‘out there’ appears to be real – science has spend centuries ‘proving’ that to us… and yet the issue of ‘consciousness’ vexes science more than any other. What’s really doing the seeing?

What is it that is aware? We know that the mind is inseparable from the thoughts that form its movement – its changes and states. There is no location where the mind lives. This is the basis of meditation. When you quieten your thoughts, you drift through to a deeper place where anything related to words is unnecessary. Our subject-object use of language means that the idea of ‘me and it’ is embedded in our consciousness.

In truth, we assemble the ‘world’ in our own minds, and much of this is related to expectation. We see what we expect to see; and we have some sophisticated mechanisms for building up the force of that expectation.

Chief of these is memory. Everything we do with the mind uses information from the past to interpret the present.. and to worry about the future, which has no existence but plenty of uncertainly to generate constant anxiety.

Memory is essential for our day-to-day work. But the past as a basis for our future is distinctly flawed.

We can examine this in a forceful way by stopping in the middle of a repeated activity – say, washing the cups after our morning tea or coffee. Take away the act of vision by closing your eyes and letting your hands explore the mug, the hot water and the feel of the soap. Let the sounds you had forgotten come back into your experience and feel the richness of it. Take away any sense of having to complete this before you move onto that next ‘essential task’. When you’ve established your gentle will over this, open your eyes and see how much power of experience is removed by habitual repetition and expectation.

You’ve just had a truly fresh experience and seen the power of the habitual to seriously dull things. But that continuously-available freshness was still there, waiting for you.

Our minds do this for good reason: to help us cope with the sheer volume of ‘information’ in our lives… but it robs us of colour and depth.

In meditation, we want to leave behind the normal day-world. But there is another ‘discipline of consciousness’ that is the reverse: being present to the now.

Being present to the now means being fully engaged with whatever we are doing. We don’t need to be judgemental, just to be truly involved with that task that has arisen and that we need to get on with. We might like or dislike it, but if we can ‘trap’ those two imposters and not let them sap our energies with negative emotions, we can enter a state of presence that in-volves us with the now in a feeling of clarity (and often love) that is startling.

Pulling all of this together, we might want to ask if there is a single, core cause of this dulling of our lives; of this loss of freshness?

There is. It’s one of the most essential things in our lives, but its construction from the material of the past means it has only one place and one direction: heaviness.

Its name is the personality, known in psychology as the ego.

It’s not wicked or evil; it simply is what its nature makes it – our apparent centre.

But the infant has no ego, no personality. It – we – are born with a full set of glorious, beautiful and loving characteristics that, in mystical work, we refer to as essence.

Imagine two circles that mirror each other, one above, one below. The one above is connected in joy to everything in the universe. The one below is connected only to our separateness…

Next week, we will begin to examine these two circles and to map the way the original, joyful qualities of essence have become diminished … But not lost, and how what William Wordsworth called our ‘Clouds of Glory’ are still with us, as traces; traces that generate so much longing in our souls.

The two maps on the twin circles might just provide us with a method – a deeply personal path – that allows the original ‘essential’ qualities to shine again in our being … and regenerate our inner lives in the world, without needing to be withdrawn from it.

Parts of this series:

This is Part Two: The look of Love

Part One: The Human Hologram

©Stephen Tanham 2023

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