This Sunday is the third of the month, and we have our SE-Explorations talk over Zoom; linking a growing group of people across the world in friendly yet deep explorations of key topics in modern mysticism.

This month’s topic is the mystery of identity.

We begin by asking. ‘What is identity?’ We will all have answers unique to our journeys…

When I was a boy, I loved comics. Over the years I took on the roles of Dennis the Menace, Billy the Whizz and the famous Dan Dare of Eagle comics. 

Dan Dare was much more sophisticated and reflected my growing sense that certain things in the world were beyond just having fun, and took you into a world of higher purpose.

(And later, the more sophisticated Dan Dare, all round decent chap and Pilot of the Future! Image: Wikipedia))

Dan Dare’s mission was to protect the Earth from the evil Mekon – a mental giant but an emotional and moral monster… Looking back, there was much of the morality story about the nature of these protagonists. Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faceswould have recognised both characters and the plots in the Dan Dare story.

Fun at the time, these absorbing identifications were far from just a game; they were ways of seeing yourself in a form that had an inner life and a different sort of energy – a kind of sophistication not available to a young boy in his native environment. A fantasy? Certainly… But one that had interesting elements of egoic development that made even more sense from an adult perspective – though the author may not have consciously included that element. Stories have a habit of repeating ageless plots.

The young child is simply fascinated and lost in the characters of a story. The older one typically has a sense of boredom with the person they are, feeling it limited, where the comic or fantasy character is not.

Children naturally escape into fantasy, and love playing games with others where they take on roles. In that sense, they are very ‘plastic’ about their identities. At first they have little idea that they even have a character. Later – typically around the age of seven – they being to realise that the ‘me’ they take for granted is developing, and that the result is a new sense of self.

As teens, we may find ourselves identifying – though more quietly, as we are now deeply self-conscious – with heroic figures from cinema. The great psychologist Carl Jung had much to say about archetypal forces that underlie all mankind’s experiences. These may be seen as heroic figures when brought to life in the human consciousness and the life it lives, though they do not have that representation in their native realm, which is below our consciousness – Jung’s concept of the subconscious.

Figures such as warrior, lover, trickster, child, king or queen, that appear strongly in the stories of our inner lives often seem at odds with our reality and circumstances, if not our intentions. They come from colourful worlds, whereas our is grey.

Alongside this is a growing sense of who we are; largely in terms of our society. Teen years are full of the gap between the expectations of the adult world we are expected to join and the actual state of our self-opinion, stripped of fantasy images we realise hold no power, outside of the imagination.

But we should not rush to diminish the power of the imagination – nor its ‘fantasy archetypes’. Imagination can be made active rather than passive and trivial. It holds great creative power in moulding our future – if we have the will to create or call forth an enduring model of how we wish to develop – more importantly, how we wish to be.

The cinemas would not be so full of people if the latest 007 James Bond films did not strike an essential chord within us. We do not wholly let go the inner attachments of resolve, bravery and brilliance, even if our prowess as liver and lover falls short of fictional proportions…

What grows, quietly in those moments of recognition of the whole cycle, is the certainty that there is something at our core which is truly us, but which is strong – in the sense that it can be not only cultivated but given free reign to develop itself and us in our ‘outer’ lives.

We may call it soul, or self or many other terms, but its essential character is that of a ‘rightness of me’ that has alway abided in our truthful depths. 

What has been lacking is power…

So now we come to one of the great battles of our lives: the war between unrealistic societal expectations and what we can harvest from the ‘inner self’ which is now revealed. 

Somewhere along that challenging road is a moment when we realise that living the life of a James Bond (substitute your own archetype here) is not actually what we want; that we have tasted far warmer and kinder worlds of the creative self than this. Moreover, when we explore these worlds with our new ‘body of truth’, we find that the actual pleasure of the experience of truth in action is greater – and more personal – than any fiction we could have acted out. 

Metaphorically, a great and familiar stallion draws up alongside us, inviting us to adventure, not war. Everything we truly are becomes aligned, and a quieter and much more real energy now flows in our lives. It has a continuous freshness, precisely because it belongs to the realm of Being and is not made by the mind from dulled and repetitive representations of memory.

We see what is true and false about our outer picture of ‘me’. But we also see that the inner reality of our true identity and its emotional and ‘felt’ presence within us is more potent, in a life seen honestly, than any fantasy could ever be.

In that quiet dawn of the true identity, we climb on the waiting horse … and ride. And smile a lot…

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The Silent Eye Explorations talks, held over Zoom on the third Sunday of each month at 8:00 pm, UK time, are open to all. Send an email to Rivingtide@gmail.com.

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©Stephen Tanham 2023

Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

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