Life can be short and life can be long. Often it depends upon your point of view. To us the life of a bee seems rather short, but not to the bee. The length of life however should not be a concern, more to the point, it ought to be the way we live it that matters. The bee does exactly as it is programmed to do by nature and knows no more and desires nothing more because of it. We on the other hand are conscious beings – we know more and so paradoxically we desire more, thus causing strife and striving. Our life is a multi-faceted and intricate web of individualities, both exoteric (outside of our selves) and esoterically (within ourselves). We are many different people, affected by many different people. This complicates our life yet further, but so do other things such as fear.
Fear is a prime mover in our lives. We may not be aware of it, but it is a fact. Until we overcome our fear we shall not be truly free – so say almost all mankind’s wisdom texts. But first we must come to recognise this fear and its many faces. Fear can be as simple as worrying about how the bills are going to be paid or as complex as the subconscious notions of our position within our immediate peer group. It is a strong and subtle element of our psyche that is used against us by those who would manipulate us. The Church has for generations utilised fear in all-manner of ways to cajole the sheep into the pen. So too have governments and today we have the added bonus of the commercial world adding extra fear on top. Now individuals get stuck by their fears and run frantic on the hamsters wheel of greed, envy, lust, desire and all-kinds of other “sins.” The companies use slick advertising to convince us that we mustn’t miss out on the next big thing and so we run off to the bank, borrow huge sums of money and spend all our lives working to pay for the things we now cannot enjoy. Nature is free, it is there waiting for us to rejoin it. Unfortunately we are too busy running away from the hell of the Church, the taxman of the State and the overdraft manager of the bank, to enjoy it. Do not think that you are reading this objectively, you know that you are subject, as we all are in one form or another. No man is free, unless he frees himself. The question is, do we even know that we are in chains? And that is the first move we must make to find true freedom – we must look long and hard in the mirror of our life. In the end, these are our fears and are not owned by religion, state or company.
Whether we are talking about alchemy, gnosticism or just plain spirituality the fact is that we are told again and again, sometimes in arcane language and sometimes not, that we have to burn off the bad stuff. We have to reduce ourselves down to the original core, to the seed that started it all, because most of what we think we are is really somebody else.
Once we have worked out that we are not “James Bond” or anybody else, and that we are unique individuals then we can move forward with our lives properly. Now we can look in the mirror and see who we are we must also understand that we do have connection to others, but that we must not “become” others. We are in fact natural beings, connected to nature, to the landscape, the beasts, the sea and the wind. All these things touch our lives and we touch them. It’s free, it doesn’t cost us anything and so we don’t have to run around the Hamster’s Wheel like a crazed rodent.
I know, there will be people mumbling to themselves saying “but I have kids, a job, a car to pay for….” And yes, most people do these days, but the question has to be – how much “stuff” do we really need? Just because some marketing man has told you to buy something because Mr and Mrs Jones next door have already ordered one doesn’t mean you should. That scenario is playing on our fears – that we won’t be as good as our neighbours. One less thing of no worth bought is one less worry and fear. I don’t need a new lawnmower, my old one still works. I don’t need a television, it’s full of rubbish, sells me more crap and keeps me fearful. As author Tim Wallace-Murphy said to me recently, “it’s a bloody one eyed monster.” I don’t need a new computer, this one is good enough. I only need to know who I am, to see the glory of nature and be awe inspired by the fact that I am part of it.
A small example of how innocent our connection to nature came to me when I visited my sister on her land in Wales. She lives in an old stone cottage in deep countryside. The lane to her home is winding, steep and perilous in winter. But it is a place of solace and a world away from the bustling streets of London or New York. I took a day out with my two small children and we ventured off for a day in the fields, woods and to picnic by her stream. I allowed the children to run wild – to know no boundaries, like the ones they have in suburbia. For the whole day they played in the stream, climbed trees, ran in the fields and fed the goats. It cost nothing and yet they were elated, well-behaved and we drove home tired and yet refreshed. On other occasions I have taken them to fun parks, which cost a lot of money, were full of people, sights, sounds and smells. We have driven home tired, but certainly not refreshed and it affected the children’s psyche, causing more arguments and confusion. To my mind, this is an evolutionary connection. It is contact with the ancestral genes within us – the path of thousands upon thousands of years of man and his tuning in with nature. This contact has only in the last few hundred years been eroded, so that now we do not even realise what is wrong with us.
There is nothing of faith in this concept, it can be explained scientifically. Just as man’s skin alters pigmentation in different climes, or as stature has altered according to diet, so too man’s emotional and psychological state merges with his surroundings. For a longer time than we can imagine mankind has been as one with nature. He has understood her cycles, walked with the herds, swum with the schools and followed the ebb and flow of the seas and rivers. He tested the foodstuffs and found balance with his diet. All the anthropological evidence points to a distant past whereby man lived in relative harmony, hunting and gathering for a small percentage of his day. His teeth and bones were strong and there are no signs of warfare or unrest. Of course there were fewer people on Earth in those days and our success at survival knew no bounds. Mankind grew, but it was not until he began farming and claiming land and possessions that unrest seems to occur. Dairy farming brought disease. Destroying huge tracts of forests brought changes in the environment. Greed and hunger brought jealousy and the rot set in.
Now thousands of years later we live on islands too small for our population and force the natural world into our way of thinking. We destroy more than we mend. Fear drives us like never before – a fear derived in the evolutionary world of survival.
And because we do not understand our past we ruin the future. Many times we have all heard historians say that we need to know where we came from to know where we are heading and yet this is a frightening thought, for even now in the 21st century we still do not properly comprehend. Our past, we believe, is strewn with the wreckage of human failure and some success. We have the brains to create nuclear energy and then turn it into a bomb. If this is the past we see, then the future we predict for ourselves will be ever more troublesome. Instead we should look further into our past and to the point where we were intuitive of the natural world. This past lasted for a much longer period than our relatively modern settlement scenario. Is it too late? Are there now too many people on the planet? A hundred years ago there were one billion, now there are six billion. The future looks grim for the human race unless it does something soon. Will man awaken to this understanding? Will he realise what he has done in his race to nowhere?
Even now there are growing numbers of people who feel empty and isolated, even though they live amongst thronging crowds. A city is not a community if it does not have a spirit of oneness and our cities, towns and even villages can be places of high technology, fast paced, dog eat dog styled nightmares. Many of those who recognise that something is not right about the way we live are moving back into the countryside. Some take their modern ways of living with them and so also their hamsters wheel in-order to pay for it. Others feel a stronger urge to understand where we came from and to reconnect. What stops us all doing the same thing? A great many things and mostly all rooted in fear.
At the end of the day, whatever our circumstances, we will be better off within ourselves if we understand that we are creatures of the planet earth and not some machine sent to do the bidding of the corporations. We should decide what we want and we can only do this if we know our own minds – our true self. For millennia man has sought this “source” and in every culture it has come to the same conclusion, that the self is the aspect of the human psyche that is intuitively in-tune with nature. To deny this aspect of ourselves is to invite division and turmoil into our lives. The unconscious mind strives for what it has been developed over thousands of years to do – to connect, and yet the conscious mind desires all-manner of things and denies its true role. Our attraction to certain colours, shapes and smells used today to entice us into plastic products and useless insurance are all within us because of evolution. Colours of fruit, shapes and smells of healthy food are all now so long forgotten that we only see, feel and smell the poison of the burger or candy bar, cleverly mocking their natural “alternative.” And this word is an indication of how far we have walked away from our natural state – that we call good wholesome food “alternative” and have to label it “organic” because we genetically engineer and dose our selves up with chemicals. Most people try not to think about it, in the same way they do not see into the beautiful dark eyes of a cow or lamb for fear of being put off their meat. It is a self-defence mechanism, in the same way that our brain turns off our muscles when we go to sleep, to stop us beating ourselves to death.
However far mankind has walked away from his Earth Mother, he has remembered many things and over the course of human history hundreds of individuals have secured their knowledge within texts, symbols, art, structures and ritual. It is to this sacred knowledge that we now turn.
We very briefly touched upon the connection of man’s inner psyche to the natural world around him. How this is part of our history and forged by our evolutionary instincts. In fact we are following patterns, mathematical equations that simply did not predict that consciousness would create a world like the one we now inhabit. In fact, it was not part of the mathematical equation to predict, but to survive and to be strong. But that does not help our conscious mind, which has to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. How can we be healed of this scare we have created?
Well, me and you are not the first people in existence to comprehend these issues. In fact in every generation there have been men and women who have grappled with the complexity of our disjointed societies. The powerful imagination of mankind has created all-manner of answers to the dilemma. One of these is religion, but in creating these so-called sources of wisdom and spirituality man has created yet more chains. Alpha dominant individuals muscle their way into these well-meaning groups and sects and turn them into grand imperial armies that set out to destroy the weak and collect the chosen ones into the fold. Those individuals who comprehended the truths were simply not numerous and powerful enough to fight and so used intellect and cunning to pass the word. These we know in many names and even some of these groups have been taken over by more powerful ones. Gnostics, Sufi’s, mystics, underground streams, alchemists, Cathars and heretics – their names are many and widespread, but within their philosophies and texts we can discern methods of overcoming our conscious issues to life and find ways of helping even us today.
All the groups I just mentioned and several others are linked through time by a thread. This thread has been worn thin by the religious States of times past, but has nevertheless remained connected from the very earliest groups in a time before Egyptian empires, right through the rise of Christianity and into the modern world. Carl Jung the psychoanalyst was one modern writer who discovered the thread and showed how it had been kept alive during the inquisitorial periods of Catholic Europe by the alchemists. It was the thread of Gnosis – the knowledge of the connection, the Divine element of mankind within each and everyone of us. The language of the alchemists was so obscure that it wasn’t seen on the whole as a threat by the Church and so they either ignored it, or even joined in with it – often hoping to be friends or have influence over the one who discovered gold. Of course, the discovery of gold is an esoteric terminology and not a literal element, but that was lost on the profane.
The alchemist, in simple terms, tells us what to do, in-order to discover the Philosopher’s Stone – the source stone of all, of ourselves. Once we discover this stone we can build again. This stone is the core of our true selves. We have to reduce the body down in-order to find it. This means that we have to get rid of all the things in our lives that do not represent who we really are. All the issues we are carrying with us, created by other people and planted in our minds awaiting a bad harvest. These seeds grow within our minds until we can no longer see ourselves within the weeds. We have to chop down and destroy these weeds in the mind and what we shall reveal will be the seed stone of the Philosopher’s. In modern terms it’s like this: when we watch a television program or go to the cinema we see the modern gods of celebrity world. Whether we like it or not these stars affect us and we take on their personas as if our own weren’t good enough. We are in effect trying to become a character created from within the mind of another individual – it is not even a real person we are trying to emulate. There are evolutionary reasons for this – it revolves around children copying and learning from parents – but we must grow up and realise that we are who we are and we need not become a Hollywood clone. Over the course of a lifetime and to differing degrees, we all clone other people and take on the attributes we like. We all start wearing “badges”, whether this be a Rock t-shirt or a Freemasonic apron. It is as if these badges help us to become who we think we are and eventually we no longer know where we came from. Imagine if you can all the people and influences on your life and how you have developed because of all those influences. Now imagine trying to burn them all out of your mind – what would you be left with? Does this scare you? It does most people and so you may be among good company. This is why alchemy was hard, not for the feint hearted and was seen as the Great Work. The same was true of the Cathars, some of the Gnostics and all-manner of groups who understood these concepts, albeit in different form and language. To be “perfected” and “pure” meant not to have any of the impurities of this world. It is a job we must undertake if we are to discover ourselves properly and it is a job that cannot suddenly happen over night – there is no red or blue pill.
How do we go about beginning this work I hear many ask? Well, in fact we are all individuals and so there are many ways, but the truth is that we are all pretty much alike at the core too. We all have to take a serious look at the esoteric mirror – at what lies within. We have to start with the mundane and work through the layers we have built up. I often tell people to begin with actions, because they speak volumes about an individual. Think about what you do and how you react and then ask yourself if you are reacting intuitively or are you acting in a specific way that you have learned from another clone? Do you smile peacefully because you saw the Dalai Lama do it? Or do you smile because your inner psyche tells you to? We all have many actions and reactions in life and so there will be a lot of hard work here, but do this as part of your everyday life. Put up a sticker somewhere that says “was that YOU?”
Eventually and with effort you will begin to understand your own mind and recognise in yourself and others when these clone-like spectres are talking. It will not be easy – that is the only certainty I can offer. But the rewards are manifest in the freedom of mind. You will obtain for yourself the freedom not to be fearful.
Once we have begun this process and stayed the course for some time there are other things we must learn. I know I keep repeating this in my work, but the truth is, it is of such profound importance that I will probably still be repeating it on my death bed. We must learn, on every level of our inner and outer lives the art of balance. Only once we have discovered that balance is important will we understand the truth of this statement. If I try to walk into a Temple by walking into one of the entrance pillars I will hurt myself. If I walk in the centre, between the pillars, which hold up the Temple, then I shall enter the holy place. The pillars are male (positive) and female (negative) aspects of ourselves and the Temple’s holy place holds the stone that fell from heaven – the Philosopher’s Stone – the source – our selves. Balance out our lives and much more will follow.
Article by author, Philip Gardiner
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