Knowing ourselves doesn’t mean recognizing what makes us different from others, such as enjoyments, desires, ambitions, and personal abilities. It means understanding the functions and structure of the human machine with the aim of obtain-ing perfect control of ourselves and our lives.
As written in the previous posts on this and other blogs, on many web pages, and, of course in many good and useful books, the means to achieve this goal is the development of the capacity to observe.
One of the main and often most misunderstood fields on self-discovery, is what the ancient traditions called by the name
“Being” or “Essence”, which is the immaterial and perma-nent reality.
Every human being is composed of two parts: the real and the unreal. The illusory is the non-permanent and imagina-tive part. This illusory part of ourselves, is the personality, and we are almost totally identified with this field.
The real, genuine part of ourselves is the “Essence”, which is with us from our birth, before the formation of the personal-ity. The personality is acquired through time. The Essence is innate and does not change with education and external circumstances. Instead, the personality changes according to the changes of the external environment. The Essence is the immaterial part of us which survives physical death, almost always wrongly called by some religions as “Soul”. Affirming
that the “Essence” is a part of us is incorrect, because We are the Essence! Personality is the temporary form which we use to experience material life.
To better explain our deep identification with the personal-ity, we will use here the example of the Greek legend of Nar-cissus, who, upon looking at his image in a pond, falls in love with the image he sees, and dies drowned in the waters of life.
So, he loses his self-consciousness.
Personality is a term which derives from Greek, and it means
“mask”. Indeed, this is a mask intended as a superimposed form which covers our Nature. Below the color, form, and consistence of this “mask”, there is a concrete and real sub-stance; the Essence.
For a better understanding of the concept of being or es-sence, we will take water as an example, a perfect analogy to help in forming a better idea of what this complex, and infinitely more fascinating part of us, than what we would ordinarily claim to be.
We can find water in various forms: liquid, solid (ice) and gas (steam). It moves from one state to another, changing quality and consistency. By boiling water, it becomes steam, which then condenses and becomes liquid. When exposed to lower temperatures, it becomes ice. So, what is water? A gas?
A liquid? A solid? Or all of the qualities which enable it to change form without losing its essence? What is its essence?
It is a set of “qualities” and not the forms through which it manifests itself. Similarly, the Essence is related to human life as is the essence of water with the various forms it takes.
The true man and true woman is the Being. Bodies, race, personality, thoughts, emotions, and functions of the human machine are the temporary constants that we use to under-stand, learn, and feel, in order to experience the environment in which we live. By identifying with the form, we forget our true nature. This depends on the lack of an education which would allows us to recollect what we really are. What we
ordinarily claim to be – teachers, artists, writers, accountants or other…it doesn’t matter, it’s all false, thus, irrelevant. Ev-erything we think of as us, is in principle, false.
In the ancient cultures, the concept of reincarnation is deeply related to the concept of Essence. It doesn’t matter if we be-lieve or not in reincarnation. It’s a subjective thing, therefore irrelevant, such as any other thing which we believe without direct experience. We will handle this concept according to eastern philosophy which begins from the point of Essence.
According to these teachings, this principle – our true na-ture, tries to understand the nature of the Universe through a long process of experiences, achieving this through many lives, different forms, cultures and so on. The goal of these experiences is to achieve the “Divine Consciousness”, and this means achieving the higher state of consciousness and the “powers” which characterize it.
The ancient knowing, hands down the existence of differ-ent planes or worlds, more subtle than the material matter which composes our Universe. The Essence, our true nature, is “consciousness”, not “substance”. Such as water, the Es-sence assumes a specific “substance” to experience its own evolution in a specific way, which ideally ends with complete conscious enlightenment.
For every human being, experiencing matter represents an important step in the evolutionary path, and it is repeated through various cycles of lives. At every birth, all the memory of the past life experiences arise only if an individual achieves the complete control of his psycho-physical machine, recon-necting consciously with the memories hidden in the deepest parts of his true self.
The fact that we forget our true nature- what we really are, is due to the bad and incomplete education acquired, and from the absence of a valid teaching which would enable us to “re-turn” to ourselves (Awakening).
The Trap of Loneliness
What is solitude? It is the total absence of communi-cation with the outer world, one of the most common sick-nesses of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is the feeling of the absence of others near us, and the worst thing is when this is perceived amidst a mass of thousands of people. Loneliness is not only the absence of contact with others, but also the absence of contact with ourselves.
In fact, communication between two persons requires at least one conscious communicator. Without a deep self-consciousness, even with all the good will of this world, any true and sincere communication is impossible. This is the main cause of the decline of communication between mates.
Men and women know almost nothing about their sexuality, their masculinity and femininity. Without a clear perception of being a part of, or of representing one of these principles, it is impossible for any fusion with a partner. And that is the reason why most people are satisfied with a mechanical, stag-nant sex, or an undefined mix of feelings and emotions which drive their relationship towards further misunderstanding and solitude.
Solitude brings further solitude. Parents are unable to make productive communication with their children, and children are unable to establish communication with their parents. The same happens between love and work partners, politicians, professors, and priests. In reality, all the fields of human life are corrupted by this sickness. But it is logi-cal that it must be so: to perform open communication, we
need first to understand and know ourselves, at least par-tially. This means that to overcome the pain of solitude, we must first become good friends with ourselves, understand-ing ourselves more deeply, discoverunderstand-ing ourselves and learnunderstand-ing to Love ourselves. That’s the focal point, the only good point, to be able to understand and establish a communication with others.
When we recognize that other persons suffer our same sickness and weakness, then, we establish the first possibility to communicate, and the weight of solitude begins to vanish.
One of the main reasons of incommunicability de-rives paradoxically from our fear of being misunderstood, being judged, and being rejected. So, manifesting our desires and points of view becomes difficult.
Through observing ourselves, we become more able to identify, to understand, and to overcome our fears. Once we achieve the capacity and habit of observing ourselves deeply, we also come to understand relatively better, other people, because everyone in his manner shares the same fears, blocks, and needs.
The Trap of our Self-Pity
Self-pity is one of the worst “psychic viruses” which harm men’s mind. We have all experienced it, it’s inevitable.
It is also one of the often used tools for individual and social blackmail.
Everyday we are all victims and often “executors” of such behaviors. A clear vision is not regarded, and all the sensible persons feel a sense of guilt. We meet a poor person on the road and we have the freedom of giving him money or not. The problem is that in most cases, we are unable to make a choice. We are conditioned to act in a determinate way, so we give him money. We are conditioned by the idea of making something good, but we make something wrong, because acting unconsciously means acting wrongly. I un-derstand that this is perhaps difficult to digest, but an uncon-scious act is like a gun in the hand of a child: the results are unforeseeable. It’s a bad thing even if we don’t see the results immediately.
Society is a whole of complexes and false and hypo-critical behaviors based on the sense of guilt, conditioned by a false love toward another. Loss of interest, egoism, self-am-bition, are often covered in such behaviors. It is a common thing saying that our parents are guilty for our behavior, our personality, our fears, and conditioned attitudes. That’s true, they built the first foundation of our lives, made of various
‘you can, you can’t or that’s good or that’s wrong’, etc. But childhood, for most of us, has passed many, many years ago,
and we still keep this baggage with us. I’ve noticed behav-iors in myself, my friends, here on Facebook, even in my par-ents…that’s a comical and sad thing at the same time. “I have problems because my father (or mother) was so protec-tive or authoritarian toward me”. This is a common alchemi-cal formula of this topic: our parents are guilty and we are only poor, innocent victims (re)acting as a child, even if we are 35 (like I am) or 46 or 53 years old. And we often forget that our parents acted for our good – they were unable to do otherwise such as we are unable to do the same: conditioned minds educated by conditioned minds – this is the situation.
Searching as adults for the guilt in our parents is a perfect example of self-pity. Our parents were unable to change the education they gave us, because they were unable to do otherwise. The real problem (once again), is that we can’t make a choice, because as most of us know (not theo-retically, but in practice), we can’t reach the capacity of being and acting.
Self-pity is one of the biggest obstacles to achieving these attitudes. How can we pretend to be able to make some changes if our minds are conditioned? We react, not act. This is the terror of the situation. Another reality is that there is a concrete universal (common) law, which functions for those who are more or less conscious: for every action corresponds an exact reaction. This is not a theory, this is a fact, so it would be better to keep it in our mind as a treasure. This law is of value both for the individual and the collective fields.
To get the best results in our lives, we might become able to understand what reactions would bring every action we do, and this requires a better awareness and comprehension of the dynamics which determine our lives.
We must be awake. And to become awake we must achieve the faculty of looking at things without masks and other identifications which make many distortions in per-ceiving reality as it is. Self-pity is one of these masks, or
iden-tifications- maybe the most harmful. “All men (or women) are the same”, “I can’t live in such conditions”, “Look what you’ve made of my life”, “He’s the worst person I’ve ever met”, “You can’t understand what I’m going through at this moment”…there are many examples of self-pity. Everyone of us, being a little bit aware and of self-critical mind, could find many examples of self-pity in our daily discourses and interactions with friends, parents, at work.
Asking for help is not self-pity. Knowing when we really need to be helped is very important. Life is based on interactions, helping each other, understanding each other.
Understanding this, means being mature and open-minded.
No one can live a healthy life without interacting with oth-ers. We survive because we receive help from these “realms”
which provide us the food for our body, mind, and Being.
How could we live without food for our emotions, which is derived from nature and the relations with other members of our species? The vision of some kind of Superman who can live without any help from the outer world is unnatural, and the aim of any sober self-development system is exactly the opposite: openness, not closeness. A healthy equilibrated and mature society has its roots in its collective of individuals who have reached the balance between giving and receiving, not for personal and egoistic purposes, but as the result of the statement that all is maintained by unity, a reciprocal col-laboration. Self-pity doesn’t mean asking for help when we really need it. And it doesn’t mean moaning. Sometimes, we have an urge to “release our baggage”, confessing to a friend who we know can understand our problems, doubts, fears, etc. This can be an expression or a need of our Being. Oth-erwise, self-pity means enjoying our frustrations, physical or emotive sufferings and discomforts, doing this without any purpose to find some kind of solution to overcome what af-flicts us at this moment. If we analyze ourselves and oth-ers, we’ll discover that human beings have a tendency toward the behavior of self-pity, and sometimes this becomes a real pathological problem. Human beings are really and deeply
attached to their suffering, and this tendency is visible in the fetishistic habit of maintaining alive in their memory, the
“ghosts of the individual past”, fragments of memory of what was beautiful and fulfilling for them, and which they have lost. We remain morbidly attached to these memories. Per-sons love to suffer the pain generated by remembering what they have lost: they label such states as “melancholy” and even “love”. But, if we look a little deeper and objectively (we don’t need any ‘special skill’ to do this, only sincerity), we’ll see that this is only a kind of fetishism. Nothing more, nothing less. The most curious thing is that these remem-brances do not arise to make a sort of joy, but a suffering.
Men are very strange animals.
Now, how is it possible that people enjoy suffering?
This is an important thing to ponder on.
Self-pity represents our wish to not free ourselves from pain, and it becomes a sort of nutriment. Generally, this behavior needs external support, the attention of anoth-er panoth-erson is needed. Attracting the attention of the othanoth-er is the purpose of this kind of self-pity. But, sometimes, this be-havior becomes pathological, and the outer attention is not required yet. It becomes an inner dialogue, and the convic-tion of a suffering that can’t be overcome is enough to feed the emotive. This is a very dangerous behavior, and the in-dividual isolates himself from the world, loses every contact with reality, nourishing himself only with suffering. There is another cause for this ‘cancer’ of the mind: the desire to feel ourselves. This would perhaps sound strange, but almost all people are unable to feel themselves in a natural way. No one has taught us to feel ourselves and we can’t do this because we are not awakened.
We sleep constantly. But feeling ourselves is our big-gest need. If a person does not have a perception of him-self, even if false, he is bound for self-destruction. This is the main reason why we wear many types of masks, to feel
something, however illusory, of ourselves. The pleasure and pain are the two “energies” through which we can “be con-scious of ourselves”. They are the most intense expressions in our life. One who feels a pleasure or pain has a self-presence experience of a different, intense kind. Since childhood we are not educated to feel pleasure, so we don’t know how to achieve the intensity of every drive and need. I don’t want to say that a man doesn’t know how to feel pleasure in his life, but rather that he doesn’t know how to make pleasure an art capable of keeping him in a state of constant mental vigi-lance and emotive intensity. So, he is forced to sense himself through pain and suffering. Maybe these affirmations might seem absurd, but they represent the real condition of every man, and this can be demonstrated through a serious and constant self-observation of ourselves in our daily lives.
Observation is the only tool to demonstrate some-thing in a more objective way. The other is dreaming and living our illusory life. So, the tendency to feel suffering and pain develops a false individual center and we achieve the il-lusory perception of being. The majority of persons are more conscious of the agglomerate of their problems and difficul-ties and less of the joyous and the beautiful. The tendency for suffering is a common thing for humans in general. Have you ever noticed that the most interesting news in various newspapers are always negative? Have you ever noticed that when an incident happens, every witness has the morbid cu-riosity to see what has happened, even if they know that what they will see would upset them? They search for a negative shock to live an intense emotive experience.
But, how to live an intense emotive experience that is positive? This would be a gift for everyone, but no one has taught us how to do this in this morbid society we live in, based on a repressive religiosity that preaches fear and sense of guilt. To become able to better manage our life, we must free ourselves from the culture of suffering and pain, and dis-cover all the masks of our self-pity. If we don’t do this, we
will transform our difficulties into a narcissistic from of self-glorification of our misfortunes, blocking every possibility to act efficiently and decisively.
The Wish of “Revenge”
This is really another main problem along the path toward self-development. Revenge towards life in general, a
This is really another main problem along the path toward self-development. Revenge towards life in general, a