Me, Myself & I- 3

We as teachers cannot make you into that which we should wish for you, and were you to work to please the higher order alone, you would not become lastingly in that which you have given over to. This is the covenant of the ego. It is as mysterious and profound as you might expect it to be! How stupendously configured we are! How protected we be, that we may immortalise qualities which we now choose - yet it has to be of our own choosing - deliberate, exact, and of our own.

Many teachings appear to contradict this understandably. It is usually given to be honorable that we should put ourselves last before all others and that we can trust in those who are higher and wiser to know for us, to guide us, and to hopefully, in part, do for us. This is why men will go to professionals for many things, not the least of which we may ask a priest for a blessing and a weatherman for his chart, having more confidence in their expertise and knowledge than our own.

As esotericists we know that there are many good deeds we may become involved in that are also self-serving. As hard as it sounds, we are aware that if we teach well it enhances our own learning, if we nourish we ourselves shall thrive because of it, if we give charity (and charitably into the bargain) we do also have our returns. Therefore, we know, that karmicly, ethically, virtuely and accordingly, we profit by ‘doing good’. However, we do not ‘do good’ for self-serving reasons primarily, we do not even manage them for self-preservation. We engage in them because of the sense of both correctness and joy which follows when our invisible helpers are encouraged by our acts of faith and goodwill.

Me, Myself & I- Part 2

There once was a man who ran a small drug dispensary. It was rather a private and small business with low overheads. He had no actual rent to pay for as he worked out from either his home, or as was preferred, he would go out to the people person-to-person and deliver what was required.

His scales were electronic and very portable. He had an assortment of plastic bags and a calculator, a little change purse, a discreet satchel to place it all in, alongside the substance which was already divided into neat and accurate packages.

Although the turnover was considerable, and his mark-up and profits brought in ten times the average wage, this travelling apothecary of a man had difficulty in saving much, if not all, for his monies went to pay the cost of his gambling.

When he was found to have died from a premature death (through violent means) the authorities had many choices as to who may have been the murderer :

a) his supplier

b) one of his customers

c) his wife

d) his brother (to whom he owed money)

e ) his broker (of the street variety - money lender)

f) his mistress

g) one of his gambling debtors

or

h) a ‘hit-man’ employed by one of the above

As it turned out he had actually killed himself.

Shortly after the funeral he was called into that part of death which incorporates the wastelands of earthly living. Here he did experience the many insanities which he himself had promulgated whilst he was alive. Every nerve-ending which had been excommunicated from some other's body in obeisance to the asphyxiating chemical dust which drew their life, their passion, their comprehension and their selfhood right out from them; every misplaced pain, every angel’s tear, every struggling mother, gagged word and strangled thought; every corrupted virtue - poked at him with the needle of the after-death message.

There is no sleep in this condition. There is no reprieve, no rest, no pause between the first message and the last. Our apothecary had to make account for that which he had had part in being cause to; and it was terrible.

Much later, when regret was imprinted upon his sorry, sorry, self he came to that place where one collects all of the investments they have begun in their lifetime comprising their great hopes, huge enthusiasms and life-filled enterprises. These are those things which require an honest self and a true heart, yet originate also in the kernel of who we most readily and ordinarily are.

There he found very little awaiting him. He discovered that he had by and large forgotten himself in such false charities as he had been most given to. All of the folk on the authority’s check-list (with the exception of the possible hit-man) had demanded of this man his time, his thought, his obedience, even his congeniality. He had put them all before any real sense of true wanting. He had assumed that second best (meaning: second to his own true self ) was the way that one lived life. It had not occurred to him to leave the pattern which was feeding itself and not his soul. And yet sadly, not one recipient amongst them had truly cared for him: for his identity, for his desires, for his life and what it could have stood for.

He may have appeared as an icon of selfishness, when viewed from the perspective of his trade, but in truth he was a weak man who had tried very hard (in all of the wrong ways) to do what was required of him. He suffered for being wrong. And he was wrong because he had not the ability to confer with his true self. Had he been able to refer to that protective inner wisdom which knows both consequence and worthwhile desire, he would have corrected many decisions which later impelled him to keep being answerable for.

Fundamentally, the argument is that an individual would not instinctively go against himself and cause himself harm as first preference. Therefore, if we but knew our true hearts we would not be capable of sin or a disabling misplaced self-sacrifice such as our chemist found himself given to. If we tumble out of grace into this democracy of wills then we are but conceived in another one’s dreams, yet shall not and cannot be made by them.

Me, Myself & I- a Cosmic Biography- June 5th-9th, 1999

“Me:-  a name I call myself”

    -The “Doh, Re, Mi” song, The Sound of Music

When we say the words “me, myself and I” to ourselves we experience a containment, a familiarity and a censor from the outer world. We begin at the beginning, as it were, with that innate sense of privacy which we dwell in, of that Sanctus, cordoned, rarefied soul-space .... singular to being, yet arterially defined in Father God.

Our sense of such being, in conscious wakefulness and urging, needs be that first reference from which all actions thereafter flow. And although this appears to be a given and most obvious to the fact, it is not largely occurring in ‘modern Man’ today.

In contradiction to all that has been obtained in fledgling egohood there has been a loss of continuity that the soul awareness once gave us. In past consciousness there was not the capacity for such selfhood as distinguished and contrasted in the singular, for the comprehension of a man saw his being implied most everywhere, and the outer world with all of its history implied and living within him as well.

However, there was this accompanying continuity known by him which gave him his selfhood also. Because he found his self to be in totem and meaning, in living and binding relationships most everywhere, his ‘I’ and his being were relevantly and apparently real to him. This World was his being, and the outer Cosmos his parent soul.

Now by comparison, the gift of the modern ego equips us with the powers to distinguish the detailed differences which exist within this one Creation. We are also, most importantly, going through a process of discrimination whereby we are actively deciding what there is in the world, that we should prefer to be dominant within our own selfhood, and have choice also as to that which we would willingly cast away. We are no longer given to everything. Just as a man who has moved from an entire house into a little room, with the narrowing of our consciousness we are sorting out and making space for those things which we hold most important to us and not bringing over the rest.

In order to begin to qualify our lives in this manner, and to do so productively as far as our future selves are concerned, each individual has to answer for themselves, from themselves.

The point of saying that we need to refer firstly in conference with our own being is essential insofar as we are not living to merely decorate our inner chambers with but a nonsense to the soul within. That which goes to form our lives needs be connected to the reality of both heart and reason that it be maintained in a living fashion to our inner life. If we are to refer to others (to social law, to popular opinion, to demands set upon us from other individuals who would have us do as they do) before that of our own decree, then we have no living connection to that of our own future.

Without a desire that comes right out from our own being for that which we take to ourselves, there is no living spiritual thread that can be maintained and worked upon.

Equally it can be said: What we do and live and become within the outer world, directly persists within us inwardly and marks out our future lives to come.  If we are not respecters of our own sense of being and give over our lives to the choosings of others our ‘congeniality gone-too-far’ will betray us. For example:

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