/14

So we come to a great mystery. It is often misunderstood. It is a huge stumbling block. If you can cope with it we are going to make some real progress.

I recall at school being taught CPR on a rubber doll. We have all seen people who have died and been brought back to life. It’s a feature of many TV shows, out come the paddles, someone shouts “charging” someone else “all clear”, a convulsion of the body and life returns. Books and documentaries abound on near death experiences.

What we are going to talk about has no relation to any of the above. When  Jesus Christ underwent resurrection after three days it was a totally new thing. This was not a coming back to life after three days as a human being. This was a new being, a transformed physical and eternal human being. Examinations of the Turin Shroud show and reveal a force beyond our ability to understand, never mind reproduce, that caused the famous imprint. Jesus Christ had a risen body that was the absolute divine recreation of the human body. One that could appear, disappear, cloud our eyes so as not to see him. This was a body like no other. One fit for eternity, one fit to dwell in the spiritual realm, the first born of the dead.

This is the central plank, the cornerstone of the faith experience. If we fail to grasp this seminal event in history then truly all is lost, all we do is an utter waste of time.

It doesn't matter how steeped we are in science, philosophy or theology, a failure to see clearly this event, for what it was, leaves us blind and stumbling in darkness. The event was witnessed by hundreds of people. People died rather than deny the truth of this phenomenal event, people still die willingly today because of this event.

If it didn't happen, then billions of people are seriously deluded. Although the event was two thousand years ago, people are still experiencing and encountering this living, resurrected Jesus, who of course is God, part of the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

What we see in this event is our own future. A time yet to come. A time when soul and this new creation of our bodies are reunited at the end of time.

This is our hope, this is what we live for, the most important thing to live for and work towards, nothing else in life comes anywhere near this for importance. It should occupy us every waking moment of every day. It is the reason we are alive.

/13

In reaching out with my prayer into the ether asking God to show himself (see previous chapters), actually to be honest it was to any deity or supernatural being, I found myself eventually no longer alone. It was of course the God of the Christians who allowed me to draw close. Not that I saw God, that would have terrified me and I would probably have checked myself into a psychiatric clinic. But in the same way we can feel the wind but not see it, sense the light of day but not see the actual light but only its effects, so I felt the very breath of God within around and about me.

I was not alone. But I could still feel loneliness. I wasn't perfect. But over the many years since I have been led to see how very far away I am from the purity and beauty of God, so unfit to have anything to do with God. I feel naked and ashamed and completely vulnerable, and that is a welcome purifying spotlight that leads us all to want to say sorry to God and to ask for forgiveness for what we call our sins.

So I had made some progress. I hope we all have. Having explored my inner being, having searched for an encounter, having found what I was looking for, having felt the warm presence of the divine, I should have settled the question once and for all. This should be THE END.

This experience with God isn't an end, but a beginning, the start of a life long journey.

What do you do when you find God, apart from falling to your knees? Well a challenge is issued to dismantle your walls and change your life to live as God commands and not simply as we see fit.

The greatest struggle in seeking union with the divine is smashing down all inner resistance and there is a great deal to be attacked and demolished.

We have to reach, in this journey, a point of absolute submission to this creator and giver of life. To be prepared to hand over your very life itself to God, to remove all barriers and all sense of “I”. How easy it is to write these words, how easy it is to read them, how very very hard to do in reality. It is a great struggle.

All our ideas, values and plans, motives everything else has to removed and replaced in order for us to be made new in the only place that matters, our souls.

Handing yourself over is hard beyond comprehension.

Reaching that point of utter submission brings a wonderful reward. It brings peace to all the warring internal struggles.

A word of warning, getting to this stage in our spiritual growth, is not the end. Every time we climb a mountain and think at last I have arrived, you grab your breath and as you are about to relax suddenly before you appears a fresh mountain. It will always be this way, always. We can never complete this journey. It will last the rest of your life.

But it is worth it.

/12

There can't seriously be a brick wall. There isn’t of course, unless you place one, as so many do, in your own mind. A bit like those strangely deluded people who deny that the earth is round. We can have eyes but still be completely blind to the world. The object of our exercises so far has been to teach us to see without visible light. To see the world and ourselves as we really are and the world at as great a depth as our knowledge and imagination will allow.

I talked in an earlier chapter about once seeing a statue of Buddha in a shop window and having what appeared at the time to be a completely irrational response to fall down, to prostrate myself.

It was in fact far from irrational. If you have truly taken time to examine your own inner workings and thought about the nature of being human and how we work, you will be aware that while we have certain freedoms a lot of the time we are running like programs on a computer, our responses are not of our choosing. We can't decide to laugh when we injure ourselves badly, we can't think away a viral infection or really control much of anything in fact when we really examine ourselves. We can't chooses to fall in love. These things happen, whether we like them or not. Just as we can't choose to be born, nor can we choose the natural length of our lives or our heights or skin colour.

So we also have built into our beings a need for something greater than ourselves and a knowledge that there is something beyond us. We can of course, as we do with so many things subvert that knowledge and need and twist it into something else but nevertheless it is there in all human beings. No human society on earth has ever been found that did not have a profound certainty that we were not alone and that there was something greater than us that required a response from us.

It comes as part of the basic specification of being human. It is like having a heart, a fundamental part of who we are and how we behave. 

So you see there is no brick wall in engaging with the divine unless we substitute this fundamental need with say a communist personality cult or drown it out with other obsessions.

Therefore we have to, if we are willing and able, to ask why we are built this way, what is this inner need all about, what is divine and what is missing?

It is a feeling of not being complete and we are driven to seek completeness, to make ourselves whole. It is so easy to attempt to fill this gap in our lives, with food, drink, possessions and obsessions. No matter how hard we try, we never achieve that state of completeness through these means. We can never drink, work, earn or have enough to fill that basic human need to be complete.

So where to now?

/11

When you have journeyed to the centre of your being and seen who you really are, you will become aware that you have no recollection of not being. You will also perhaps for the first time realise you are not alone. Up till now you have been an isolated individual entity, locked inside your body. No one can see the real you and no matter how much you may yearn to share all that you are and be perfectly understood and even loved by another there is this barrier, this insurmountable isolation that comes with being human. We can express inadequately something of ourselves to others but we can never mix ourselves and immerse ourselves into the reality experienced by another person. We will be forever the jug of milk beside the cup of coffee. We can't pour the two together to become truly one united being, no matter how intimate we may become, such a joining is still beyond us. We are alone, locked within the prison of our bodies.

However on reaching that inner place where we realise we have a soul, suddenly that isolation flows away and we are find that we are not alone. The isolation ends and we find we are in fact perfectly loved by another.

I cannot tell, what notion of God resides in your head, assuming you have any thoughts on the subject at all. This is probably a good time to throw them all out the window. God is not a projection of anything within us, he is not some human idea writ large. The reality of the little light you might achieve in a lifetime is nothing. God is beyond boundary or definition. We do not have a vocabulary to describe that which is beyond comprehension.

That's the starting point we need to reach, we know nothing and can never even begin to imagine anything of God.

Nothing.

Can a fly resting on your wall comprehend the Milky Way? We are less able than the fly to comprehend the ineffableness of God.

So if we thought we were making progress in answering the basic question of who we are, we are now in a position where we are once again faced with a seemingly impossible task.

Who is God? We have a soul, we now know we are not alone. We may have sipped from the cup of perfect love but we are standing before the greatest and most powerful mystery.

Where on earth can we go from here? There is nothing, apparently but a brick wall. Is this the end?

/10

Once you have travelled far enough on this road of self awareness and come to realise you are so much more than a random collection of atoms in a totally random universe but rather something far more complex, what next? 

You have found that hidden seed that lies at the very core of your being. It is clear that you belong  to a different order of being, to something more than your DNA and genes. If you are a wise and thoughtful being then this seed cannot be left alone. You would want more than anything to see what happens when it grows and flourishes.

It sounds so easy but in the beginning it is a terrifying struggle because in order to let this seed grow you are going to be challenged to do something that is counter intuitive. You will have to die to self. You will have to want this so badly that you are prepared to go to any lengths and sacrifice all that you hold dear in order to let the seed not only grow but burst into the  fruitful fullness of life.

You will have to walk to the cliff edge and throw yourself off, trusting that you will not die in the process, and it will be a feeling of dying. It will be scary. And you will have no idea what is going to happen when you let go of everything and trust there is something greater than you.

This seed is your soul and in order to grow and burst into life you have meet the reality of truth. Meet and come face to face with the One who gave it to you.

Your life will be turned upside down and inside out, but as one who has travelled that road the reward is greater than you can ever imagine. As you start, it will be the first step of a lifelong journey of discovery and growth. 

Your soul will grow. Your relationship with the very giver of that life within you will keep deepening and it is a journey into infinity itself you can never reach the end.

But it will also be a war. A war with your human nature, your own desires, the peer pressure to conform to society. All of these must be tamed and subjugated only as you do that will you truly become free, truly discover, your real nature.

It is very hard, it is a very narrow path and the temptations are many to deviate from this journey.

But once you have tasted the divine, you will thirst for more, your soul will cry out for more. You will give everything just to know more, to be ever closer to the one who has given you life.

You will begin to understand who you really are, and it will amaze you.

/9

To be honest this is so personal to me, that I don't know if I can even begin to explain it. Forgive me in advance for this poor attempt. 

To start, think of an onion, think of the layers, think of peeling each layer back until we reach the centre. That’s what I meant when I talked about deconstructing my brain. Or finding out what made me tick, what lay at the centre of my brain.

Except, we aren't talking about my physical brain rather about that essence that is me.

It began with a simple decision to discover whether there existed anything else apart from what I could see or theorise and test in a lab or by extensive mathematical research by others more able in these fields.

I recall getting ready slowly that night for bed. The bedroom was soft and warm and gently lit for the long dark nights of midwinter. I was getting ready for bed, but it would be a long time before I would be asleep and a long night of serious thinking lay ahead as normal. I shot a thought out into space asking a simple question, a throwing down of a challenge.

God, I don’t know if you exist, if you do reveal yourself to me. I felt a bit silly. Nevertheless having made this sincere request I started to examine my thoughts, my emotions, my trigger points, my drivers. To look at what made me laugh, cry, get angry, indeed every aspect of my life, peeling back layer upon layer of what made me who I am. I was in modern parlance looking for the source code.

Every night for the next two or three years I worked on myself making steady progress. I remember one startling night managing to see colour so vividly that it seemed to blind me and burn through my eyeballs, on another occasion as I tried to grasp infinity I was utterly overwhelmed by terror as I caught a fleeting glimpse before running for cover and sitting bolt upright in bed gasping for breath. There was great fear in many of the places I entered on this journey to the centre of my being. Often I felt that I teetered on the edge of cliff and to proceed would lead to death. 

There were many such experiences and the further and deeper I went the scarier it became, the less comfortable I felt until one night I found something at the very centre of my being that is impossible to convey in words as I have no vocabulary that covers adequately what I saw. And I did see, it wasn't a feeling, I had moved far beyond feeling, I encountered something that was not me and yet was part of me. It was a small flickering flame, except it wasn't, yet it appeared to be, burning at the core of my being, but without consuming me in anyway. I could observe, but could go no further.

I had reached my destination. I had found, dare I say it? The answer to my question, God if you exist reveal yourself to me.

And so, within in the very depths of my being I found a very small light waiting to be let loose on my being.

A journey and a relationship was born, one I am still on, a road.

I was at peace. I was on fire.

But that’s enough of this personal intrusion. Forgive me for this indulgence.

/8

If you will allow me a necessary indulgence this section will be of a personal nature simply to illustrate the start of my own journey, I hope this will be the only time that it will be necessary to inject myself into this unfolding development of ideas.

After a fashion I had it easy as all around me as the 1960s drew to a close was a sense of mysticism. We were encouraged to tune in and drop out, The Beatles had been sitting at the feet of Indian Gurus. George Harrison was writing and singing songs like Within You, Without You. Meditation and mind expansion was in the air.

So in my late teenage years I began to experiment not with drugs but with my mind. At first it was playing with words, poetry, ideas and the beginning my life long passion thinking about the nature of time. I was fascinated by the Theory of Relativity and all the questions that flowed from Einstein’s conclusions about time and speed and space. It was a time of great wonder.

Concepts of otherness and alternatives seemed to be in the very air we breathed.

All this was but a tiller no of the soil that prepared me for the start of what looking back must have taken me three years of daily toil. I’m sure my memory isn't accurate on this time scale or indeed the frequency with which I worked on the idea, nevertheless it was a long process, an intense process and that!s all I want to convey. This was no overnight event.

At the end I had only just begun, barely having taken a first step.

I started on the process of deconstructing my mind. That sounds really weighty nonsense so I will have to try and explain this further and as best I can. 

/7

Ok, this gets a bit heavy now, if you don't understand the following skip over it, certainly don't waste your time, it is simply here to give some substance to what we have been leading up to, in the previous sections, I hope to make it more intelligible as we progress through this work and by the end of this book you will have a deeper understanding of the question we have been looking at, namely, Who are we? 

“Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) understood the soul to be the first actuality of the living body. 

Consequent to this, he distinguished three orders of life: plants, which feed and grow; animals, which add sensation to the operations of plants; and humans, which add intellect to the operations of animals. 

Concerning the human soul, his epistemological theory required that, since the knower becomes what he knows, the soul is definitely not corporeal—if it is corporeal when it knows what some corporeal thing is, that thing would come to be within it. Therefore, the soul has an operation which does not rely on a body organ, and therefore the soul can exist without a body. Furthermore, since the rational soul of human beings is a subsistent form and not something made of matter and form, it cannot be destroyed in any natural process.The full argument for the immortality of the soul and Aquinas' elaboration of Aristotelian theory is found in Question 75 of the First Part of the Summa Theologica.”

Another writer puts it this way :

“In many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions, the soul is the incorporeal essence of a living being.”

Now let’s tone things down to more normal language as I have a great dislike of language which obscures meaning by failing to use plain speech. This is not the same as dumbing down ideas, but we have to be able to express concepts in everyday language otherwise we fail on every level of communication.

If you go back over the previous sections of this book then you will clearly see, at least I hope you can or I have failed miserably, that the answer, the thread, the idea contained within each exercise or description can be reduced to this one word, soul.

This is who you see when you look in the mirror. You see yourself on some level as you really are, your true self which has no bodily physical existence, your essence, the thing that make you who you are, a unique soul.

I think you need to step back now, before reading any further,  and draw breath as we have come a long way in a very short time and yet our journey has barely begun.

/6

My earliest memory is of bending down in a Sunday best coat aged about three and turning over a nasturtium leaf and finding a caterpillar. We all have memories. Have you ever examined that memory closely. If I bring that memory back into my mind, I can see the leaf, the hedge behind it and the path to the front gate. But on examining it more closely I see that in fact my point of view is from outside my body. I see myself doing this act, I don't see it through my eyes I don't fully experience the “seeing” of the event. There are no photographs of this event. I am not remembering a snapshot and confusing it with a real event.

I could go on and list other memories and describe the same experience over and over again. This ranges from memories that are over sixty years old to those of more recent times.

You might want to take some time now to examine your own memories making sure none of them come from a photograph.

If we are seeing ourselves in memory from another point of view what does that say about who we are?

Have you experienced thinking thoughts, mulling something over while another part of you is also examining the thoughts and ideas? Have you ever tried to catch a thought? No, it is not sign of madness it’s the way we work. We can observe our brain at work. But who or what is this thing that observes what we do and think and say?

Which is the real you? If your brain is damaged  by time, accident or illness, this other you for want of a better word will still be there intact and whole.

This is the real you. Isn't it? You recognise that don't you?

Referring back to an earlier example I gave about seeing a statue of Buddha in a window, my memory is clearly a view from behind my body. This is a very clear almost dualistic moment, where my emotional self is thinking about falling down on my knees, while the me, that sees the memory, is disagreeing, and knows this is the wrong reaction, well not so much wrong, as misdirected.

So once again we are looking in our mirror and asking the question who am I?

/5

I wonder, could you take some time and go and find a seed, any seed, sunflower, apple, cosmos or even a mustard seed. If you have a magnifying glass even better. Place it in the palm of your hand and study it, take as long as you need.

Now as we have already established all you can observe is an outer casing, you can't see inside. Even if it had a transparent casing you still wouldn't be able to see it fully. If you pull it apart you will still not see the very thing we are looking for, which is the trigger for life.

If you keep it in your pocket or mantelpiece and observe it, the great secret of life contained within it will not be revealed. You can keep it for as long as you like but nothing is going to happen. It needs to be buried in the ground and there hidden from sight the great miracle of life, unseen by us, unobserved, will take place and the seed appears to die and then rises into a complex plant. I regularly marvel at the apple tree I first sowed in a pot last century and is now lovely little tree.

Now the same is true of every human being. We have the gift of life. A seed. We can do one of two things with it,  keep it like the  cosmos seed and do nothing with it, except keep looking in the mirror or we can take that precious gift and bury it in good soil and watch what happens when appearing to die we spring into the life we are meant to live.

In order to live we have to be prepared to die.

So who are you? Are you an apple seed or an apple tree?

How do we die like a seed? What soil do we need?

/4

If we continue these thought experiments we will come to realise that our sight is very limited indeed. Having sailed in the Atlantic, it is a strange experience to see all the surface activity and yet be unable to perceive in anyway the life that exists  hundreds of meters below the surface. If we walk in a meadow we cannot see the complex life that lies just below the surface, never mind what is going on beneath our feet many kilometres below. Not only can we not see the large things that lie below our feet we cannot see the microscopic life cycles that exist all around us. We need air to breathe and yet we cannot see it.

So what we see is very limited indeed, as I think we now know. Yes it is true we can take X-rays and Cat scans, use microscopes and electron microscopes to catch glimpses of the world we cannot see with our eyes, but still we cannot see properly.

You cannot see the anger in a heart, the angst, the pain, loneliness, depression, another mind at work and you can't see a single thought.

Yet there are impulses hidden deep within each person that on the surface we can't explain anymore that we can explain love. We can experience the different kinds of love but we can't explain it. Please note sex is not love.

Let me give you a glimpse of that hidden impulse. Once when I was a teenager I saw a statue of Buddha in a shop window, this stirred in me a desire to throw myself onto the ground and to adore. It felt very silly but it was very strong.This is not a series of thoughts about Buddhism.

But what was it that stirred in me that sumner morning? Have you experienced that feeling?

/3

Our next mind experiment requires deep concentration. You are standing in an Art Gallery. Before you is a framed painting. The paper canvas is white. In the very centre is a red dot. That’s all you see. Moving closer you see the dot has an irregular shape and is not a perfect circle.

The painting has no title, so no clue is given to help interpret the painting. What do you see?

Does it symbolise menarche? Do you then see a young girl on the cusp of womanhood?

Is it the first prick of the diabetic, the start of a nosebleed? Is it a hesitant full stop, the ending of life? Is it just a dot on white paper?

Is it a beginning or an ending, a statement or an observation?

The most important point is what do you see when you close your eyes and try to imagine what it might be?

That’s one level of seeing. Look more closely, can you imagine the journey of the ink or the paint to the canvas, can you see the atomic structure, the light absorbing property that allows the eye that isn't colour blind to perceive a shade of red. If you are colour blind what journey of meaning do you see?

Then there is the paper, the machinery behind its construction, the science of paper making, then back to the tree, its life cycle starting with a seed, the fruitful soil, its first breaking through into light from the darkness of the soil.

At what level do you see all this?

Now go back to mirror and look at yourself with fresh eyes and see beyond what first appears.

Who are you?

/2

Let’s start with a game. A mind game. You need to take this slowly, I think, and give it all some thought. 

However before we start I sincerely hope that in asking the question, Who are You, you haven't answered and defined yourself by your name or your life experience. You aren't a musician, a dancer, a dentist or a mother, father or grandparent. They might fulfill a certain use as descriptors but they aren't true answers to the question Who Are You.

The first mind game.

Imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror. 

You are five years old.  Who are you? Who is looking back at you?

You move on, you are 25 years old. Who are you? Who is looking back at you?

You are 65 years old. Who are you now? Who looks back at you?

You are 90 years old, now who are you? Who looks back at you?

Are you simply looking at a growing and decaying human figure? No you aren't, because if you look closely you will see a shadow of your true self that doesn't alter with your decaying body. Something inside you, that is way more than a collection of cells and atoms.

The second is harder, repeat the first exercise but you are blind. Remember blind people don't see anything at all if they are totally blind, it isn't the blackness of closed eyelid, it is the absence of sight, no stimuli for your brain to process at all.

So now who are you? Who do you see? You don't see body at all. You have moved inside, closer in fact to seeing your true self.

Now imagine you are dead. Are you still there? Imagine you are one day old, are you still you?

Who is this you?

/1

We have to start with the assumption that you know nothing of the reality of the world around you. You may have a mish mash of fragmentary knowledge mixed up with passing fashionable ideas. You might even have constructed something that looks like a sensible construct but if viewed properly is put together back to front and inside out. There will be words you think you know the meaning of but really harbour  only erroneous shadows of truth.

So in our present society we have to make the assumption that you know absolutely nothing. This in your case may be an error. But since I don't know you I have to make certain rules to create a starting place for all. If you are further along the journey you will eventually find your appropriate level.

Half a century and more ago we could have started with a certain assurance that there was a common basis, building blocks we could all agree on, sadly for reasons we won't go into here, the reliable intergenerational passing on of knowledge has collapsed as our society has become self absorbed and blinded by consumerism.

Sometimes finding a beginning is a daunting task. There are in this case multiple starting points. If I knew you I might have a clue as to the starting point. However that's not possible. It was once before when I was able to start this journey with a pen friend six thousand miles away in the infancy of the Internet  but you?

Who are you?

And so by an act of serendipity we find the starting point. If you missed it, we will ask again, Who are you? What are you? Perhaps even why are you? Why do you exist, deep inside where the secrets lie, who are you what do you find? How do you define your existence?

Who are you and why are you here?