Values. What are they? What do they refer to exactly? What are your values? How do your values manifest through your actions? Are your values in harmony with your actions? What would that even look like? A more pertinent question might be - Are we even capable of knowing our own values, or is it more complicated than it appears from a surface point of view?
If we have any hope of knowing ourselves deeply in order that we may transform ourselves for the better, then these are all questions of supreme importance, the answers upon which we will shed new light, and fresh perspective.
We will achieve that understanding through first learning to recognise the variability of our own values and how they are expressed (of which I will define 3 distinct categories; our perceived, idealised, and enacted values). The content of these classifications are revealed to us through the observation of our actions in within the world, our speech, and the contents of our mind. Becoming intimate and honest with ourselves about our actions, speech and thoughts is both the first step, and the perennial step, to understanding our idealised, perceived and enacted values, and ultimately ourselves.
With this information, that is, a deeper understanding of our own personal values across this handful of subdomains, we can see ever more clearly where we, as individuals, are in harmony with ourselves, and the rest of the world. This internal harmony, or lack thereof, is at the root of what I believe to be our very sense of fulfilment and self enrichment as individuals. I also believe that this sense of wholeness, or sense of lacking, dependant on the extent to which you are in harmony or out of harmony with your values, is of paramount importance in this day and age, in which we are, as a global society, ever more fragmented and removed from an obvious and concrete pathway to internal salvation of any kind, spiritual or otherwise.
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Around the middle of last year, I began attending a councillor every few weeks over the course of the months leading up to my 2024 tour of America. I had reached out because there was a sense within me that, despite knowing that there were specific things I wanted to achieve and to overcome, I seemed to have a limited ability (or even perhaps a complete inability) to actually put into action what I thought that I most deeply wanted to embody.
The first and most immediate lesson I came to realise was that, by explicitly stating out loud my thoughts and feelings about myself, and having to elucidate that information in an understandable enough way for a complete stranger to comprehend, I was able to begin putting together a more comprehensive vision of myself and the construction of my being. Through this dialogue of speech, I was able to clarify my own thoughts and actions to myself.
I think what many of us are prone to do is to analyse our own thoughts within our heads, with our inner dialogue, speaking to ourselves. But this allows us to cut an infinite amount of corners, as we know (or think we know) certain aspects about ourselves so intimately, that we don’t have to explain them to ourselves for us to understand them. We have already constructed narratives and reasonings for ourselves, and those constructions are embedded in the bedrock of our self perception, so when we think things through to ourselves, there are innumerable factors which don’t have to be fleshed out and are therefore glossed over as preconceptions.
This ‘self lore’, which we could equally call ‘self delusion’, is built on 10 thousand bricks of preconception; preconceptions which are inaccessible to a stranger. If we want to really explain ourselves in a way in which a stranger could begin to understand us as we understand ourselves, then we must take them on a guided tour of the temple of our mind, must show them the bedrock, and be able to explain and clarify its construction. If who we think we are is at least relatively in the range of who we actually are (displayed in our actions within the world), then a stranger, after some in depth communication, should be able to perceive us in a light in which we find at least somewhat agreeable in its, at the very least, shallow definition. If that cognisance is not able to be reached, then it is an indicator of our own self perceptions blocking out the reality of ourselves, for whatever reason. If we try our best to explain ourselves and find we still aren’t understood, then we are either misperceiving ourselves as other than what we truly are, or our ability to communicate what we perceive as ourselves is greatly lacking.
Let me introduce you more formally to some concepts I’ve mentioned briefly already. These concepts are the 3 subcategories of our action within the world: the action of our Body, the action of our Speech, and the action of our Mind. The sum of our beings entire engagement with this world can be delegated amongst the interrelation of our actions of Body, Speech and Mind.
Our actions of Body, Speech and Mind are us, and our ability to observe our own thoughts, speech and movements of the body within the world is our very ability to see and know ourselves clearly. If we cannot maintain attention of our body, or of what we say, then even more elusive will be our patterns of thought, and we will live in self delusion as to who we truly are.
This cumulative action which is our very selves, is known in Buddhism as Karma. The aggregated actions of Body, Speech and Mind is the superimposition of all the actions of our entire being. This is our Karma - this is us.
So why is all of this important? Well it relates directly to the analogy of ourselves as either in our out of harmony with ourselves. Harmony implies the constructive coexistence of different tones that gives rise to a chorus greater than any of the individual melodies alone. These different ‘tones’ are our actions in the world. They are the the melodies of our body, speech and mind.
To be ‘in harmony’ implies that ones thoughts are conducive with ones speech, and simultaneously our physical actions in the world.
To be 'out of harmony’ implies that the way we think internally and the ways in which we speak and act externally are in opposition to one another.
Now that we’ve established a framework of understanding our actions within the world as being built on a basis of essentially 3 aspects, and that the culmination of those aspects is basically akin to ourselves as we are, outside of our ‘self lore’ or ‘self perception/misperceptions’ of ourselves, we can continue en route to the understanding of our values, and the relationships we have with them.
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What do I mean when I say ‘values’? In the everyday sense of the word, value is a measure of the worth and applicability of any particular thing to an individual. It is a spectrum that ranges from blatantly invaluable and therefore unwanted, to highly valuable and therefore desirable. In this sense our personal values are those things which we as individuals place as the most important, above all else; they are the things, the people, and ideals we cherish most paramount to our being as we currently exist.
Just as we have broken up our actions into three classes; those of body, speech and mind, in order for us to more succinctly apprehend the intricacies of our interactions with the world, we will now the do the same with our values by introducing three subsections of value that we each exhibit.
It should be noted that, body, speech and mind - the three classes of action - are a long established format of examination of our behaviour that has its roots in Buddhism; The buddha called our actions of body speech and mind the ‘three doors’ as they are the 3 ways by which we engage with the world. Much discussion has been done on body speech and mind and you can find endless resources on their explanation if you just research them. In contrast, the three classes of value which I am about to introduce have arisen from my own contemplation, and hence the terminology will be new and unique to this discussion.
Those 3 classes of value are perceived, idealised, and enacted. Our perceived values are the values we think we have, those that we perceive ourselves valuing. They may or may not reflect reality, depending on the individuals own ignorance. Whether or not they reflect reality is clarified in contrasting them with our enacted values. Our enacted values are those values which make themselves evident through our actions (of body speech and mind) within the world. For example, one may perceive themselves to value truth, however they may simultaneously lie every day of their life, consciously or unconsciously, in order to escape what they perceive as condemnation or rejection, or some other experience that they are averse to. In such a case we would say that ones perceived values are out of harmony with their enacted values, and therefore their perceived values are not a reflection of the reality of their actions - they are false perceptions. In contrast, someone may think that they value honesty and in that way make sure they avoid being dishonest in all of their actions. Perhaps they make mistakes here and there but they are conscious of the fact and upon seeing themselves doing so, seek to rectify such actions which have opposed their perceived values. This person we would say is correctly perceiving their personal values as we can see that their perception of said values are in harmony with their enacted values, and hence reflective of reality. To be reflective of reality is a reoccurring and symptomatic aspect of being in harmony with the world.
Then there are idealised values. They are the values we aspire to, but which we do not currently act according to. The clarity of our perceived values acts as the intermediary between our enacted and idealised values. If we are like the first person mentioned above, who thinks that we value truth yet acts in an otherwise manner, then we are deluded, and that delusion may have us also believe that we are already enacting our idealised values, when this is almost never absolutely the truth with anyone. If your idealised values are one and the same with your perceived values, then you are either a perfectly enlightened being, or you are ignorant to yourself in that assumption of harmony. 99.9 reoccurring percent of people do not live their ideals absolutely; there is always room for awareness. If we are like the second person, who’s enacted values are largely in harmony with their perceived values, then we are much less inhibited by delusion, and therefore we can see clearly how we act and value things, and from that point we can envision how we would like to alter our action in the world and therefore set idealised values, towards which we aim to shift into our perceived and enacted values over time.
To put it in another way; our perceived values are those values we can deduce from our thinking about how we are, our idealised values are deduced from our thinking about how we are in contrast to how we could be, and our enacted values are deduced from how we act in the world.
Our perceived values are easy enough to deduce, they will usually be the closest to what we previously termed as our personal values, they are simply what we believe ourselves to value - whether or not they are in or out of harmony with our actions and reality is irrelevant. Our enacted values may be slightly more obscure to us, particularly if our perceived values are shaded with delusion. If we perceive ourselves with certain values yet are unconscious to our actions disharmony with those perceptions, then we will similarly struggle to recognise the relationship between our perceived and idealised values; those we wish to attain, or erroneously believe we already possess.
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So far we’ve discussed how our actions of body, speech and mind manifest as mechanisms of harmonious and disharmonious being, and how our own value structures can be recognised by the assessment of those relationships. We’ve established what a value is as a concept but we haven’t yet dug down into the manifold spectrum of specific values, so let us now graduate from abstract meaning into the concrete reality of the various values that exist as they relate to us as we live our lives.
Let me jump right back to where I started with the counselling sessions I attended last year. Around the mid-way point of my 6 meetings, I was given a worksheet with a list of 60 specific values (which turned out to be more like 50, as I believe many overlapped). From that list I was to narrow down the top 6 that felt the most important to me, as an exercise to become more aware of what it was I stood for as a human being. These values, under the application of our new tools of classification, we will recognise as perceived values; they are those which we deduce through reflection on our thoughts and feelings.
My top 6 perceived values came out to be:
As I mentioned at the start, I began seeking advice from the counselling sessions because I felt that I was limited in my ability to implement change. In particular, 2 behaviours I was seeking to change were my smoking habits (which I’m sure you’re aware of if you’ve ever seen even a single one of my music videos), and my habitual use of pornography, both of which I considered at the level of addiction. I was smoking spliffs every day, so my addiction was to tobacco and marijuana, and had been doing so for more than half a decade (the majority of my 20’s). The few instances where I managed to go longer than a 24 hour period without smoking were when I had long international flights which literally required I be without weed for such a period.
And in regards to pornography, or rather PMO (the pathway of porn->masturbation->orgasm), I wasn’t so addicted that I couldn’t go a day without wanking to porn, but rather my addiction lied in the fact that I had been trying for a long time to stop consuming pornography all together, but could only ever achieve a few days at a time, or at best a week. This is one aspect of how I am personally defining addiction; that is being unable to stop a recurring behaviour regardless of my sincere intent, and attempts, to rid myself of it.
Now let’s take my 2 addictive behaviours as examples and extract from them my enacted values, and examine how they may be at odds with my perceived values.
Immediately I see a lack of self control in the service of self gratification, based purely on the fact that these are addictive behaviours, and I’ve defined addiction as that which I seem to have no control over stopping. This is clearly inharmonious with my perceived value #6, Self Control.
Of pornography/PMO specifically I see a choice to engage in a form of sexual gratification that disconnects me from a real, living breathing, sexual partner. I also see it as diminishing my own mindfulness and clouding my self awareness, particularly throughout the act, and even in the build up of thoughts leading to the act - and interestingly I even see it as evidenced in the return of self awareness that arises post orgasm, I.e. what we call Post Nut Clarity (“sitting here I’m oxied up again”). So we can see in a threefold manner how PMO is inharmonious with my perceived value #2, Connection; Mindfulness and Self Awareness.
With both pornography and smoking, I see an unwillingness to face my own personal suffering/discomfort, which I suppose I could justly call weakness. This is obviously inharmonious with perceived value #3, Courage and Persistence.
With both smoking and PMO, I see a slight level of deception when it comes to my interaction with others. Specifically with pornography, I had seen a willingness to hide and omit my masturbious (not a real word) behaviour in relation to my girlfriend. If she asked me what I did that day, I was certainly less inclined to let her know that I’d wanked to some MILFS or to a cam girl compared to whatever else I’d done that day. Feeling ashamed at my behaviour to the level of being unwilling to share my actions with the closest person to me is certainly a level of inauthenticity that walks the line of bending the truth and therefore undermining trust, and hence is far out of harmony with my #1 perceived value - Authenticity.
We can clearly see how these two addictive behaviours are emblematic of enacted values quite contrary to more than half my own perceived values. In one aspect, this could very well mean that I was under an illusion as to the classification of these values as perceived, and more realistically that they should be deemed idealised values, for, as evident in my behaviour, they are not enacted, and rather to be aspired to.
That being said, smoking and pornography do not encompass my entire being (thankfully), so while my perceived values may not be complete delusions, they are, at the very least within the bounds of these specific behavioural manifestations of my life, inharmonious with core beliefs by which I envision myself and how I would like to be in the world.
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What effect does living out of harmony have on us? The conditions of inharmonious living has its consequences not only on the individual but also on the greater community and by extension the world. On the individual level, there is an increase in hopelessness. Constantly taking one step forward followed by one step back makes us feel as though we are incapable of making progress, incapable of moving towards what we want or moving away from actions we no longer want to embody. And particularly, if we aren’t conscious to our inharmonious actions that are contributing to this feeling of hopelessness, then it will increase the feeling even more so, along with confusion and other negative emotions. Another emotion we will feel is anxiety, for much the same reason. We will become over time more and more anxious over our seeming inability to take the reigns of our life, and will quite possibly dive further headlong into habits of inharmonious action as a form of self medication from our situation, i.e. in my case, more drug taking, more PMO, etc, etc. All of that which I speak here is based on reflection on my own personal experience in regards to my aforementioned behaviours and their observed effects on my own mentality and self concept.
I believe that anxiety and depression arrises as a messenger to let us know that something is wrong with the way we are living, in the same way that physical pain arises to let us know when there is something wrong with how we are operating our physical body. The burning sensation in your hand informs you to pull it off the stove. Your anxiety and depression informs you that some of your actions are inharmonious with your values. But these emotional states aren’t as 1 to 1 as physical pain is; they aren’t as obvious and immediate of a reaction, so it’s hard to tell exactly what it is they have arisen in response to. This is why developing mindful awareness through meditation is necessary, as it will aid us in our ability to pinpoint with clarity what these emotions arise in response to.
But without this mindfulness, the negative emotion can seem to exist without reason, beginning or end, and hence we seek to self medicate, in an effort to quell our uncomfortable states of mind in whatever a way we can find, and by whatever means we have available to us. Personally I spent close to a decade self medicating with the smoke.
Numbing our emotional pain pushes it out of the immediacy of our awareness, but with it too subsides the necessary push of those uncomfortable emotions to locate and eradicate the inharmonious actions we perpetuate which are at their cause. That pain will always return, however, as long as we are still acting in the inharmonious way. I myself was only able to slowly build the strength necessary to cut down my vices by gradually increasing my awareness and ability to be mindful of my pain while still in the grips of my inharmonious ways of coping - I couldn’t gain the good and lose the bad all at once. My increased mindfulness, nourished with meditation, allowed me to be able to sit with my emotional pain, without masking it, without running from it, and without identifying it as an unchangeable identity, but rather perceiving it as a divine messenger with invaluable information as to how I could be acting in contrast to how I’ve been acting.
The way we could be acting in the world is the way that Jesus acted in the world, the way that Buddha acted in the world; the way that any great mythological hero acts. But the way we are acting has us dying of thirst. Our inharmonious actions keep us from existing as the hero within our own stories. Whether you consider them mythological or historical, figures like the Buddha and Jesus were transformative of the world around them, and their stories encourage us towards the pursuit of living such a life. In the same way, but to a relative degree, each of us transforms the world around us. If we act inharmoniously then we darken the world. If we sacrifice our inharmonious actions for the world, we bring about light and salvation to those around us, the ripples of which can spread far and wide, beyond conceivable perception. We have the potential to be the next Buddha due to our great fortune of having been born as a human. The degree to which we leave that potential untapped and dormant, unwilling to transform it into a kinetic reality, is the very same degree to which we are starving the world of that unique quality which only we have to offer.
To summarise with an analogy, the negative emotions that arise from inharmonious living effect the mind of the individual like a stab wound effect the physical body, weakening it and engendering pain in its operation. As a result of living inharmoniously, we have become divorced from the natural positive emotion that would otherwise arise from the fulfilment of realised potential, starving the individual and the world of the positive light of harmonious living. This effects the individual, as well as the world at large, the same way a vitamin or mineral deficiency would effect the physical body. We are metaphorically riddled with stab wounds and deficient of the elements that would make us whole, wounded and in pain with each step we take. The whole world is like this. So what is there to do about it?
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In 2022 I travelled to America for the first time. I was there for 3 months and I was apart from almost everything that brought me comfort; my home, my girlfriend, my cat, I was away from everything except weed and pornography. I made sure that whatever state I was going to had legalised weed so that I never needed to be without it. I didn’t have to do so much planning ahead in regards to pornography as that was always in my pocket by virtue of the black mirrors we all carry around. I was very nervous prior to leaving as I was going to be meeting, for the very first time, people that I had only every communicated with over the internet.
I consider myself quite introverted and I don’t particularly seek out social situations, so to be throwing myself into what was essentially 3 months of prolonged socialising without a break was equally remarkable and frightening. Gladly, no one turned out to be unbearable, each person was pretty much just the IRL version of the person I knew online. But that still didn’t detract from the fact that I had to socialise with them constantly for 3 months.
I’m bringing all of this up to give proper context to my individual propensities, addictive habits, and the environment into which I was being placed, so that we can now examine and discuss how I reacted with my Body, Speech and Mind in such an experimental situation.
With the amputation of all my usual comforts and coping mechanisms other than those of smoking and PMO, my reliance on those two grew to new heights. By the end of the trip I was smoking up to 20 spliffs a day. And, as a lot of the time I was surrounded by others, my immediate ability to satisfy myself with porn was stifled (bar the occasional airport disabled bathroom), and eventually the lust that had fuelled my pornography addiction boiled over into me acting it out in the form of cheating on my girlfriend. New lows of inharmonious action were bred during this trip due to my having no thoroughly ingrained positive coping mechanisms in my arsenal of behaviours. Now why am I sharing all of this? Believe it or not I’m not trying to make myself look bad, as inevitable as that may be while discussing such realities. I think it’s important to see all of this with complete transparency, in order to compare it to how my second trip to America went, 2 years later in 2024.
Considering how I dealt with the stresses of the first trip, I knew that I needed to prepare much more significantly for the second. The imminence of this second trip was also a part of the reason why I was particularly aware of my current flaws and seeking help in rectifying them, evidenced in my reaching out to the counsellor I began to attend in mid 2024. During the months I attended the counsellor, I also decided to retake a small beginners meditation course I’d taken years prior at my local Buddhist centre. It consisted of 4 one hour classes, one on each Saturday of the month, teaching the basics of meditation, including breath counting, walking meditation, and mindfulness of the breath meditation, or Ānāpānasati in Pali, the language spoken during the time of, and by, the Buddha. In the first week we are encouraged to begin daily meditation for 5 minutes a day, then in week 2, 10 minutes a day, week 3 - 15, and by the end of week four we are doing 20 minutes a day.
The previous time I’d done the course years ago, I remember not doing the set amount of meditation every day. I thought I already knew how to meditate well enough and so it didn’t matter if I missed a day or two, or even days in a row, or even a majority of the days. I was very big headed in my sense of progress. I may have known how to mediate on a basic level, but I was ignorant to the importance of consistent practice. Practicing every day is like filling up a bucket one drop at a time. It doesn’t happen all at once. It's a cumulative, progressive process, which increases ones conscious awareness and mindfulness over time just as the bucket fills over time even if the tap only drips one tiny drop each day. I was in the mindset that since I could squeeze out a drop here and there, that I already had enough water to fill the bucket. How naive indeed.
But during this period in 2024, I became confident in the fact that if I was going to do this course then I had to do everything asked of me, otherwise I could not in good conscience accept that I had completed it. So I attempted, and I came close to completing the first months retaking of the course. But my inner voice was not happy with that. I needed to complete every day of 5, 10, 15 & 20 mins, ect. So I redid the course the following month - now approaching the final month before my trip. This time I completed the course with only 1 or 2 days missed. Still not perfect, but I had no more months to redo the course before leaving. I had done the best I could, and I had firmly established a daily practice, lasting for longer than a month, for the first time in my life. I continued with the 20 minutes a day for the final week or two approaching my flight to the USA, ultimately reaching ~30 minutes a day before flying out.
The reason why I was decisive in nailing down a daily meditation practice was because I knew that this was a positive behavioural mechanism, an action in harmony with my values, that I could take anywhere and everywhere I went. It was exactly the type thing I would need to depend on when I wanted to not so heavily lean on my other crutches of smoking and lust. I was certain I could not allow myself to slide back into the inharmonious action of smoking up to 20 spliffs a day, and I was even more certain that I could not allow my lust driven mind to cheat again. Despite being so certain, I also knew that, from my past experience, I couldn’t exactly trust myself, and that this adventure would be the ultimate test of my growth of character, the strength of my mediation practice, and the harmony of my actions within the world.
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The first couple of weeks in the US I was able to keep up my daily mediation schedule fairly well. Parallel to which, I was able to maintain smoking only a few spliffs a day, a lower number than the average I was smoking per day before flying out from home. And this was all despite being around people every day, in near constant social interaction, just like the first trip. My schedule began to strain slightly at around 3 or 4 weeks in at a point during which I was sleeping in the same room with a few other people, and didn’t have room to lock myself away in to meditate, (nor go outside because it was so cold).
And following that I would spend a week with a friend of mine who is the biggest consumer of weed out of all my acquaintances, so naturally my smoking increased somewhat - but I had room to myself again and was able to begin attenuating my practice. At this point, however, I finally made an important decision for my trip; I had a desire in my heart to attend a retreat at a Buddhist temple at some point during my trip, and I’d finally found a place that would work. The mini US tour I was on had 4 shows, and in between the first 2 and the final 2 was a break of a couple weeks. During the first week of that break, upon leaving my friend, I flew to New Mexico and spent 8 days in retreat at a Zen centre in Santa Fe called ‘Upaya’.
The schedule at Upaya was as follows; 6am wake ups, 3 hours of meditation daily, broken into 3 roughly 1 hour sessions, along with 5 and a half hours of work practice each day, known as ‘Samu’ in Japanese; This consisted of simple chores carried out with the mindfulness that usually accompanies meditation.
These disciplines were also to be carried out in noble silence, which is essentially not speaking unless speech was required for necessary communication. I had attended a 9 day meditation retreat in early 2022 back home, but the schedule there at the Theravada Buddhist tempe, with a tradition stemming from Thai forest monks, was much more lax. This was a level of practice and discipline I had not previously partaken in. What ensued was a marked increase, necessarily so, in the commitment and application of my daily practice of meditation. I was also, once again, smoking much less, 2- 3 spliffs a day max, an amount I was fairly proud of subsisting on at that point, considering my previous trips 20 a day record.
My retreat period at the Zen centre ended and I was soon to reunite with my girlfriend, on the second leg of the tour. I was smoking way less than 20 joints a day, and with my girl back at my side, my risk of cheating was dead in the water. The final 2 shows went by and soon enough I was back home. I’d made it. My confidence in the effects of my meditation practice on my character, and the harmony of my actions and values was stronger than it had ever been. And that lead me to take it even further. I continued practicing every day that I found the time, which was most days, and eventually reached a point of clarity, approaching my 29th birthday, where I knew for sure that I wanted to stop smoking for a longer period than I ever had before, as well as not engaging in PMO for a longer period than ever before.
Something about being closer to my 30s than ever before had stirred up a need to finally break this habit, which had been with me all throughout my 20s. Bolstered by my mediation practice and an increasingly harmonising action to value relationship, I was able to make it more than 3 weeks without having weed in my home, and simultaneously went a recorded 26 days without wanking to porn. Suffice to say, the practice of consistent mediation allowed me the ability to finally attenuate a cluster of inharmonious actions I had been perpetuating for the majority of my 20’s, in regards to smoking, and for more than half my life at this point, in regards to pornography. The test was over; this was a practice that brought results.
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So what exactly can we learn from this little experiment of mine? I believe that within the story I’ve presented here lies one possible answer to the question posed at the end of Chapter 4 [We are metaphorically riddled with stab wounds and deficient of the elements that would make us whole, wounded and in pain with each step we take. The whole world is like this. So what is there to do about it?].
The answer begins with awareness. We must first be aware of our wounded state. The clarity of that awareness being the degree to which we are perceiving reality. If we cannot accurately perceive our own wounds, then what hope could we have at attending to them?
It was the awareness of frustration at myself over my own arrested development that lead me to initially seek out counselling at the beginning of 2024.
It turns out that what I was experiencing as a personal inability to take action towards my goals can be explained by the incongruence of those goals with the actions I was currently engaged in and perpetuating in my daily life. Those inharmonious ways of thinking and acting, in relation to my ideal, had to necessarily diminish and transform in order to allow the space for new harmonious habits and ways of thinking to breath life. Simply, it took awareness of a problem, and then the attention to analyse the value-action relationship from which that the problem had taken root. Healing is then equivalent to the process of recognising the inharmonious relationships of our actions and values, and transforming them into harmonious relationships; a process catalysed by our awareness.
To put it as concisely as possible, the answer to “What there is to do” about our metaphorical wounded state is to become more aware. Seek to practice and increase your awareness, and with that expanded awareness, observe your values, and observe your actions. Analyse the extent of your harmonious or inharmonious existence, and seek to transform your inharmonious actions into ones that harmonise with your values. That’s it, as simply as I can put it.
There are a great range of techniques and practices that serve the function of increasing awareness, clarity and mindfulness, synonymously. While meditation has been the primary practice in my own journey so far, even within the sub category of meditation as an awareness increasing tool, there are many alternate methods for you to try in order to find what works for you.
And then as you continue to practice, you can use the tools of analysis I’ve provided to you here to figure out your own enacted, perceived and idealised values, as well as to become more aware of each subset of your actions in the world, those of your body, speech and mind. A basic tool we can use to clarify ourselves and our situation is to speak about it to others in an attempt to fill them in on all the necessary contexts, as mentioned in Chapter 1, which will help solidify our situation to ourselves, and with that clarity one is more readily able to formulate actionable steps towards a resolution. With ever increasing clarity your own inharmonious actions will become more obvious, and then it's purely a matter of altering those value-action relationships into ones of harmony. Thats all the game is at that point.
While putting the context specific changes of your very own behaviour into action might not be so simple, the pathway to the clarity and awareness of what changes need to be made is simple. Thats all I can provide to you here, and it’s less than 10 words; Awareness of inharmony in ones own values and actions. The pathway to figuring yourself out is simple. The actual figuring yourself out is the part that takes the work only you can do for yourself. It might possibly be the most unique and challenging work that exists. But you’re here. If you don’t want a challenge then that’s fine. But just incase you do, those are the signposts.
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Certain characteristics of our personalities and ‘who we are’ are innately mysterious; we cannot trace them to any absolute beginning or find any absolute origin point of what and who we are, nor are we even able to comprehend in full the breadth of what we are. So much of existence is unknown and unknowable, and so much of that (or perhaps all of it) is us.
Having spoken last episode about Identity and our roles within the world, we should already have some sense or idea as to how our values play a part in that construction. We are drawn uniquely, in some way or another, towards particular phenomena and ideals in this world, and for some inscrutable reason, you will tend one way while I will lean another.
There is no greater mystery, nor more bold of an adventure, than the search for ones self, for the worlds self, for god and the universe, for the unborn buddha mind, the christ consciousness, and for the path that unfolds on the ferris wheel of birth and death. And the steps upon that path to adventure begin with the investigation of your own, honest and true individuality, which is so uniquely valuable and rare that no one else other than you could ever hope to bring your light to this world. Each of our inner lights must manifest, and our authentic expression, through our actions and roles in the world, is the process of revealing that inner light from within the darkness of ourselves, out and into the shared reality of the world we inhabit together.
This inner light as I have characterised it here can only every be authentic. If we are inauthentic in any way, then the light is blocked. Our lives are therefore, in one sense, the adventure of discarding our own delusions in order to eradicate inauthenticity. As we develop along the path of cutting away delusion, our paths and actions within the world will transform. The roles we play in the world will reflexively influence our values, and reprioritisation will occur. Prioritisation being essentially the hierarchical re-structuring of those things that we value most. The transformation of our values incurs resultant changes in our behaviour and action in the world, this being the path by which we slowly ease our way into ever more congruent harmony with ourselves and the world.
To end, let me risk sounding perhaps too otherworldly for a moment in order to express one final perspective on Harmony, that is, Divine Harmony.
Divine Harmony is that which is always in motion, like a never ending song, but which never finds itself out of harmony. It is always perfect. We, as individuals, use what we call Mind to transform what is this primordial harmony into a personal reality, filled with our own personal lore and delusion - this reality is simultaneously a lived delirium and a necessary function of consciousness. The more we are drawn in by the play of the Mind and the plot of who we think we are, and what we think the world is, the more we are engaged in an illusion (or personal reality) which is what I mean when I would say that ones personal values are incongruent with the way of the world, or the flow of existence - the endless stream of phenomena. Ultimately, we would forgo our personal delusions to the point that we are no longer at odds with the reality of the world as it is, in its Divine harmony, but that is by far beyond the scope of what I am seeking to elucidate here, so I’ll leave it at that.
Dedicated to Sean Badell