For the project, Deakin set out to experience a frog’s-eye view of the British Isles – its seas, canals, rivers, and lagoons. When he arrived in West Oxfordshire, he had the following to say about a particularly dazzling stretch of the River Windrush:

‘About a mile downstream from Burford on the meandering footpath to Widford, I found the finest oxbow bend I have ever seen.’

Having recently moved to the area, I’ve been jogging, walking, and dipping up and down this stretch of river for the past week or so, trying to determine exactly where this was. In the process, I’ve discovered a few things – some enchanting, some incredibly sad.

On my first day, after viewing a local property, I went on a wander-turned-bushwhacking expedition through an area of forest, fields, and private land between Burford and Swinbrook. I started near St Oswald’s Church, a beautiful old chapel positioned in the middle of an empty field. The grasses had been roasted golden-yellow by weeks of uninterrupted sun, and the dusty track crunched underfoot with shards of compressed stone.

I could sense that this had been Deakin’s frogging ground, but it took a while to decipher the most likely location of his oxbow. I’d read on blogs that both sides of the stretch of water described by Deakin are now private land. Unlike our American cousins, however, the English long ago surrendered their Second Amendment right, so the most you risk in clambering through someone’s field is a stiff telling-off – usually in posh Oxfordian English (I’m learning that most of the occupants of the manor houses around here were educated at that illustrious institution).

If you look at the map, there are only perhaps four sections of the river between Burford and Widford that could be described as ‘oxbow’.

I ventured in a south-easterly direction from St Oswald’s Church and climbed a couple of fences to reach the edge of a peaceful stretch of river bordered by tall reeds. I could definitely imagine Deakin here, on his back with a big grin on his face, the glistening surfaces all around.

He writes, ‘I was so absurdly delighted with my discovery that I swam round and round until I was dizzy.’

When it comes to the legality of this pursuit, there’s an interesting element of English common law that is best described as Deakin’s Loophole. No one owns the river water itself. Under English common law, flowing water is classified as a transient, common element. Landowners hold title to the riverbed beneath the stream, but the liquid volume moving over it remains public.

Once floating, a swimmer occupies moving water rather than landed property.

So the key loophole to remember is – be like Deakin, be a floater who does not touch the sides; no riverbed or bank contact permissible, or you could suffer a knock on the door the following day...

I rolled my trousers up and descended into the river that day, technically breaking Deakin’s loophole… but I wasn’t aware at the time.

The water was a strange shade. Not at all like Deakin had described. Later, upon traipsing across another section of land closed to anyone but fly fishermen, I encountered Eileen on the other side of the river at the bottom of her garden.

I learnt a lot from Eileen. She and her husband played central roles in the Channel 4 docu-drama Dirty Business, which addresses the scourge of privatised water companies destroying England’s rivers.

The Windrush is now heavily polluted, and swimming is discouraged. Talking to this lady who had observed the river turn from crystal clear to shampoo-and-pesticide blue over twenty years, I learnt of the water companies continuously and illegally dumping untreated sewage, destroying ancient Burford festivals like ‘water day’ and killing all the fish life. No fly fishermen engage in their pursuit anymore… But that’s another story that I’ll pick up in a future piece.

Subscribe now

The difficulty in Atlanta is the paved sidewalks, which entirely neutralise a walker’s relationship with the planet. As a result, if he’s risen on time – which he always does at 4:58 – Duncan can navigate between front gardens and flowerbeds, his nervous system enjoying all the anti-inflammatory benefits Mother Earth has to offer. When a homeowner is up early (which does happen from time to time), they’ll ask what he’s doing and he’ll raise his hands and be chill about it and swiftly move on, skipping over their flowerbed onto the adjacent lawn and picking up the routine from there.

Duncan owns a Dobermann because someone said on a podcast once that pets are a reflection of their owners, so he bought one in the hope it would change his image. It didn’t. In fact, it makes him look rather small. He could ride the damn thing around the city and save on electric ride-haul tokens.

After the gardens, it’s a non-negotiable one-minute hang from a climbing frame in the local children’s playground to decompress the spine. Luckily, it’s so early the kids have yet to arrive. It would be a strange sight for mother and child if they did decide to turn up early one morning – a lump of muscle dangling from the colourful frame like prime beef in a butcher’s window.

Duncan isn’t an uncommon specimen (sometimes I feel like his kindred spirit). He belongs to a growing tribe of protocol maximisers, constipated with podcast advice injected in continuous doses through the ear canals. Wired headphones, of course – Bluetooth frazzles your brain. So does Wi-Fi, for that matter. But did we ever stop to think that endless metrics, micro-managing and routine optimisation might also spike cortisol and fry the mind?

I read an article recently (I flicked through a carousel on Instagram) about the smattering of men who have ever lived past 112 years old. I think the group was so small you could count them on two hands, although you’d have to crunch the fingers through the osteoarthritis to do so. These legends (literal and figurative) did saunas and cold plunges every day without fail. Twenty minutes in the heat, three in the cold. They fasted a minimum of 16 hours a day with a three-day monthly fast. They wore orange-tinted, blue-light-blocking glasses after sundown. They made a beeline for sunlight each morning and completed 100 jump squats in the sun while sipping a water-and-lemon shooter through a straw inserted into the nose. They needed the straw in their noses because their mouths were taped shut overnight to ensure nasal breathing. They used three different meditation apps, one for each period of the day. At only four dollars a pop per month per app, they touted the affordability of this practice. Most crucially, they said, they retained their semen; recirculating their vital fluid throughout their bodies for the entirety of their 112+ years. The side effects of this practice (zero spouse intimacy and no offspring) were considerable, but in their own words, worthwhile to achieve the 112+ years milestone.

None of the above is true, of course. The men lived for as long as they lived because of a few very simple habits. They walked. A lot. Everywhere, in fact. They engaged in slow, mildly strenuous exercise like gardening for many hours a day. They ate natural, totally unprocessed foods, because they were around during a time when processed foods weren’t endemic. They had a number of very close friends, whom they spent much of their time with. They slept well.

The optimisation movement bears the hallmarks of commercialisation, much like the unhealthy, unnatural lifestyles it claims to oppose. While removing things that make us unhealthy – indoor living, a sedentary lifestyle, constant social media use – is undoubtedly beneficial, the relentless accumulation of other supposedly positive habits can create its own kind of pathology.

As is often the case in times of confusion and madness, it’s worth opening a work of ancient scripture. Jesus is my go-to. He has a way of cutting through the noise:

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”

Breathe. Do less. Walk. Love one another. Nature exposure. Sleep. Them’s the rules. If God takes care of birds, He will absolutely take care of us.

Subscribe now

You read something, you jot down what you remember without looking back at the book. It’s usually the simplest things that bubble up to the surface. But for whatever reason, they are the things that stuck, which means it also hyper-personalises the reading process. You retain what most resonated with you.

The habit is shockingly revealing; one, for highlighting the kinds of things that stick, and two, for highlighting just how little you remember sometimes. This morning, for instance, I was reading a biography of the French writer Balzac by Graham Robb. I was distracted and unfocused for much of the time. If I sit here and consider what I actually remember, after thirty minutes’ reading, it amounts to something pitiful.

Balzac engaged in celibacy and non-ejaculation to retain his ‘vital fluid’ for creative purposes.

For obvious reasons, that one’s pretty memorable.

Balzac dreamt of writing a 300-page novel set entirely on the battlefield, a narrative that ‘began with cannon fire and ended with a cry of victory’. The work was never completed, and barely begun in fact. It amounts to about half a sentence.

What else can I recall… Basically, that’s it. So, on paper at least, not a very enlightening session. That’s another reason to start essaying about the books we read – because it heightens the reading process itself. As you read, the mind focuses in because unconsciously it knows it must connect with the text in order to write about it later.

I’ve been slowly going through Homer’s The Odyssey every day. My knowledge of Greek texts is woeful, and what with the upcoming rendition by Christopher Nolan, I thought it best to dive in. I’m going through line by line and looking up all the characters and turns of phrase. Some of the names appear with unfocused familiarity, as if emerging from a dense fog. Achilles, ah yes, he’s the one with the weak ankles played by Brad Pitt. Zeus, the most powerful Greek god. Mount Olympus, the spot where the gods meet and debate interventions and punishments for the material world. Poseidon, that’s the furious sea god.

Homer writes with the assumption that the reader knows all about the conflicts taking place at the time, the history of conflicts, characters, and the godly forces at play, along with critical cultural elements like xenia (guest-friendship), which was a sacred moral obligation at the time and ties crucially into the story dynamics.

I’ll apply the ‘essay to understand’ technique to my Odyssey reading so far. I needed to research all the most basic background information for context, so this and future essays will serve as good introductions to the work. Some of this information is taken from my notes whilst reading the book.

The background. The real war behind the epic took place around 1200 BC, when a coalition of Greek kingdoms (one of which was Sparta) attacked and destroyed Troy – a wealthy, fortified city in modern-day Turkey. The epic tradition placed the mythologised heroes Achilles and Odysseus on the offensive Greek side, crediting Odysseus with the design of the Trojan Horse that ultimately breached the city. A ten-year siege for a city seems extraordinarily long, but Troy occupied an incredibly strategic defensive position. Because Troy was an impregnable coastal fortress with open trade routes, the Greeks couldn’t surround or starve it. For nine years, the conflict was in gridlock, with the Greeks camped on the beaches, raiding nearby towns for supplies, and the Trojans remaining secure behind their formidable walls. This notion of hubris is a strong element picked up by the Troy movie – so much confidence is placed in the city’s ‘unbreachable walls’, which suffer a similar fate to the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic. To maintain momentum, the movie collapses this decade-long war into a span of a few weeks.

Why are the Greeks invading Troy? The mythological reason pertains to Paris, a prince of Troy, visiting Sparta in Greece and taking Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world and wife of the Spartan King Menelaus. The Greek kingdoms united under a massive alliance to sail to Troy, recapture Helen, and restore Greek honour.

The historical reason for the battle. Troy sat in a highly strategic position at the entrance to the Dardanelles, a narrow strait linking the Aegean and Black Seas. The Greek coalition likely attacked Troy to secure control over these lucrative trade routes and access valuable grain, gold, and resources. Archaeological excavations confirm that a wealthy, fortified city at Troy was besieged and destroyed by fire around 1200 BC.

What’s the meaning of the title? The Odyssey is named after its main character, Odysseus. The word ‘odyssey’ has come to mean a long, wandering journey filled with hardships and adventures, reflecting his ten-year struggle to return home after the war. The original title was ‘Odysseia’, which translates to ‘The Story of Odysseus.’ Over the years, Western language adopted the title as a noun.

I’ve read the first few pages. These are the main elements I recall.

Although the Greeks won the war, they were cursed by the gods for committing horrific wartime acts during the sacking of Troy, violating divine law. On the journey back, Odysseus is shipwrecked and marooned on the mythical island of Ogygia. The island is home to the beautiful nymph Calypso, who falls in love with Odysseus and keeps him trapped there, offering immortality if he stays with her forever.

The story opens with a council of the gods on Mt Olympus while Poseidon is away in Ethiopia enjoying a feast. With the sea god distracted, Athena – goddess of wisdom and warfare; daughter of Zeus – pleads Odysseus’ case to Zeus, arguing that he has suffered enough on Calypso’s island. Zeus agrees, and they initiate a plan to bring him home.

“But the heart in me is torn for the sake of wise Odysseus, unhappy man, who still, far from his friends, is suffering griefs, on the sea-washed island.”

Why does Athena care? Athena champions Odysseus because he mirrors her divine nature. As the goddess of wisdom and war strategy, she admires his intellect and resourcefulness. By intervening, she protects her ultimate earthly representative and ensures his legacy survives through his son.

I’m currently at the section in which Athena descends to the house of Odysseus to rouse his passive son Telemachus into action:

“But I shall make my way to Ithaka, so that I may stir up his son a little.”

She flies down to Ithaca disguised as a family friend and merchant, Mentes.

Telemachus is doing nothing as a gang of parasitic, wealthy Greek noblemen have moved themselves into Odysseus’ palace with the aim of forcing Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, into marriage and to claim the vacant throne.

Athena’s arrival as Mentes serves to shock Telemachus out of this passivity, inspiring him to stand up to the suitors.

“Rather I will urge you to consider some means by which you can force the suitors out of your household. Come now, pay close attention to me and do as I tell you.”

Boy must become man:

“You should not go on clinging to your childhood. You are no longer of an age to do that”

“She left in his spirit determination and courage, and he remembered his father even more than he had before, and he guessed the meaning, and his heart was full of wonder, for he thought it was a divinity.”

Interesting side note on the linguistics. In Ancient Greek, the name Mentes shares a root with menos, which means mind, intent, courage. When Athena takes the form of Mentes, she is breathing menos – mental power and courage – into Telemachus to push him into manhood.

This is where I’m at thus far. I’ll keep reading and essaying as I go.

Subscribe now

I reach the landing area with the lifts and there he is, cooing, circling and looking for aid. He has creamy white fur with light brown patches like the surface of a cappuccino. I tend not to stroke him; stray cats in Thailand are said to carry various diseases.

My idea for the rescue is simple: get him into the lift, close the lift without him running out or getting stuck in the mechanism, descend, open the other set of doors on the ground floor so he’s back in the covered parking area with his pick of scooter loungers for the evening.

I go over to the lifts and press the call button, making squeaky noises with my lips – I suppose it’s the sound of a mouse or some other rodent cats enjoy chewing on. I also rub my fingers together like I have some… What might the cat think I have? Cheese?

The lift arrives and I step in, tempting him after me with the fake promise of a treat. To my surprise, he follows, slinking into the small, well-lit cubicle. I press the button to close the doors, thinking he’ll either panic and spring out through the closing gap, or suddenly think he’s trapped and go completely mental, leaping all over the walls like those videos of cats being dropped into baths. He does neither.

I press the ‘1’ button on the console for the bottom floor (the ground floor is ‘1’ here instead of ‘0’). We descend together, reaching the ground floor where the doors open. He slinks out and I go over to the doors to the outside, pressing the release button. A big gust of wind blasts into the foyer. He hesitates for a moment, then heads outside, hopping onto a recently parked scooter. He seems to know instinctively which one is the warmest.

Subscribe now

The other day at ten o’clock in the evening, I sped to the spa, scything through the sheet rain on my scooter. I was wearing only my swimming shorts and I sang loudly to myself as I shot down the road, the torrent providing ultimate anonymity. As I picked up speed on a long downhill section, the rain droplets bit into the bare skin of my torso and legs like millions of splattering flies. I slowed when I reached a flooded section of road, but not soon enough. My scooter hit the water and aquaplaned. I lost steering as my tyres skimmed over the surface. Luckily, they hit tarmac and an uphill section which provided the adequate grip to get me back on track.

Ton Mai is an open-air spa with straw-roofed sections and loungers. When the rains come down, the droplets pepper the surface of the swimming pool in tiny explosions. As I completed my three minutes in the cold plunge, the cascading rain warmed my hair and face.

On the way home, the night echoed with the coos of ladies and ladyboys of the night, glowing over their phone screens under the cover of roadside tiki huts. When I flew by an establishment named BJ Massage, a lady with bulbous lips and breasts reached her hand out into the road. The enhanced sections of her body, squeezed into a tiny, soaking tube dress, scattered my evolutionary radar. My nervous system must have thought it was passing through a mythical water-world of sirens. Business is surely quieter when the rains come down. I shot by, narrowly avoiding the flooded section of road from before, and enjoyed the emptiness of the streets and the quiet ride home.

Subscribe now

The family never seemed to be getting anywhere with the renovations; that was another thing. Jacques was the son of an English couple who’d moved to the Alps and raised him French. Every time we went, the dad would be outside in the garden, moving piles of rubble around, but the interior remained derelict the entire time I was there. Maxime used to just chill and talk to us as we did push-ups and pull-ups. He couldn’t be bothered with all the faffing around with clothes.

The other spot where we used to hang out during lunchtimes was an abandoned house. Properly abandoned. The kind you see in WWII movies, where the wall’s blown out by shellfire and the second floor just hangs there in empty space, strangely exposed to the world like the cross-section of a doll’s house. We’d clamber up there and relax on a couple of sofas. The smokers would get out their hashish, crumble some off and light up.

I remember one afternoon when Jacques’ best mate, Charles – who’d only joined our group a couple of times – smoked far too much. I think he was dealing with some trouble at home. Later that day, at the back of computer class, he collapsed. His face slammed onto the keyboard, and then his limp body fell to the ground. As those of us around him leapt off our high stools to help, the IT teacher rushed over, asking what had happened. While someone explained, Charles murmured quietly on the floor, as if enveloped in the most comforting of dreams. Then came the absurdity of the teacher gently taking Charles by the ankles and dragging his semi-conscious body down the aisles of computers to the front of the room, across the floor and out of the door, holding it open with his heel. We slowly returned to our chairs, watching with fascination.

Subscribe now

I wasn’t very good at school in those early years; distracting people and handing in half-hearted homework. We would have been arguing about something related to this.

The note said: “I’ve gone out. I have a knife with me. I don’t think I’ll come back.”

Kids do strange things. Getting those closest to them scared about their welfare makes them feel loved, I suppose. I assume that’s what I was up to. It was attention-seeking; growing pains during the bizarre process of ego formation.

Contrary to what I had stated in the note, I hadn’t in fact left the house. I did have with me the little penknife I’d purchased in France, though. I placed the note on the floor of the landing and took up position under Dad’s desk, bunching my knees and pulling his chair in after me – enough to obscure me, but not enough to prevent my view of the landing, the note, and Mum eventually finding it.

The front door opened downstairs. I heard the rustle of shopping bags being hauled in from the car – a job I should really have been helping her with. But I stayed put. Minutes later, slippered footsteps padded up the stairs. I watched as her silhouette grew taller in the darkness with each step, then stopped on the landing. She hesitated, crouched down, then quickly stood. The note rose in the air as if lifted by itself. The white sheet hung there for a moment. Then she was gone. A rapid succession of feet down the stairs. The letter tumbled gently onto the landing again like a falling leaf.

The front door was yanked open; the security chain clattered against the frame as it shut. The car started up on the drive and tore off down the road.

My memory is vague from there. I recall leaving the house and hiding in a bush at the end of the road. I waited until I saw Mum’s car return, veering round the corner, the red tail lights passing by and heading towards home following a failed search of the neighbourhood.

I must have simply gone back to the house at this point. What else was I going to do? Surely my task was complete. I’d scared Mum for a bit; now it was time for dinner and bed.

I remember being in Dad’s office that evening as Mum and I talked things through. She was sitting in Dad’s chair; I was standing on the threshold of the room with both hands behind my back. After a while, she said: “Give me the knife, Patrick.” I handed it over.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

The sun rose early this morning, at around 6am. I got up and stood on the balcony with a mug of 100% cacao, honey, and cinnamon. Dark chocolate is a superfood; I’ve been drinking it most mornings. Dark chocolate provides steadier energy than caffeine, without the crash, due to theobromine, a natural stimulant and chemical cousin to caffeine that operates with a smoother effect.

My skin is looking clearer out here due to the sun, seawater, and a light diet. I snack on fruit and nuts throughout the day and have one big meal in the evenings; usually chicken, rice, and vegetables, or avocado, salmon, and scrambled eggs. I always douse my eggs and avocado in as much olive oil as they can absorb, along with a couple of capfuls of apple cider vinegar. The olive oil contains monounsaturated fats which provide energy, stabilise hormones, and reduce inflammation. It is essentially a lubricant for the biological machine.

I watched a few writer interviews today, including one with Ian McEwan, author of one of my favourite books, Saturday. He spent two years shadowing a neurosurgeon when researching the book. He discusses the concept of ‘flow’ in the context of writing and surgery: “Some of the most pleasurable moments a human can experience are those moments of flow when you drop into your work for one or two hours, and you disappear, and time disappears, and then you wake up and life floods back in.” He mentions how he would observe the neurosurgeon entering this state for five or six hours at a time during his seventeen-hour days. “I saw that and I said to myself, I want to be a neurosurgeon. It was just wonderful.”

I like the way McEwan articulates himself. You can tell he’s spent thousands upon thousands of hours building beautiful sentences for the page, and this skill flows out spontaneously when he speaks.

I’m watching a lot of interviews with writers at the moment. James Patterson, the most commercially successful author of our time alongside Stephen King. A short documentary on the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. One thing that keeps coming up in these videos is the necessity to just write. Write ugly, write randomly, write continuously. If you sit and write for long enough, something good will come.

You need patience and focus. During an era at war with patience, hell-bent on amplifying distraction, this may seem tough. But perhaps not. We may be prone to pining after those times when writers would wake up and have nothing much to do with their mornings besides walking in the garden and talking with their spouse. We may assume writing came easily then. But maybe it’s easier than ever to get away. We know now just how prone the mind is to distraction. We’ve observed the patterns on a daily basis for a number of years, so we can act clinically to cut them loose. Trips to isolated places can be taken at the drop of a hat. Smartphones can be locked away for the first half of the day. Doors in busy houses can always be shut. That’s one thing that comes up in Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing. “Shut the door. You must have a completely isolated place to work.” He says something along these lines. And even that isn’t a necessity; solitude can be found in the crowd.

I’m currently at a cafe in Nai Harn, Southern Phuket. Even though I double up on the noise cancellation – earplugs and headphones – I can still hear the clinks and calls of the coffee shop operating at full tilt, along with the constant stream of pop songs: “Never mind, I’ll find someone like youuuuu...” Adele’s famous lament.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve set myself the challenge of writing four thousand words each morning without fail. I’m working on a new novel titled Silences. It’s about a father and daughter making their way across dystopian England: a cross between McCarthy’s The Road and the video game and HBO series The Last of Us.

The ‘words before thought’ mantra is proving productive for the first draft. Much of it will have to be reworked, revised, and removed, but as Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer of Fleabag, says: “You can edit a bad page; you can’t edit a blank page.”

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

The cafe is unusually empty when I arrive. The staff know my order by now – an Americano with milk on the side. I take a seat and begin to organise my day. The coffee arrives. Over the next four hours, the number of customers rises and falls like a tide, picking up their orders on arrival and leaving the debris of empty plates and coffee cups as they recede.

I was in the ocean today. The water was as clear as a swimming pool. I released the air from my lungs and descended to swim parallel with the seabed, gliding over channels of sand that mirrored the ripples on the sea’s surface. A couple of pieces of trash floated by. The first was a multipack crisp bag that drifted past like a Doritos chilli-flavoured jellyfish; the second, a ribbon of bright yellow rubber tape that, at first glance, I took to be a fish’s tail.

And then, at the base of the underwater cliffs, I saw the ocean’s first victim – a large fish. Its belly was white and slightly bloated. It must have died recently, because it was still lying on the seabed. The decomposition gases hadn’t yet raised it to the surface, the way heat lifts a hot air balloon. I swam down and cast some sand over it to see if it would move, but to no avail. We had lost him, most likely to an extra-spicy appetiser.

Aside from these two pieces of rubbish, the water was crystal clear. As I spread my arms through the deep blue, floating in this vast liquid expanse, it’s hard to see any clear boundary. The plastic in the water doesn’t stay there.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

We ride down to the beach on my scooter. The southern tip of the Thai island of Phuket feels different this time around. The air is thick with heat. The sickly sweet smells of damp rubbish and stagnant water waft up from the drainage canals. Local labourers construct villas and a concrete boardwalk around the reservoir that drains into the sea at Nai Harn Beach. Steel rebar for reinforcing concrete juts out from these unfinished structures. When you see these spikes sticking up like witches’ fingers you immediately think of the prospect of impalement. I drift a little further from the edge of the road on the scooter, wary of the sharp debris.

My girlfriend has come with me this time. She was expecting paradise, which, in some areas, this place certainly fulfils. But there is also the reality of somewhere like Thailand, which can be shocking at times.

On the walk through a section of jungle to the beach, we pass piles of fly-tipped rubbish and various chunks of concrete that at one point made up a walkway through the woods, but now amount to a strange sequence of stone blocks that must be skipped over like hopscotch. The incessant cicada buzz rings out through the jungle, which acts as an insect amphitheatre.

The beauty, when you emerge from the jungle, is wonderful, however. The shallow cliffs dropping down to the sand. The sea beating gently against the coastline that stretches the length of the bay. The headlands at either end that extend into the ocean are heaped with green foliage all the way down to the water.

We lie on the beach in relative silence. She gazes out across the sea. After a while, I get up and wander down to the water while she stays and watches. When I return and sit down, she says, “It’s terrible what humans have done to the world.”

I sit, keeping my gaze on the horizon and the yachts dotted across the bay. I think of the steel rebar, the piles of rubbish, the smells, the heat. A small morsel of understanding falls into place for me; how we humans have been given an ego – the only species that contains this psychological tool – and how this ego provides us with a perspective on ourselves and the world that other species do not have. But with this sense of identity that gives existence its reality, comes a feeling of separation – from others, from the world. We truly believe we are something other in this world; that we are in the world, but somehow not intimately part of it. And so our egos treat the planet as something to be used.

It is from this sense of separation that all ills arise; the disrespect of nature, the lies, the abuse, the violence, the brutality. The ego, therefore, is a blessing that gives us and the universe a self-aware capacity, but also a curse that distorts our inherent intimacy with all things.

If we are to live and to love fully on this planet, collapsing this illusion is paramount. For our survival as a species and for the survival of our little world. And we have been told that this is our duty here. In all great religious texts, we find this idea – that our sense of separation is an illusion, that everything is one.

The Karaniya Metta Sutta, a discourse attributed to the Buddha teaches:

“Just as a mother would protect her only child with her life, even so should one cultivate a boundless love towards all beings.”

The Buddha said it this way, Jesus said it another. It was, in fact, Jesus’ single most important directive.

“Teacher,” asks a Pharisee, “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

This declaration describes the necessary collapse that must take place within us and between ourselves and the world. Every part of us must come into union with the reality of oneness. Every fibre must submit to the notion that all substances are inseparable. Everything we do to our bodies, we do to the world, everything we do to the world, we do to our bodies. And the second directive, to ‘love one another’ is ‘like the first’, meaning, it is an expression of loving God with all that we are – the understanding that nothing is separate is perhaps most evidently expressed in our treatment of others. This is the finding that Jesus brings. In John, there is another beautiful affirmation of this reality.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

We sit for a while on the beach. Arriving somewhere new is often disorientating, especially when you’ve had certain idealised preconceptions. We discuss parts of the world that might not be like this. There will be many that have not yet been affected in this way, but slowly, as our species grows, these places will be pushed to the peripheries and become increasingly inaccessible. Eventually, nothing will be left.

We cannot help our situation or our egos. This state of our existence is a fundamental process of this reality. Perhaps it’s like this: our existence is a question mark in the divine mind. And the question considers the possibility of integration. Can the self-aware being navigate its necessary sense of separation to arrive at an awareness of source? In other words, can the universe know, and then integrate itself through us? This is what the great thinkers are saying when they present different formulations of the phrase ‘know thyself’. What they mean is, ‘know God’, ‘know oneness’, ‘understand source’, ‘collapse the illusion of separation’.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

The things and forces of this world feed off our sense of lack. In order for the economy, social media, and politics to operate, the populace must be led to believe that we are somehow incomplete. Only this product, this house, this income, this validation, this sexual interaction, this political party will make us complete. And so the gears of this world turn, kept in motion by our restless desire, and the powers that be sit atop this mighty moving machine.

Our sense of lack is the fuel that drives this world of shadows.

This means that anyone arriving and telling us we are already complete, perfect, beautiful, and in need of nothing, causes this world to reel back in fear. This is why someone like Christ is put to death.

Christ is a man, but he is also a frequency that distorts the broadcast of this world. If we internalise his state of being – and perhaps that of the Buddha and other great thinkers – we feel wholeness within ourselves. We are no longer a consumer.

We know that the world of consumption is not real, because it is based on manufactured desire. Marketing, celebrity collaborations, product placements; energy is a constant requirement to keep it inflated.

Imagine an actor on stage, stopping his performance and glancing at the stage lights. Breaking the fourth wall and looking at the audience. But there’s a watchful sniper in the stands, always present, always observing the performance, just in case any of the players wake up. A shot rings out the moment the character realises what he truly is, and he drops dead. The sniper scans the audience. A sigh of relief. No one saw the revelation.

The trouble is, we have seen. If we go inward for long enough, we find the frequency, and we learn we are not of this world. It is a frequency that does not end with death. That is how we know it is eternal, and therefore the most real thing there is. You can have the shadows, we are the light.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

How funny we would find this place, these thoughts, this existence, if we saw it all from the perspective of wholeness. All our anxieties, ambitions, desires.

A line in the Gospel of Philip struck me this morning, as it reframes the severity usually imparted by organised religion as just that, a joke.

Some went into the kingdom of heaven laughing and came out laughing.

Religion can be a heavy, lumbering, judgemental thing. It communicates spirituality in terms of sacrifice and suffering. But in that very word – spirit – we see the oddity of this. The spirit is lightness, the spirit is love and freedom.

The Gospel suggests that levity is the answer. That, when we find the kingdom, we may learn of the great cosmic joke. That all the things we were worried about have absolutely no impact on our true nature. We make boulders out of grains of sand, and call our lives hard.

Because the world was a trifle […] if he despise the world as a trifle, he will come out laughing.

‘Despise’ here does not mean hatred, but ‘devalue’. It means stop giving miniscule things in the world power over our feelings.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

Being obsessed with detaching oneself from the world is just as unproductive as being totally attached to the world. Both are traps that keep us fixated on the material, either through aversion or desire. If we must resist something intensely, then that thing is still defining our identity.

Saying 62 of the Gospel of Philip reads:

Do not fear the flesh, nor love it. If you fear it, it will become your master. If you love it, it will swallow and paralyse you.

In many religious traditions, the body is treated as an enemy, full of unruly desires that must be overcome. The Gospel of Philip, however, warns against becoming overly fearful of the flesh. If we constantly fret about the sinful nature of bodily urges, we are surrendering power to these very forces. In resistance, the drives remain in control.

There must be a middle way. True awareness lies in lightness, clarity, and non-judgement. If we are dedicated, for instance, to not slipping up in certain ways but something happens, the impulse to be frustrated with ourselves can be turned on its head. We can instead practise gratitude for a mishap, seeing it as a teacher that shows us something and reminds us of the freedom we gained by letting go of such things to begin with. If it were not there to teach us, we would not know. In this way we become grateful for our failings and stumbles, which, seen in this light, are not failings and stumbles at all, but the rising and falling patterns of progress.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

We are all building a life in a material sense – money, house, possessions, the chance to travel – and a life in an internal sense – narratives around our improving sense of self, our identity.

We are like beavers, hurriedly building physical things for our physical selves. This is all fine; we will continue doing this while we are here, because it feels intuitive. Yet we may be neglecting a hidden world, far larger, filled with silent forces that will endure long after all the burrows we have dug and the stores we have accumulated are available to be enjoyed.

In other words, this is both a body of flesh, which is finite, and a body of light, which is eternal. We may be wise to also work on the thing that lasts forever...

How do we tend to this body of light, and why would we want to?

Being honest, as much as we possibly can. This means acting without the masks we carry for social acceptance or gain, because these masks attach us to a false world that will disappear. They are clothing; they are not real.

Practising non-attachment is another approach. Walking away from things that do not serve our growth. If we feel something is pulling us deeper into the world of things and unhelpful desires, we can distance ourselves from it – things and people that inflate our ego rather than cultivate our divinity. The ego can become an incredibly heavy thing if over-indulged, weighing us down and fixing us to the finite world. We want to surround ourselves with people who recognise us as divine creators, not worldly workers.

Equanimity is another. This was a word that came up frequently during the lectures on my ten-day Vipassana retreat in California a few years ago. It means developing a character that is not altered by criticism or praise. These forces are fine, but we should not attach ourselves to them. They should never become the wind in our sails. In this way, the world becomes a thing observed rather than a thing we cling to.

Spending time in our awareness every day is essential. Identifying as the conscious observer of sensations, thoughts, and events, rather than the things themselves. Our true nature is the awareness in which all things appear.

A few other practices include shadow work – identifying the parts of ourselves that are hidden and suppressed, which sometimes ‘act out’ randomly, impulsively, or cruelly. Taking ownership of these and recognising their value. Acts of selflessness – helping others from the understanding that they are of the same substance as us. This dissolves the illusion of separation.

I believe this is how we build a body of light, a light body, which floats seamlessly away when our worldly frame disappears. In the following Sonnet, Shakespeare asks why we spend so much energy on outward things, while the soul starves:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Feeding these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 146)

Here’s a modern English translation:

My poor soul, the centre of this flawed, earthly body,
Why are you feeding these rebellious urges that surround you?
Why do you starve on the inside and suffer such emptiness,
While painting your outer walls in such expensive, bright colours?
Why spend so much, when you have such a short lease on life,
Investing everything in a mansion that is already fading away?
Will the worms, who inherit all this physical excess,
Simply eat up what you’ve spent? Is this how your body ends?
Then, Soul, begin to live off the losses of your servant, the ego;
Let the body go hungry so that your inner storehouse can grow.
Buy eternal truths by selling off these hours of useless dross;
Be fed from within, and care no more for being rich on the outside.
Thus you shall feed on Death, the very thing that feeds on men;
And once Death itself is dead, there is no more dying then.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

In my early twenties, I completed a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat in California. The structure involved ten hours of meditation per day, whilst committing to ‘noble silence’. This meant not so much as looking at anyone else; eyes to the ground was the requirement. I went to this particular retreat with my cousin, so our discipline in this area wavered somewhat. I also wandered off through the surrounding wooded mountains once, which wasn’t permitted, and took hour-long showers each day, just sitting in the shower basin and staring. In other words, I didn’t stick to the requirements entirely, and in hindsight, I’m not proud of myself for that; one day I’ll return alone and complete it properly.

I remember the guide, at the beginning of the first meditation, mentioning how women are closer to the awareness that would form the basis of our journey over the ten days. He didn’t go into much detail as to why, but intuitively, I felt I understood.

Women’s bodily functions align more acutely with the celestial spheres – the moon and the feminine cycle. They are more emotionally attuned to the movements of this world and its people. When discussing abstract concepts – magic, spiritual phenomena, astrology – I feel women respond with intuition as opposed to logic. They sense their way to knowledge, more than reasoning themselves there.

I mention all of this because it came to mind when reading the following passage from the Gospel of Philip, a Gnostic gospel exiled from mainstream Christianity:

[The Lord loved] Mary more than [all] the disciples, [and used to] kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The disciples said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?”

The Saviour answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”

Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus from Magdala, a town on the Sea of Galilee. After being healed by Jesus, she became a supporter of his ministry. She remained a loyal disciple and is consistently recorded as a witness to the Crucifixion and among the first to discover the empty tomb. In the Gospel of John, she is the first to encounter the risen Jesus and report the Resurrection to the other disciples. In later Gnostic writings, she is portrayed as a visionary disciple who understands Jesus’ teachings more deeply than many others.

The kiss on the mouth in the passage describes a transmission of knowledge (gnosis) from Jesus to Mary; the breathing of the divine spirit into a receptive soul. The jealous disciples perceive favouritism here, and Jesus’ response suggests his greater love for Mary is due to her superior capacity to detach from the material and embrace the spirit.

The lines are actually a rather damning indictment of the disciples, essentially saying: You all think you’ve proven yourselves because you’re doing the work and following me devotedly – ‘a blind man and one who sees don’t differ in darkness’ – but in truth you’re still sitting in the dark. Mary is the only one able to fully perceive the truth – ‘but when the light comes, then he who sees will see the light’.

In fact, in exhibiting frustration that Christ prefers Mary, the disciples prove Jesus’ point exactly – they are, in part, like the blind, who even in the presence of the light remain bound up in the darkness of prioritising ego and rank (worldly things).

Side note: there’s a brilliant section of the Gospel of Mary titled. The disciples’ dispute over Mary’s teaching. Here, Peter asks:

“Did he really speak with a woman in private without our knowing? Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?”

To which Levi replies:

“[…] if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you then for your part to reject her?”

At times, I find that these Gospels are some of the coolest religious material I’ve ever read...

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

Jesus may be far closer to us than traditional Christianity has led us to believe.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within, he said.

You will do greater works than these.

The standard understanding is that Jesus is a God to be worshipped, someone so perfect that no human could ever attain his likeness. And so we erect sculptures of him everywhere and wear pendants of his body around our necks.

Traditional Christianity – especially the most expressive, beautiful, and symbolic kinds, such as Catholicism – has made him an object ‘out there’ and ‘up there’; far away from us, out of reach. But what if this is a deflection, a removal of our responsibility to live as he lived? We are ‘flawed human beings and he was perfect’, we say, ‘we could never be like him’.

Perhaps this is an unconscious avoidance that releases us from the responsibility of being better.

It is a terrifying, almost impossible prospect that we are carrying the same consciousness as Christ – the knowledge of the Father within – and that with this comes the same responsibility: to never lie, under any circumstances, even if it means exile and death; to always treat people as if they are a part of ourselves.

Perhaps the radical ethical demand of Jesus is too much to bear. And this is why we place him outwards and upwards on that cross in the local church, to soften this reality. Even though Jesus seems to be telling us, time and again, that he is within us and we are within him.

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me (Matthew 25:40). Christ’s identity is present in every human being. To touch another is to touch him.

He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him (John 6:56). By imbibing his teachings and habits, the believer transforms; the separation between divinity and humanity is erased.

Jesus is ours – more personal, more intimate with us than our very flesh. Yet, we cannot cope with this idea because we so often fail, so we reject this and place him outside, which relieves the burden. Perhaps the possibility of our own perfection is too great to bear.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

There’s an idea that arises in the work of Barbadian writer Neville Goddard. In the books The Power of Awareness, Your Faith Is Your Fortune, and Feeling Is the Secret, he describes the story of Christ’s birth in Mary from a mystical, psycho-spiritual, and deeply personal perspective.

In his framework, Mary symbolises human imagination, and the Virgin Birth the awakening of Christ consciousness within each of us. For Goddard, Christ is the aspect of divinity that can come alive in every person. In Your Faith Is Your Fortune, Goddard writes:

Man will one day realize that this whole drama takes place in his consciousness, that his unconditioned consciousness or I AM is the Virgin Mary.

I’m reading The Gospel of Philip at the moment. It’s among the texts exiled from mainstream Christianity. The following passage from the Gospel addresses a very similar notion, with some slight differences.

Some said: “Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit.” They are in error. What they are saying they do not know. When did a woman ever conceive of a woman? Mary is the virgin whom no power defiled, who is a great anathema to the Hebrews, the apostles and apostolic men. This virgin whom no power defiled… the powers defile them, and the Lord would not have said “My Father who is in heaven” unless he had had another father, but he said simply…

The passage ends there, most likely due to the original manuscript being damaged or missing. The Gospel of Philip survives in a manuscript found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Parts of the papyrus are fragmentary, with holes or worn sections. Scholars believe the passage continued with something like ‘Father’ or ‘My Father’.

When did a woman ever conceive of a woman?

The line undermines the idea of the Virgin Birth as understood by mainstream Christianity. In early Christian theology, the Holy Spirit was grammatically feminine in Aramaic, the language Jesus likely spoke, highlighting the biological implausibility of a woman being conceived by another woman.

The goal here isn’t precision of biological facts, however, but an urging for the reader to question established teachings. With a linguistic flourish, The Gospel of Philip aims to highlight how people are repeating a learned formula without considering it from other perspectives.

Instead, the passage emphasises, through the metaphor of Mary, the power gained by individuals who are not corrupted by worldly powers:

Mary is the virgin whom no power defiled.

Mary, and her conception of divinity within, is a message to all of us that purity catalyses divine presence. The birthing of Christ symbolises divinity entering our daily life when we become free from the powers of the world.

Every man is the Mary of the Immaculate Conception and birth to his idea must give.

(Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness)

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

It’s an idea addressed perhaps most famously in George Orwell’s 1984 – controlling language controls perception, and perception controls a people. Once the powers that be have misappropriated and distorted the way we interact with phenomena – language – it is more difficult for us to recognise truth from lies.

In a modern context, this contortion of language to obscure truth arises so often, and is perhaps the primary reason why there is so much tension between political viewpoints.

On the political right, migration is at times described as ‘an invasion’. The word carries the imagery of armies and conquest, but many migrants are individuals searching for a better life. The language around the debate foregrounds a particular moral concern whilst obscuring another.

On the political left, abortion is framed as bodily autonomy, emphasising liberation, a powerful moral value. But critics argue that another body is involved, one that cannot defend itself. Again, language reframes complex movements in simplistic moral terms.

Putin will call an invasion a ‘special military operation’. Supporters of Hamas will call the butchery of concert-goers and the door-to-door slaughter of families ‘resistance’. Die-hard Israelis will call the total decimation of a territory ‘defence’. Deception works through a process of something ugly borrowing the language of virtue.

The Gospel of Philip highlights these contortions, addressing how, so often, a morally charged word is placed over complicated reality. This is why so many debates descend into anger, because people cease to debate the complex situation, and bash their simplistic, diametrically opposed words together.

The archons wanted to deceive man, since they saw that he had a kinship with those that are truly good. They took the name of those that are good and gave it to those that are not good, in order that by the names they might deceive him and bind them to those that are not good [...] For they were wanting to take the free man and make him a slave to themselves forever.

‘Archons’ means rulers. The rulers know that people naturally feel drawn to what is good and true, argues Philip. To control people, they change the meanings of words. They give good names to bad things, and bad names to good things. Because people rely on language to understand the world, this change tricks them. As a result, people start to support or desire things that actually harm them. In this way, rulers can turn free people into slaves.

It is also important to consider our own propensity to conceive of reality in this way. The only reason propagandistic forces can take hold in people, is because of the mind’s appetite for allowing language to define reality. In other words, the process of manipulation is fundamentally internal, as well as as external.

Freedom comes when we begin thoroughly questioning the ‘names’ of things. When we do not rush to create or react to slogans. It comes, therefore, with a death of the ego. As I addressed in a previous blog, when Philip discusses animal sacrifice:

As for humans, they offered themselves to God dead.

The ego – the false identity – dies, and with this the world evaporates, with all its propaganda and labels. Words are not an end in and of themselves. Philip repeatedly argues this. That words are flawed, that the truth is not something to be spoken, but something to be experienced. Freedom comes when we break free from the constructions of this world and begin perceiving direct reality. The world and its illusions will remain, but we no longer elevate them. Words are tools to be picked up and put down for our use. Our awareness does not catch upon them, it passes through to something richer and purer and unfragmented.

And this speaks to a subsequent passage in Philip, where the process of Christ’s arrival brings ‘bread’ for us to eat, and so we no longer have to consume ‘food for the beasts’. In other words, a new possibility for human existence is presented, one that directs us towards our divine source, rather than trapping us in the constructions of this world.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

In a previous blog, I cited the Gospel of Philip when discussing how language can form a barrier to divine awareness.

When we name something – love, beauty, truth, Christ – we automatically distance ourselves from the reality of that thing. We become hung up on the word, the image, and the whole host of associations that come with it.

The Gospel at times reads like an incredibly modern deconstruction of the flaws of language, the kind we might find in a French postmodernist like Derrida or Foucault. My previous article is titled, ‘A Language of Idols’, but the Gospel offers more on this topic:

But the truth brought forth names in the world for our sakes, since it is not possible to learn it without names.

Whereas earlier, Philip criticised names (words) here he points to their utility. They are useful tools of instruction. We need language to comprehend phenomena, even at the cost of a momentary distancing.

The aim is that, in experiencing this division of reality into many, we will come to recognise the oneness of all things. Processes of separation and deconstruction will be followed by an awareness of union – that everything is fundamentally one.

The truth is one and is many; for our sakes, it teaches us this alone in love through many.

Truth is one; names, symbols, and teachings are many. In the context of a Christian gospel, this refers specifically to Christian titles for Christ being the single truth: the Son, Logos, or Son of Man. However, in a philosophical sense, if we expand the logic, the idea that ‘ultimate truth exists beyond language and form’ opens the door to truth appearing in many forms – different prophets, teachers, and cultures. As Jesus said: ‘Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and greater works than these’ (John 14:12).

In the context of Philip, Christ is still placed at the centre of revelation. Truth can be expressed through many symbols but is most fully revealed in Christ. All cultures have elements to offer, Philip would argue, but some teachers reveal the truth more clearly than others.

It is an idea that I am wrestling with in my own understanding, and I hope that, through exploration of other faith systems, I will come to understand truth more clearly: is Christ the perfect example, or are there others equal to his nature?

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now

When religious folk engaged in animal sacrifice, in some ways they were exercising a form of projection.

Projection in psychology is when we avoid disturbing aspects of our own selves by externalising them onto others. For example, if we see dishonesty and infidelity in all our partners, it may be worthwhile stepping back and asking: ‘In what ways am I unfaithful?’ There, we might find the true source of our instability. The external world is like the surface of a lake, reflecting back the contents of our own minds.

The following passage from the Gospel of Philip speaks to this. It is a Gospel that I am finding incredibly subversive in the most fascinating ways; perhaps even more so than the Gospel of Thomas.

There are powers that give things to man, but they do not wish to make him free, so that they themselves may remain powerful.

Some forces in the world – institutions, governments, schooling – offer certain things while keeping humans dependent and spiritually immature. They offer crumbs of awareness, when we’re after the entire loaf... This approach ensures their dominance is maintained.

If man were free and truly awakened, sacrifices would no longer exist.

The Gospel gives an example: if we realised our own divine nature, external rituals would be revealed as unnecessary.

Animals were offered up to the powers to whom people sacrificed.

Sacrifices were not, in fact, offered to God, but to the controlling powers that aimed to put themselves in God’s place. And now comes the most fascinating section:

Those animals were alive when they were offered, but when they were sacrificed, they died.

Sacrificing animals does nothing. It destroys life, both literal (the animal) and symbolic (the potential inner work the congregation could have done). The most powerful line:

But man was offered up to God dead, and he lived.

The line is jarring. Is he talking about Christ? How should man offer himself up to God ‘dead’? This is death in a symbolic sense. Man should offer to God, as Jesus did, his entire attachment to the world of illusory things. Every attachment to the world – ego identity, desire, fear – is offered to God fully. This death to the world of appearances allows for a rebirth. You place yourself front and centre in the sacrificial process. All your wants and attachments, all the egoic patterns of self-fulfilment. This process, I am sure, would indeed be a form of death. In modern times it may be termed a total ‘ego death’, and in the resurrection comes new life.

In summary then, we engage in projection to avoid the incredibly difficult process of confronting our own unsettled inner natures. And it could be said that when the pious offered up sacrifices to God in the form of animal slaughter, they were placing the burden of the required inner offering onto an external object because bearing their own egos (attachments to the world) would be too painful (and revelatory for a congregation they wanted subservient). Animal sacrifices were symbolic alternatives. Real awakening means turning the sacrifice inward.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. If it resonated, please share it with someone who might like it too. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments, subscribes, and supports my work, it truly means a lot. I always appreciate hearing from you in the comments and by email.

Subscribe now