Imagery versus Truth

The question "Who am I?" is one of the most important ones anyone can ever ask. All true knowledge starts right there. Unfortunately, it is a question that most of us have given up on. There is a sense that we will never find out, and together with the "Why are we here?" question it ends up in the wastepaper basket of our life.

However much that is a shame, for every individual it equals a criminal act in so far that it suspends the investigation and returns a solemn open verdict, indicating that we don't know, but more worryingly, that we don't care. Should we care? Well, if you have no idea at all who you are, the whole of life can only be a mystery to you. It can never be anything else. Do you care about that? Maybe you believe it doesn't affect you at all? But just think that each time you feel lost, bewildered, disillusioned, angry with the world, it is mostly ignorance that caused it. Understanding soothes a lot of life's pains. Ignorance and brute force creates a lot of life's pains.

Most people, when asked the question who they are, respond with informing us of there name, their job, their role in life, where they live, and other details about their life, not about themselves. All that information only serves to place the individual within a variety of groups, and that includes information about their religious beliefs, what they like or dislike. No matter how much of this information one can gather, it can never fully answer the question. Why? One reason is that those bits of information are essentially static snapshots of what is a moving target, the "I", which changes constantly in responds to its surroundings. The other reason is the way we live our lives is an expression of who we are, but it isn't who we are, because lots of things stand between the inner self and the outer expression of the self within the framework society offers us.

Placing a suspect at the scene of the murder, at the time of the murder, with motive and opportunity, does not in itself make that individual a murderer, although maybe our "justice-system" would brand him/her as one.

So, in order to simplify life for its citizens a society uses imagery. It creates "ideal" images that people can aspire to and that they can mirror themselves on. These mirrors, images, then serve a secondary purpose as more and more people gather around them. They herd people. They make people congregate in a particular place and the authorities, at any given time, will know where these people are and what they are like. As a group it then becomes easy for the authorities to change the image, whenever they require it, to something different, just to see the whole group aspire to the new image. People become what they are told to become. They believe what they are told to believe. They want what they are told to want.

The images that are upheld in society for us to mirror ourselves on cover the generally accepted three areas of life: physical, emotional and spiritual.

We are all pretty familiar with the physical imagery of our time. The slim, well-proportioned, fit bodies are used to fill magazines and to sell a whole array of products. We even have an industry that prides itself on providing the ideal body or body parts and that is ready to respond to whatever your ideal image of yourself is. Plastic surgery has managed to get itself accepted as a "treatment" for low self-esteem, for depression and gender confusion. The perfect body image is what is going to make you more happy as it is believed to "show" people exactly who you are. Get the right body and all other aspects of life will instantaneously be right as well! In society we have some fixed ideas as to what fat people are like, what women are like, what gypsies are like, what bank managers and doctors are like, what teenagers are like, and so on. Each group has its own pictures, whereby character traits are linked to physical appearance. The way you look, smell, stand and sit determines, in society, who and what you are.

Image has become more important than substance in our modern world. We buy products because of what the packaging looks like. We have a secret belief that if we buy a certain product we will look like the person who is advertising it. Promises attached to image range from better health, to beauty, to love, to status. Even music is sold not on what it sounds like, but on what it looks like, the video, that is. Physical imagery is ruling our every day life in thousands of magazines, tabloid newspapers (are there any others these days?), teens magazines, 24-hour television, makeover programmes, relentless advertising and high street's shopping window displays.

But that is not all. The system is not confined to the physical world. It applies equally to the emotional. What is making people happy is basically set out in the same guidelines and in the same way as our physical world is. Happiness relates to certain possessions. How can anyone live without a computer, or an iPod, or an MP3 player, or a Playstation II? Surely one cannot be happy, I mean really happy, if one is lacking these essentials in life! We are shown, through images, that happiness very much depends on the physical presence of certain objects, but equally, we are told how to behave in order to become happy.

Problem pages in every magazine and newspaper advice us on how to live our lives in the pursuit of eternal happiness. It tells us what we should be happy with, angry about, and consider unfair. The underlying principle is to show everybody bits of someone else's life and encourage them to want to achieve the same. Make people unite in their wishes and you have a very strong lobby force, be it for the introduction of free medical treatments, for the equal rights for the disabled, or for vibrators on the NHS. In all of this, the key point is to gather people around an issue and make them believe that there is only one way to judge it. The image of a caring and peaceful nation is an important one. Our feelings about the less-fortunate, whether these are the starving of the world or the homeless in our own country, are manufactured and guided towards one particular point. The power of that mass can then be used to achieve whatever the authority had in mind. Once the people are convinced of the necessity of the idea, it becomes really easy to rule and govern them, as they want nothing different from what the authority had already told them was right. No legislation is really being enforced for the benefit of the population, although it is sold to us on that basis. All enforced legislation is for the benefit of the authority, and only for their benefit, as it strengthens their power base. So, emotionally we are also being manipulated through imagery that we strive to conform with.

But even spiritually we are not free. Churches implement their own interpretations, set out in laws, of spiritual texts and tales. In the same way governments are telling us what the right thing to do is when driving your car or employing someone, the church is telling us exactly what to believe. In order to be accepted within a religious community we have to accept their "spiritual" beliefs. It is their "right" that is right, and their "wrong" that is wrong. There can be no doubt about this. Different churches may use different writings to base their belief system on, or they may use the same writings but have different interpretations. Whatever their differences, they are constantly emphasising those differences to ensure that we do not stray from the "right" path, straight into the hands of an enemy church. Conflicts are invariably blamed on other churches, simply because they must be wrong, per definition, or because we are told, by our own church, that these other churches invoke violence and hatred. The Cold War of the Churches.

Spirituality in itself has nothing to do with religion. Spirituality is the art of finding the truth within oneself, and of allowing all others to do the same. This implies tolerance of others and their different ways, and acceptance of different answers to the same questions. Spirituality is an individual journey that is only bound to the self, not to any other group or institution. Whatever images the individual uses to express his/her experiences, they are only a reflection of the experiences, and the images should not be read as the experiences themselves. The image, the story, is not the message; it is only a picture of the message. Identifying ourselves with the image is not going to make us into spiritual human beings, only the experience itself will. We all need to experience what we believe in, what we see as right and wrong, and we need to be allowed to change it as we experience life in different ways.

The meaning of life, the existence of an afterlife, the role of a superpower, and all other fundamental questions are not answered by the rhetoric of the various churches. Each individual needs to find the answers from within him/herself, based on the experiences life puts him/her through. All any church can do is provide us with a template to work from. The template is not the answer; it is just an image of the answer, one of many possible ones. Blindly following the rules of any church, without questioning its validity, can only restrict our experience of life, not enhance it. That can only be done by truly questioning our own life, in an open and honest way.

The self is constantly bombarded with images coming from another three levels. All these images represent ways of gaining and establishing control over the self by portraying the images themselves to be the answers.

• The widest level of pressure exerted on the individual comes from governmental authorities such as national governments and religious churches. Their strategy consists of implementing laws and rules under threat of punishment, in order for the community to stick closely together on all three levels, physical, emotional and spiritual. That brings the individual into the flock and the authority then no longer has to regard him/her as an individual; it can take account of the flock in its entirety knowing that what is good for the flock will be good for the individual, as he/she is part of the flock.
• The middle level of teaching us about life and what is right and wrong, is taken up by what we could call "the group teachers". These are people from a certain profession such as doctors, scientists, marine biologists, teachers, economists, etc., who will pass on the established knowledge as the one and only truth. This rigid structure involves schools and teaching institutions with its own hierarchy and authoritarian regulatory bodies to oversee any infringement of colleagues. What is known and believed has to be taught the way it has been prescribed by the Council. Again the object is to ensure that all individuals are given the same images, once again presented as the true answers, in order to control the knowledge and therefore the behaviour of the group as a whole.
• The third and lower level is formed by our closest relations. Here are individuals who are trying to pass on their experimental knowledge of life to the next generation as it were. Although even here we might see the same force at work that tries to hold every member of a family, for instance, within a certain framework of beliefs, customs and traits, there is generally also a tremendous opportunity available to everyone. Because the level of contact is much more intimate, people are living in much closer proximity, both physically and emotionally, it means that there is an opportunity to discover a lot more about the images that we are presented with at this level. With a bit of interest and persistence we can find out more about the reasons for certain behaviour or certain feelings amongst family members. Here is a real opportunity to take a sneaky view behind the scenes of laws, rules and regulations and to start asking the question "why". Once you have learned to do it at this level, you will soon find yourself questioning authorities that believe themselves to be beyond outside scrutiny.

It is only by making the self a priority in one's life that an individual is able to stand up to all those pressures and remain an individual. It is only the individual who is going to be in a position to serve the self, as he/she is the only one who can really experience what or who that is. All outside attempts are nothing but images. The real thing lives inside, and that is the only place it can be found.

The truth about oneself does not reside in the images that are being used to describe who you are. The answer to that question is not: I am a married man, a father, a doctor, a grandfather, a foreigner, a small car owner, a traveller, a food lover, a dreamer, ..... .

The answer to the question, "Who am I?", is simply, "I am me".

And that's the truth. Even when my characteristics alter in time, I will still be me.

That'll be the true me.

January 2005