The Point of Departure is Verification

The Point of Departure is Verification

Verify everything. I can observe myself and make psychological efforts, and I have learned that I can indeed verify these powerful ideas. Working on myself is not about adopting a new belief system. But rather, like a sound building, verifications provide the footings of fruitful personal observation, self-discovery, and self-discipline. Verification is the glue that holds it together, especially at the beginning of the journey.

I have an Observing ‘I’ that sees that I live in a machine, but until I verify that, it remains a theory. I learned early on about the many ‘I’s, but until I verified that idea it was not mine. This type of thinking to verify everything ran counter to my cultural programming and religious upbringing. As a creature of habit and a victim of the circumstances that produced my life—such as my family, religion, wealth, career, and status—I learned to believe many things that I had not truly verified.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” − Socrates

The Fourth Way asks its adherents to dig deep and verify everything. Verify that you are asleep. Verify that there is a way out, that there is a Fourth Way. Verify that you have outside help. I’m confident that sincere followers will verify much. Don’t believe me - try to do the work. Apply some of the basic tenets, and you will quickly learn that you are asleep and that you lack the being to sustain effort.

Our preprogrammed belief system helps explain, in part, the many attributes we might wrongly ascribe to ourselves, abilities that we don’t have. We think we can control attention and then realize we were in imagination about dinner or the drive home. We think we can “do” and follow a course of action to its conclusion, only to realize we have deviated. That book we started has somehow been replaced by another book without even thinking about it. We then might justify the decision as if it were the plan all along. We think we can control the nonexpression of negative emotions, only to catch ourselves in the act of complaining or arguing with someone. We think we can divide attention and then find ourselves completely swallowed up by an identification.

We are filled with many contradictions and paradoxes. The work involves unraveling our mechanics and our tendencies toward identification and imagination, and to re-orient our lives in a manner that produces higher states of consciousness. Verification makes that possible.

Working on oneself is not a comfortable endeavor, nor will it ever be popular. Verifying that one is asleep is painful. But verifying that one has the potential to awaken provides a beautiful point of departure. Progress begins almost immediately with sincere efforts.

When we’re honest with ourselves and honest with our observations of utter mechanicalness, we begin to emerge from a deep sleep. Verification creates understanding as we stretch our being and learn new things about ourselves and the world around us. Verification is the ultimate point of departure, for without a solid foundation we cannot sustain the work.

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Woman with a Mirror, Titian