Anton Jarrod

“Although my present awareness of the nature of life and reality grew gradually throughout my life, it was not until late in 2011 that I was able to find ways to formulate and express something directly about it and the perspective that had been acquired. As I was always ‘good at writing’, as it were, by March 2012 this website seemed to me the most suitable means through which this expression could be mediated.

“Even as a young man I never really bought the commonly held model of reality. However, after I returned to living in London in 2001, my ‘induction’ into the standard perspective reached its greatest intensity and for a time this perspective was the dominant one within me. Although I did not realize it at the time, through this perspective I was quite lost to myself, and suffered the consequences of that loss; personally, I experienced unhappiness, suffering and darkness, and the greatest separation and disconnection from reality. I was quite lost in this darkness and almost completely consumed by it for I had forgotten myself and replaced my own thinking and feeling with that of the standard perspective. I was not really experiencing myself or the world as myself, but as a jumbled collection of inherited tendencies and flawed ideas. I was operating largely as a projection of other people, past and present, as a phantom, and participating in the multiple reflected illusion of daily living. However, I did not realize this fully at the time, or the seriousness of the situation or the implications; I was like a sick man who did not know he was sick but who suffered much nevertheless.

“Fortunately, though slowly, there began within me a quiet, private and personal re-engagement with something that I realized was my own: my ‘self’, and the awareness that had been growing gradually since early youth, but which had become somewhat suffocated and hindered in its development. Gradually, through striving and struggle, my awareness began to grow again although there were many, many difficulties. Struggling with invisible enemies through many battles, enemies sometimes far stronger than I, which often completely overcame me – enemies with the weight of the world behind them – realization and understanding did not come easy. I was plagued even by purely mundane and quite laughable concerns, for I was very weak; a weakness that served me very ill in the face of major challenges. At times, I was vanquished. Eventually, however, through my encounter with what I would understand later to be universal principles and processes, and through my encounter with the ‘unknown’, I began to live and move as my own self, in a life that was acquiring new and entirely different shades of meaning and reality.

“Through 2011, my understanding and awareness of the nature of being, life, experience and reality acquired a certain level of maturity and stability; an understanding that had been trying to express and refine itself in many different ways through the years, that had been forming and informing my new relation with the world, and that now found stability not in others’ ideas – however noble and powerful they may have been or seemed – or my interpretations of them, but in my own direct encounter with life, which I began to value and understand anew. I had never been a student, practitioner or follower of any particular system of knowledge or belief, but now, even if I wanted to, it would be impossible. The days of youth had passed. I realized that it was neither necessary nor even possible to come to an authentic relation with life through the perspectives of others or the products of them. I was, as it were, able for the first time to walk upon my own feet.

“My personal experience aside, which was assuredly only interesting, important and relevant to me, I knew that the fact that I had entered into the kind of awareness and reality that others must have entered into had an objective value. After all, I had come through the ‘contemporary western world’ standard perspective. I wondered about ‘saying something’, or just continuing my way in obscurity. Of course, I knew that I was not at all unique, being just one more apprehender of the wider world disclosure and subject to the same world processes that had brought others to its apprehension; I knew also that the world, largely, set no store by such things, and commonly denied and devalued them according to the standard perspective. After considering many things, I thought how, even in the face of a somewhat probable negative reception, incomprehension, indifference etc. one ought to try to ‘say something’. Besides, negative and personal considerations such as these ought to be, I felt, quite irrelevant to any serious engagement with the non-standard disclosure or anything that resulted from it.

“When the possibility of sharing this perspective and its results more publicly became firmer in my mind, I began to consider various points, factors and challenges more seriously. For example, there were the problems of language. I understood that much of the new relation with and awareness or understanding of life disclosed by the new disclosure could not be expressed or formulated in a sign or symbol system in any truly meaningful or accurate way. However, I recognized that, out of individuals’ own scientific insight of non-standard disclosure, especially where it was in accordance with the world processes that made such insight possible, there could always arise a more natural and contemporary, if not complete, expression that could communicate ‘something’ of it in a way that was more appropriate to it, and that this should always be sought.

“There were also the problems of perspectives. For instance, I knew that, while it was not right to completely disregard the standard perspective or the positions it offered people on the subject, the standard perspective could not constitute the principal focus of the endeavour, and it was right to address the principal content to those who had already understood something of the new disclosure and the realities of apprehending it. It was neither useful, right, nor in accordance with my own understanding of the developmental nature of awareness, to provide a ‘defence’ or ‘argument’ for non-standard disclosure and apprehension. It was then only useful and efficient to concentrate on delivering the results of research, and to try to establish a firmly neutral position as regards others’ perspectives on it.

“There were also the considerations and problems arising out of the non-standard perspective itself. After all, ‘insight’ was a complex science, itself subject to development, and while it was profound it could never be perfect, and certainly it could not be undertaken lightly. All these and other considerations, as with many other kinds of endeavour, would have to remain a work in progress, and there would be very many questions and areas that would have to remain unanswered and untouched.

 ”It was also around this time that I began to take on more fully the significant challenges of living a life that was more consistent with and appropriate to this awareness and understanding of being, life, experience and reality. Although I recognized that my perspective was by now fundamentally different to the norm, and that the society and world in which I lived was built on values and perspectives that I had largely outgrown, I still considered myself to be an integral part of the community, having a value in and responsibility to it. The question was ‘how to live?’ in it. I had been asking and answering this question for a long time already.  Even through my adolescent years when my awareness was only inchoate, I still felt that my explorations and investigations into the fundamental being of humanity constituted my ‘work’, and I was ever trying to resolve how to pursue this work, and various lines of enquiry into the nature of humanity, while supporting myself in the modern society in the near and distant future. Later, when this enquiry and work become more formal and complete, I had to face the many different challenges that would arise from making the necessary and all-embracing commitment. Since this work became the central focus and source of my activities, the wider question of ‘how to live?’ took on a far-reaching, objective, ‘beyond-the-personal’ practical relevance and importance, and had become an integral part of the work I was engaged in.

“Alongside awareness and understanding there is always a knowledge and ability that is commensurate with it. With these things one may explore the various aspects and terrains of being, life, experience and reality that come within their scope; exploration which forms and informs one’s perspective. Having come through the reality that could be described as ‘modern western society’, and having been greatly enriched by it and the processes mediated through it, I appreciate the responsibility that comes with sharing uncommon and non-standard perspectives on life. It is my firm belief that if more and more people share something of those perspectives arising out of the apprehension of the wider reality, according to their capacities and abilities, the better – in time – will be the general understanding about it, and this must have its positive effects.

“There is a very real need for individuals everywhere and always to strive for fundamental integrity. This is very poorly understood and hardly appreciated. We live in very difficult times. Every age has its difficulties, but never before has human kind been so separated from its essential nature. Ultimately, this must have serious consequences for our future.”

28 June 2012