Depth. Sinking yourself towards the bottom. Doesn’t it get dark down there? It’s actually darkness only to your thinking self. The newly known darkness emerges as light. You plunge and plunge deeper and deeper, you turn around to look up, and you see things. You see your behavior as it really is behaving. You see your thinking as it is thinking. You see the trouble in your relationships through the light of truth. It illuminates the totality of each moment.

Self-discovery is rich and it illuminates your outer world. If depth is in reference to an inner world, like diving into the ocean, then self-discovery is the experience of the sky above the water. It’s the external world we are most familiar with. Self-discovery happens when we find a way to swim down deeper than the surface, turn around to see our inner world with illuminating prowess, and bring that more full knowledge back to the surface of our external reality. It’s insight. It’s understanding. The natural consequence of insight is space, a feeling of reprieve. Your insight touches the blue sky of your life and liberates your world. The self-discovery confirms a truth that is particularly relevant to you first, then becomes trustworthy as a way to relate to yourself and also the world around you.

Self-discovery leads to an accurate relationship with other humans, singularly and corporately. What emerges is a pattern of learning. The learning is deeply personal and mostly ineffable. It’s an invitation to day-by-day, moment-by-moment, return to the depth of your inner world, forgoing the emotional triggers, stigmas, beliefs, judgements, memories, imaginative energies, and being recollected in a place of solidity that does not exist on the surface of life, or even five feet deep. It’s God’s view of you. 

A foundation of behavior, or pattern of learning, might be the most consequential development we can aspire to. We build a passageway to depth – to God. We let insight and self-discovery be our confirming proof, the faith fulfilled by blind light. If it’s true, it becomes known and given, and the fruit of the self-discovery is actualized in the cloudy, windy, rain-filled air above the crashing waves of our surface. We see food in its fullness, the plant, the rain, the soil, the farmer, the market. We see our inner world being mirrored back to us through our loved ones, through fishing in a small pond, through poetry, through compassion. We begin to notice the transparency of the material – the external world – growing translucent with unity and stories and history and brother and sisterhood, no complaints or pains or false narratives or traumas penetrating the depth. The depth is always there. The depth births the shallows, the surface, the lightning, the stars, the known universe. It’s a radical path of change. It carries everything like a mother carries a crying baby, soothing it with a song. And it is knowable to us through a built passageway of profundity. May we desire the truth of Life, within ourselves and within the world, may we desire connection from lost things and people, and may we be bold enough to set aside any confirmation bias we find comfort in, to find God.