Guard your hidden treasure.

All living things go through the cycle of life. There is a constant stripping of outer layers of being and the evolution of inner states.During inclement periods, there may be no outer manifestation of the life pulsating beneath the surface. As soon as better times manifest, life continues uninterrupted. Nature is a source of inspiration. Trees and flowers that hibernate in winter put out bold green shoots at the start of spring. The cycle of death and new life on earth is like the intricate pattern of nature that human life repeats.
At each stage of life we are faced with fresh challenges. And at each stage there is hidden strength at the centre of our being which rises to meet circumstances and overcome hurdles. Like hidden treasure, we can call on our buried wisdom to guide and lead us when we are in a quandary, faced with doubt and despair. The hidden force in us needs space and time to unravel its treasures. We need to develop physically, mentally and emotionally and also spiritually. Spiritually, we find that people who live close to God, in whatever way He manifests Himself to them, have devoted time to conversation, prayer and service to God. They have also had space to search and shovel out the extraneous and to focus on the beautiful and the noble in human existence.
Whenever we are faced with a catastrophe, it is the hidden force within us that rallies our defeated soul and its energies and leads us to tap the deeper recesses of our being that we never suspect existed. It is as if we have an inner survival kit that gets activated when our energies flag. For those of us who realise that everyday prayer is a necessity and not a luxury reserved for a few enlightened souls, sooner or later we dip into our inner core and activate this survival kit. The hidden treasure has nothing to do with egotism. It makes us realise how limited we are but that with our limited powers we can still contribute to living and add our own footprint to the many footprints that others have left behind. We can create beauty, we can set lofty ideals and we can leave our mark on life.
Once we become aware of the life force that each of us carries within, we realise that we are here on this earth for a purpose. The hidden treasure is the divine life within us. Like the merchant who on finding a pearl of great price sold everything else to acquire this pearl, we too begin to focus on the really essential. Once we find this treasure, we redirect our efforts and our goals. We find that one of the best ways to share this treasure with others is to serve our brothers and sisters. The hidden treasure also helps us develop deep insight. We perceive differently and so our lives acquire an added dimension. Call it what you will, this added dimension is that which gives weight to all we do. It raises our sights to higher goals and helps us connect with others more deeply.
Many of us live most of our lives without becoming conscious of this hidden treasure that we have within. As we approach our end, we cannot but stumble upon our hidden friend. Our best friend is buried within us. No matter where we go or how high we climb, it makes the climb easier, the goal worth reaching. Guard your hidden treasure then and it will take you places, not on the outer journey but on the inner journey we all have to undertake in our lives.

Concerning Human Understanding.

AFTER John Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, he sent copies to various savants of his acquaintance, asking for comments and in particular for advice on whether he had left out anything essential - for if so, he could add it to a second edition. His correspondent William Molyneaux of Dublin replied that Locke needed to say something about personal identity: that is, what makes a person the same person throughout their life. Belief in the idea of a substantial soul - a "you" that is separate from your body - was waning. In the absence of this metaphysical entity as a convenience for underpinning personal identity, what, asked Molyneaux, makes the retired general continuous with the eager subaltern of 40 years before, and he with the red-cheeked baby in his nurse's arms 20 years before that? In response, Locke added a chapter to his second edition which instantly caused a storm of controversy and has been famous ever since in the annals of philosophy. In that chapter Locke argued that a person's identity over time resides in their consciousness (he coined this term, and here introduced it to the English language) of being the same self at a later time as at an earlier, and that the mechanism that makes this possible is memory. Whereas a stone is the same stone over time because it is the very same lump of matter - or almost, allowing for erosion - and an oak tree is identical with its originating acorn because it is the same continuous organisation of matter, a person is only the same through time if he or she is self-aware of being so. Memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore loss of the self. The divines, represented by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, took umbrage and attacked Locke for ignoring the immortal soul. In 1712 The Spectator magazine ran a front-cover demand that "the wits of Kingdom" should get together in conference to settle the matter of personal identity and selfhood, because the controversy was getting out of control. In 1739, when David Hume published the first volume of his Treatise on Human Nature, he stated that there is no such thing as the self, for if one conducts the empirical inquiry of introspecting - looking within oneself - to see what there is apart from current sensations, feelings, desires and thoughts, one does not find an extra something, a "self", over and above these things, which owns them and endures beyond them. Thus in 50 years the unreflective idea that each individual has an immortal soul as the basis of their selfhood had changed utterly. For millennia before Locke, no one had so much as raised the question. But it was no surprise that the question should suddenly become urgent as the EnlightenmentMovie Camera dawned, with its central idea of the autonomous individual who is a bearer of rights and responsible for his or her own moral outlook; such an idea needs a robust idea of selfhood, and the philosophers eagerly tried to make sense of it. Hume's sceptical view did not prevail. Kant argued that logic requires a concept-imposing self to make experience possible, and the Romantics made the self the centre of each individual's universe: "I am that which began," wrote Swinburne in Hertha, "Out of me the years roll, out of me God and Man." Without a deep idea of the self there could be no Freud or psychoanalysis. So fundamental is the idea of the self to modern human consciousness that one would expect developments in neuroscience to have a direct bearing on it. And as Thomas Metzinger argues in his stimulating new book The Ego Tunnel, reviewed on page 44 of this issue, that is exactly what is happening - with surprising and often disconcerting results. One would expect developments in neuroscience to have a direct bearing on the idea of self.