Within you Without you

By Gerard Leahy

The words of some of the great Beatles songs were the crutch which helped guide me through the chasm of establishing my self-identity and validity as a part of the human race. Within You Without You examines the knowledge and universal being that exists within us and its relationship to the perceived world without us. It is a self-help book, which enables the reader to understand and realize their full personal potential.

We look at the relationship between our internal being and the thoughts which course through our minds. We examine the clash between the universal knowledge within and our sense-perception of the world without. We compare the contented acceptance of the consolations of society without with the creative destruction coming from within. We look at the myths of religion, philosophy and science and the ways in which they shape our self-perception. We see how important our individual consciousness is in shaping the universe.

Within You Without You will help you understand your vital role in the world around you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398479937

Gerard Leahy

Gerard Leahy is a writer and social commentator. His previous books include, Towards a Jobless Society, The Voyage and The Rosary and other Stories. He lives with his family in Listowel in the Southwest of Ireland. Gerard Leahy can be contacted at [e-mail].

Book preview

About the Author

Gerard Leahy is a writer and social commentator. His previous books include, Towards a Jobless Society, The Voyage and The Rosary and other Stories. He lives with his family in Listowel in the Southwest of Ireland.

Gerard Leahy can be contacted at

[e-mail].

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the searchers.

Copyright Information ©

Gerard Leahy 2023

The right of Gerard Leahy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, experiences, and words are the author’s alone.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398479920 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398479937 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

Chapter 1

Thought or Being

I found the prospect of not having control over myself terrifying. My first-year sociology course included behavioural psychology and as the lecturer spoke, the rare Galway sunshine flickered through the upper windows of the ancient classroom at the western end of the quadrangle in October 1972. At least 50% of our psychological behaviour is genetically inherited and the remaining 50% is learnt behaviour and the lecturer was convinced that the inherited portion was much more than 50% and that the acquired behaviour was acquired by the age of two. The state of mental vulnerability in which I arrived at University College Galway in September 1972 had been intensified by two months’ excessive drinking and the revelation that my paranoia and insecurity were probably inherited and therefore incurable left me in an even greater state of distress. I could not handle the concept that at least 50% of me was predetermined. How could I influence or unlearn what I had learned before the age of two when, I was informed, I acquired the majority of my learned behaviour. Am I to be a prisoner of my genetic make-up and my childhood, with no hope of changing myself into the type of person I might think I wanted to be? Could I even hope to know the type of person I wanted to be or would this knowledge also be a prisoner of my inherited instinct and my acquired intelligence? Where was my nature? What is me?

I was too uncertain and insecure to be content with a personality created for me by genetics and early learning over which I had absolutely no control. Was I doomed to be controlled by the depression and mental instability which regularly tortured my poor mother? Would I be a clone of my overbearing father or would I be a mixed-up conundrum of both? The strategies I had developed to hide my insecurity and shyness, argumentative and intense in discourse, long hair to signify my hippy credentials, the liberal ideals of John Lennon: all now seemed but cruel masks attempting to hide and disguise a core self that I disliked and was uncomfortable with but could not possibly escape if 50% of me was genetically acquired and the other 50% was learned in my first two years.

I did the only thing I could do at the time. I summoned up all of my courage and rebelled. I told the professor that human personality is much more complex than a 50% allocation to genetic instinct and 50% to learned behaviour. I told him about free will and our ability to change our lives. He said free will is an illusion and lifestyle changes are always within the parameters of our acquired and learned behaviour; that the studies on animals and humans give the same results; all of our behaviour is conditioned and determined by our instinct and environment. He moved on. I had no more courage to speak up. Further discussion was pointless as I could not risk losing hold on my grip of a reality that would enable me to form myself in a likeness that would be acceptable to me. Did I even know what was acceptable to me; or was I just trying to be a clone of John Lennon in another perverse example of learned behaviour? Was there to be nothing intrinsic to me at all? The lecture had destroyed any optimistic dreams of my life that I may have clung to and had left me deeply troubled and confused.

The confusion was temporarily mitigated by the drinking sessions, which were a constant in University College Galway life, not just at weekends but also during the week for the more rebellious of whom I was now certainly one. The sessions tended to divide into two distinct patterns; a large group of ten or more with one to two ringleaders who started singing lewd songs after three to four pints; or a smaller group of minimum three and maximum five who engaged in deep conspiratorial conversation on any mind blowing issue that presented itself. Although I engaged with both, my natural affinity was with the second group of drinkers. I would eventually try to steer the conversation towards the instinct or nurture argument, but usually at this stage, the influence of alcohol was distracting from the lucidity of our thoughts and steering our instincts to sex or violence or both. This was a more innocent era when sexual advances rarely led to sex or hard word posing to violence but the distractions of both were always enough to finish my psychological ponderings and the subsequent hangovers amplified my condition of emotional insecurity.

Then out of the blue, as if to reward my years of loyalty, my role model threw me a lifeline. While listening to I Am the Walrus, I heard John Lennon singing about us being all together and part of one another and I began to grasp a lifeline of meaning out of my confusion. I had previously thought that these lines referred to a hippy culture of sharing in a commune, but of course, it was much deeper than that and went to the core of my instinct v nurture, being v thought conundrum. The concept of myself being determined by others outside of my control works both ways; others are also determined by me so that I have a definable self that can have huge influence. I am you, my presence and unique self, determines what you are going to be, maybe not all of you but a little bit, maybe even a big bit. If you meet me, even for a few seconds, I have impacted on you and have influenced what you are and you cannot escape this influence in the same way that I cannot escape the influence that you have had on me; You are Me. For generations before I was born, I have been meeting you and I have been helping to shape and create you, I am you. For generations before I was born, you have been influencing me, shaping and creating me. You are me. You have been unable to escape me since you were born; I am everywhere in everyone you meet; teaching you, loving you, fighting you, admiring you, repelling you; always in every interaction changing you and making you; I am You. You have been doing exactly the same to me, through my parents, through my friends, through my teachers, through my lovers. You are Me. And We Are All Together. Is that not the best part? I can have a distinct self but it is not an alone lonely self. It is a self that is joined to everyone around me because it is derived from our mutual ancestors and our subsequent interactions. I don’t have to be preoccupied by my fears and insecurities because they are part of everyone else and not mine alone. I have acquired them from you so you have them too and I can choose to propagate them in you by being a fearful insecure person or I can choose to alleviate them within you by being a brave and philosophical person. I see no benefit to me or to you in the first course of action and every benefit to all of us together in the second. I have enormous power and it is better for me and for you that I use it to express the positive healthy side of my personality. I am a mishmash of feelings and emotions acquired from you in this life and from previous generations of you, but if I can control my feelings and emotions, I have the power to make you a better person for generations to come and to make me a better person now.

I thought that I had no influence and that I was doomed by inheritance, but John Lennon has shown me that I have unimaginable power to select the best bits of me and use them to help create everyone I meet from now on. The key is in the exercise of self-control.

But what do we mean by self-control? Again, the Beatles come to my assistance, this time George Harrison, who wrote about life flowing on within you and without you.

Where did a young 26-year-old George Harrison, the quietest of the Beatles, get such wisdom from during the hectic tumultuous times of 1967 when he travelled the world as a member of the most famous band of all times? Perhaps being the quiet one is the key and he had the time to look into himself and bring out this magnificent song. It was all there for me; the truth is within myself, and to exercise self-control, I must look to the truth within myself. If I am brave enough, the answer to all questions lies within me. What’s in me is eternal and contains the knowledge and wisdom of the universe acquired from the billions of beings which lived before me. And the knowledge within me is not just derived from the countless genetic interactions and heritage which I can benefit from but also in a material sense everything that came before me is part of me. The amount of physical material in the world is a constant. It deteriorates, dies and gets reformulated in the material world in that same way as our bodies do. The reformulated atoms are absorbed in the biosphere and are regenerated as new material goods, or creatures such as us. Everything in the universe is in a constant state of change, but the amount of material remains the same. The atoms that are part of my physical body are as old as the universe and have experienced innumerable different existences since the beginning of time. This is the wealth of experience I have within me if I can only possess the capacity and the bravery to go within myself and seek the answer there, where there can only be truth.

It is not easy to do this. We have been brought up in a world of instruction. Firstly, our parents and then our teachers. We have been brought up to believe that we acquire knowledge from teachers and from books. The knowledge is pushed into me from outside and I never liked being told what to think or do. I always rebelled but in an acceptable way; arguments, music, long hair, but generally, I battened down, did what I was asked to do and scraped my way into university with moderate second-level results. But I didn’t enjoy any of it. Study and classes were a chore which my mind struggled to absorb while it raced with ideas about life, music, people, relationships and my place in the world. My mind was hungry to experience the real world and resented the shackles and chains of the education I had drifted into from the weight of peer expectations. At 17, I could not face continuing this type of education. I could not face a class structure and daily lectures and a structured environment of classes followed by study followed by exams. I tried it for a couple of weeks but soon found that I much preferred to go drinking with some like-minded students who were prepared to spend their time drinking and discussing issues as they presented themselves to us in the cosy pubs of Galway.

However, I still had to reconcile myself to the fact that I had to face an exam at the end of the university year and this would not be possible without some form of study or lecture attendance. This necessity challenged me to put my theoretical meanderings to the test. If I believed that all knowledge and truth was inside me and this was the inevitable and consoling conclusion that I had come to when I was made to realise that my inherited physical being and not my independent force of thought dictated my actions, then the tapping of this knowledge could be a shortcut to the conventional means of education which I resented, could not excel at and absorbed too much of the time that I wanted to spend drinking with friends.

John Lennon and George Harrison had shown me the path. It is all within me. The truth is inside me and I am one with everyone else. Put the seed of the subjects I was forced to study inside me and let the truth and eternal knowledge within me do the rest. Feel the subject as part of me and let it grow within me. I had to apply this to mathematics, economics and sociology.

To trust what is inside us instead of what we are told and to go against what everyone else is doing, this was the challenge for me then and is the challenge for every student and every person in search of self-development. When I went to university, lectures consisted of professors reading out lectures basically cogged from textbooks and students copiously writing verbatim notes which would be regurgitated in the end of term exam and this was normally enough to pass without giving the student any deep understanding, love or memory of the core subject. I’m sure that this has now changed to a question and answer-led prompted discovery type of education in the more enlightened universities, but the core problem of learning at the same class pace along a defined and closed path which leaves little room for personal input remains.

‘Within you and without you.’ I stopped going to virtually all lectures after my first six weeks of college. My core understanding of myself had changed, and if I now believed that all knowledge was within me, I decided I would reject the forced labour of lectures, note taking and late nights reading recommended texts in the library. I wanted a shortcut which would have the added benefit of enabling me to go drinking with my new friends whenever I chose. I chose to go drinking on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays but Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays were recovery and teaching myself days. ‘Within you and without you.’ You need to place the seed within you and then let it grow. I purchased or stole the basic textbooks for each subject; 10% of my learning time was spent reading and absorbing the seed; 90% was spent going for long walks along the banks of the Corrib, Salt hill Promenade or on the propitious 40-minute walk from my suburban accommodation to the town centre and campus, which had turned from a drawback to my accommodation location to a bonus. This was where the seed was nurtured and developed. The basic mathematical concept or economic theory was placed deep within me, and as I walked and thought, it was developed and expanded. The problem was examined step by step and the next step was never reached until the previous step was fully understood. The seed from the textbooks were developed and progressed, and there was never any doubt that particularly with mathematical and economic issues but also with sociological and philosophical issues that subsequent reference to the textbooks would prove the progression correct. After years of primary and secondary schoolteacher-led education with mediocre results, I had found a pleasurable and wonderful means of acquiring knowledge, and it was within me all the time. It is within all of us. It is just a matter of trust. Look within yourself. Acquire the basic concepts from the